Information Polity

This special issue includes six of the best papers from the 17 th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2016) that explore the intersection among the Internet, citizens, and public policy. As a theme, these papers ask how citizens and governments deliberate, engage, and interact in online spaces related to public policy and problems. The studies present two noteworthy observations on this theme. First, public deliberation about policy on online platforms has its own lifecycle and stages, but the behavior of online participants does not differ from what is known of citizens’ participation in offline meetings and deliberations. Second, the context of studying social media use is broad (e.g., political regime change, urban resilience, and law enforcement agencies), but Twitter and Facebook are the primary information technologies under scrutiny.

The legitimacy of public decision-making in democratic government is often challenged by its lack of capability for representing the public and their true preferences. This paper revisits existing methods of eliciting public opinions through the lens of structured public decision making, and highlights the importance of establishing public value and solid decision analysis before measuring public opinion. While deliberative mini-publics have been used to enable informed and reasoned judgment, they are vague on how opinions can be formed deliberatively and can not work well with highly complex and controversial issues that often have unclear value criteria. Following deliberative systems thinking, we argue for a three-phase process where opinions from the general public are elicited only after public values and solid decision analysis have been established. The working of this approach requires concatenation of three deliberative forums that establish legitimate public values, decision knowledge, and public opinions in synchronization with the three phases of public decision-making. We applied this approach on a real community issue in State College Borough (Pennsylvania), and developed a practical solution, Community OPinion Elicitation (COPE). COPE is a process that sequences two mini-publics (for public value identification and decision analysis) and one mass deliberation (for public opinion elicitation). While we observed positive impacts, it remains challenging to assess the method empirically.

With the development of online participatory platforms, many governments are extending consultation processes beyond traditional face-to-face meetings. These online spaces are used by government agencies to collect ideas from the public and to aggregate preferences through non-binding voting procedures. Many of these digital platforms allow residents to post comments, creating potential for ideation processes. Examining data from an unmoderated online platform initiated by a municipal government, this paper explores whether ideation emerged organically in the deliberation process, and if so, how this occurred. After analyzing over 800 comments in the 20 most highly discussed ideas debated in the forum, the study confirmed that ideation took place and identified five main activities in the process: idea proposal, idea reception, idea development, idea closure, and idea implementation. It also distinguished eleven different roles performed by participants throughout the ideation process: initiating, supporting, disagreeing, clarifying, informing, arguing, commentary, expanding, wrapping, mobilizing, and implementing. The study also found that ideation patterns differed by idea theme and by the level of controversy of particular issues. The paper concludes with ideas for further research and recommendations for the design and implementation of online public participation processes.

Many governments now seek ways to generate ideas for public policies through online platforms. Although this concept is promising, further knowledge is needed to understand the factors associated with generating ideas within online communities in a public policy consultation setting. Building on existing theories and empirical findings, we empirically test how online interaction through commenting activities in the Open Government Dialogue might influence the likelihood of proposing accepted ideas. By crawling the interaction and contribution data from the online policy forum, our findings show that proposing accepted ideas is positively correlated with boundary-spanning activities and the receipt of feedback. In particular, for repeat contributors, the likelihood of proposing accepted ideas for government consultation is positively related to prior success but negatively related to the number of ideas posted. These findings provide implications for using commenting functions to facilitate usable and feasible ideas in the online public policy consultation setting.

Citizen participation is a key factor in open government and a fundamental form of collective problem solving in democratic societies. Citizens need reliable information to support collective sense making and decision-making. During crises, such as political uprisings and controversial elections, reliable information sources are essential for citizens to stay informed and make sense of rapidly changing developments. In countries that exert control over media, citizens try to access alternative information sources, such as unfiltered Internet and social media. Using two rounds of surveys with young, educated adults in Tunisia, we examined their use of diverse information sources during the 2011 revolution. We update these findings with a third survey round asking similar questions to young, educated Tunisian adults’ about their use of diverse information sources during the 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections. Our results show there have been dramatic changes in the use and perceptions of the reliability of broadcast media as Tunisia builds a new government with more open participation and national communication media. The Internet and social media still play an important role in informing the Tunisian public, but new government and private sources are perceived as significantly more reliable than they were under the authoritarian regime overthrown by the 2011 revolution. Our election survey results show that higher perceptions of information reliability, along with the sharing of online information, lead to greater political information efficacy (PIE). Prior studies show higher PIE is associated with greater democratic participation. This finding bodes well for the nascent democracy emerging in this small North African state.

Urban terrorism worldwide underscores an urgent research need for understanding urban resilience capabilities in extreme events. We examine whether the content of online news and tweets reflects known factors affecting urban resilience during the 2016 Jakarta terrorist attack, to answer two research questions: 1) What are critical capabilities necessary for urban resilience against urban terrorism? 2) How does the content of online news and tweets reflect known factors of urban resilience? We collected 212 articles on Detik.com, an Indonesian online news website, for media content analysis. Moreover, we examined Twitter use by Jakarta police on the day of the terrorist attack. By drawing on adaptive capacity research, our study found that information and communication, competence, social capital, and leaderships reflected known factors affecting urban resilience. Our results indicate the potential critical role for Twitter in mobilizing the capabilities for faster recovery from the terror attack and hence greater urban resilience.

Social media plays an important role in the era of e-government. Facebook and Twitter are now widely used by law enforcement agencies to inform the public, communicate and establish partnerships. In this paper, we present a multi-platform investigation of law enforcement agencies on Facebook and Twitter. More specifically, we collected 26,490 Facebook posts and 41,277 Twitter tweets made by 40 U.S. municipal police agencies in 2015. We classified these posts and tweets according to topics related to three social media strategies, i.e., Push, Pull and Networking. We applied quantitative methods to examine the patterns of agencies’ posting behavior and user interactions both within and across the two platforms. Our findings provide empirical evidence of how police agencies applied different social media strategies on Facebook and Twitter in their daily practice. We also contribute new knowledge of different public interactions with these agencies on the two platforms and discuss the practical implications.

Digital technologies are changing information flows and transforming some of our current social structures. From some perspectives, increased interactions among people on social media platforms are already transforming the role of the free press in modern democracies, with the potential to influence our governance systems. Moreover, government and non-government organizations are promoting digital participation through the development of technology platforms, such as e-Consultation and e-Petitioning systems, to promote social interactions as well as political conversations with the aim to improve the public policy development process. These trends continue to change our democratic governance system by opening opportunities for citizens to directly influence policy issues and democratic participation. However, lack of transparency in how the conversation is initiated and structured in these same platforms provides new opportunities for private interests to influence public conversations.