Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Abstract

Public participation in administrative decision making has been increasingly promoted at all levels of governments. The undeniable influence of political control on bureaucratic behavior notwithstanding, the recent literature has advocated for a more pronounced role of bureaucratic values in explaining administrative decision-making, outputs, and outcomes in dealing with stakeholders with diverging demands and interests. In light of the democratic necessity and potential substantive benefits deriving from citizen involvement, it stands to reason that public managers perceiving a higher value of public participation will seek to increase their efforts to engage the citizens. On the other hand, there is a widely documented observation about the superficiality of public participation, primarily through occasional, one-way and post-decision interactions. One mechanism for increasing public participation and advancing two-way communication between public agencies and the public is the use of social media tools to promote authentic and meaningful citizen participation. The ubiquity, accessibility, and low costs of social media also make them attractive tools for this purpose.

This research aims to examine the role of bureaucratic responsiveness to participatory values in shaping citizen involvement, and how this relationship is mediated by the utilization of social media tools. Drawing on the literature on bureaucratic values and social media for citizen participation, we hypothesize that bureaucratic responsiveness to participatory values is positively related to the range, purpose and frequency of social media use, which ultimately leads to higher levels of authentic public participation in terms of frequency and quality of citizen input. We also investigate how city size, a proxy for city governments’ capacity to adopt and utilize social media, moderates these relationships.

We used data from a 2014 national web survey of e-government technology and civic engagement sponsored by the Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University. The survey was administered to government managers in 500 local governments in the U.S. with citizen population ranging from 25,000 to 250,000. For each city, surveys were sent to the lead manager in each of the following five departments: general city management, community development, finance, police and park and recreation. A total of 791 respondents completed the survey for a final response rate of 31.6%. The survey data is paired with data from the U.S. Census Bureau to account for the variation in citizen participation across cities.

This study expands the current literature on the role of bureaucratic values on civic engagement. Its unique data from multiple public managers from small and medium-size cities enhances the generalizability of the results to a wider range of cities in the U.S. Moreover, the study specifies the use of social media tools as one of the mechanisms for public administrators to engage with the public outside of traditional platforms and enable meaningful participation. With city size as a proxy of city socio-technical capacity, the results provide important empirical insights for researchers and practitioners aiming to enhance citizen participation.