Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Social media platforms transform the interaction between governments and their citizens. Twitter could be the new space to offer such platform for voicing citizen’s opinions in Qatar. This essay attempts to highlight four levels of policy that guide decision-making: first, citizen voice and actions, which have an effect on policy. Twitter is one such voice, as argued in this paper. Second, foundational values or constitutional constraints on policy. Third, government directives enacted as policy relaxations or exceptions. These are temporary relaxations of an existing policy, which continue to remain in effect government directives. Fourth, government regulations, which are based on legislation and remain coherent with foundational values and constraints. These four policy dimensions mark the interaction between citizens, policy and the state. Very little work has been done on the relationship between citizen voice and policy in Qatar, let alone research on Twitter’s influence in Qatari policy-making and implementation. My interest in this paper is to explore the interplay between these areas. Focusing on the 2011 alcohol ban, how can we examine the interplay of citizen voice and policy using John Kingdon’s framework? Despite the government-led ICT initiatives, this paper argues that twitter may represent an opportunity to pave the way for a virtual, yet partial, democracy within non-democracies. Twitter usage also has the potential of bridging the divide between citizens and experts and empowering citizen-experts to be noticed within expert policy circles. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, the literature review is presented. The subsequent sections describe the alcohol policy in Qatar and provide an application of Kingdon’s framework to the 2011 alcohol ban. I then discuss the policy through the lens of Stephen Coleman, Frank Fischer, and Michael Lipsky. Finally, I offer concluding thoughts and address implications based on the ideas of John Dewey.