FROM INFRASTRUCTURE TO INCLUSION: RETHINKING CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN VIETNAM’S DIGITAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

In the four decades since Canada's Access to Information Act (1983) came into force, the massive proliferation of digital technologies has prompted significant transformations in the operations of modern governments. The impacts of this digital era on access to information (ATI) research in Canada—by which we mean both research on ATI law (and its administration) as well as research using ATI law (to generate data)—have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. In this short article, we focus on describing the pervasive digital environment that Canada's ATI system operates in and what this means for future ATI research and practice. We begin by tracing how the digitization of government has caused shifts in the administration of Canada's ATI regime before reflecting on some of the implications of these changes for the current and future state of ATI research. A core point of contention is that the future of ATI in Canada and elsewhere is productively understood through the lens of data politics—the notion that all decisions to collect, share, or use data are intractably political (Bigo et al., 2019). We conclude by proposing several research questions that can help guide future ATI research in the era of digital government. The production and control of information is tantamount to the everyday work of governance (Pettigrew, 1972). In the era of “digital government” (Clarke et al., 2017; Lindquist, 2022), it is increasingly difficult if not impossible to think of a single governance function that is not digitized in some way. As many early proponents of “e-government” argued (Silcock, 2001), the adoption of digital technologies in the public sector can enable more effective, democratic, and participatory bureaucratic processes. At the same time, trends in digital government “challenge traditional notions of administration, management, organization, accountability, and engagement” in ways not yet fully examined and understood by academic researchers (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018: 633). The digitization of Canadian governance is reshaping the use and administration of federal ATI law in at least two ways. First, the information that governments produce, both for purposes of internal and external communication, is increasingly “born-digital” (DeLuca, 2020: 5). Regarding ATI, this has implications for how government information is preserved, retrieved, and processed for disclosure. To reduce burdens to the ATI system, it is now more feasible to release large volumes of information through proactive disclosure. The Trudeau government's most recent Access to Information Act reform bill, which achieved royal assent in 2018, introduced into Canadian law “the principle of ‘open by default’ in the digital age by making key information available proactively, without the need to make a request” (Canada, 2019; Duncan et al., 2023). A growing digital repository of information, under the umbrella of “Open Government” (Canada, 2022), is now publicly available on the Internet. But if digitization is expanding the amount of information accessible to citizens through proactive disclosures and by request, this is not true of all forms of information. Digitization makes it easier than ever to efficiently destroy government records. Take the Government of Canada's “Completed Access to Information Requests” portal as an example. This system, one of the most praised ATI modernization efforts enacted by the former Harper administration, allows users to informally request copies of the results of ATI requests completed by others. But only up to a point. The information that can be requested through the portal is limited to requests processed within the past two years. In most federal agencies, ATI disclosure packages older than two years can be destroyed in line with the minimum retention period recommended by Library and Archives Canada's Generic Valuation Tool (Canada, n.d.). Whereas the availability of affordable digital storage and computing power has made it feasible to collect and release more information than ever, this has not precluded policies of information control through deletion. The increasingly digital format of government information also affects how those on the receiving end of an ATI disclosure make sense of the information they obtain and what they choose to do with it. Many ATI users have a high level of digital literacy, a competency the Government of Canada actively promotes through programming and strategic messaging (Shepherd & Henderson, 2019). Even where users lack advanced technical skills, off-the-shelf digital tools are increasingly accessible to non-technical users. One example is Google's Pinpoint tool for investigative journalists, which uses artificial intelligence to help users quickly sort and search through large collections of text. Digital tools like Pinpoint allow ATI users to handle much larger amounts of information pursuant to their request than they could in the past. This is partly reflected in official statistics: between 2015–2018, the amount of information released under federal ATI law increased by 260% (Canada, 2019). There is also the matter of how widely the information is shared once it is released. The fact that information is often released in a digital format makes it easy for those on the receiving end to share it with others using platforms like Archive.org or Dataverse. Second, digital government is changing how—and by who—ATI disclosure is managed and controlled. Federal employees use proprietary software to track and manage information about the disclosure process (AccessPro Case Management is the most commonly used in the federal government). These private software solutions shape and mediate the disclosure process and outcome in ways deserving of future study (Stratton & Carter, 2023). In a digital-first organization, it is becoming less common for ATI officers to retrieve information from a physical archive. Instead, ATI officers—or other federal employees on their behalf—commonly identify, locate, and retrieve information by conducting broad and targeted searches from a computer. This new digital workflow is faster, cheaper, and more efficient. It is also more likely to turn up larger volumes of information with potential relevance to a request. Government information is increasingly acquired, produced, stored, and analyzed by private contractors (Luscombe et al., 2022). Private entities, even when they enter into partnership with the Government of Canada, are exempt from the Access to Information Act, putting a great deal of information which otherwise would have been subject to disclosure laws beyond the reach of civil society. This can also work in the other direction: when private data is purchased from data brokers by the Government of Canada (Boutilier, 2022), this information enters the jurisdiction of the Access to Information Act. ATI officers in Canada have long employed a range of informal strategies to direct, minimize, deter, block, or otherwise prevent meaningful disclosure from taking place (Larsen & Walby, 2012; Luscombe et al., 2017; Piché & Walby, 2021; Roziere & Walby, 2020). These have included using exorbitant fee estimates and lengthy estimated processing times as a deterrent, providing large quantities of information in hardcopy or digital, non-machine-readable formats (e.g., printed scans of digital spreadsheets), and simply failing to offer reasonable assistance throughout the request process. Reforms to the Access to Information Act in 2016 required federal agencies to waive all fees associated with processing an ATI request except for the initial $5 submission charge. Federal agencies were also directed to grant the requester decision-making power over the format of the final disclosure. Those filing requests under federal ATI law can now ask for the information to be provided in a digital, machine-readable format. Claims about the laborious nature of sifting through bankers' boxes in distant off-site archive facilities and other informal tactics of information control are less convincing to ATI users than they once were. This changes not only how ATI officers engage in information control, but also the kinds of “access brokering” (Larsen & Walby, 2012) tactics used by requesters to navigate and overcome the barriers that ATI officers may attempt to create. The digitization and consequent datafication of governance is creating new opportunities and challenges for ATI users. By datafication, we mean the process of creating value by taking “information about all things under the sun… and transforming it into a data format to make it quantified” (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013: 42). Artificial intelligence and data-driven decision-making in public administration have taken hold (Auld et al., 2022). Datafication presents many new avenues for public administration scholars to explore including assessing the effects of automation or advancing understandings of algorithmic fairness and accountability (Ávila et al., 2020; Eubanks, 2017). People are increasingly aware of how different aspects of their lives are datafied with implications for how they are governed (Aradau & Blanke, 2022). While access to digital tools and training remain pressing equity issues in Canada (Haight et al., 2014), the tools and skills required to access, manage, and analyze large data sets are becoming more accessible. Governments are unable to take advantage of the opportunities presented by new digital technologies without generating masses of data. The explosion of data within public administrations and the democratization of data analysis are pushing ATI use beyond the search for a “‘smoking gun’ document” (Walby & Larsen, 2011: 524). A small but growing number of researchers, activists, and civil society organizations are beginning to use federal ATI and regional freedom of information laws to obtain quantitative digital data to uncover more systemic institutional patterns and challenges (Browne, 2022; McClelland, 2022; Mummolo, 2018; Owusu-Bempah & Luscombe, 2021; Piché et al., 2022; Reeves-Latour & Morselli, 2017). For example, investigative journalist Tom Cardoso has spent years negotiating access to large datasets on prisoner risk assessment instruments and analyzing them to uncover systematic biases against Black and Indigenous people (e.g., Cardoso, 2020). The datasets Cardoso generates through ATI and shares online are often subsequently analyzed by academic researchers that benefit from access to data they might not have otherwise obtained (see e.g., O'Connell & Laniyonu, 2023 for a scholarly analysis of a federal risk assessments dataset Cardoso acquired under ATI and published online). Researchers have also begun applying computational techniques to render documents searchable and extract valuable insights. In Canada, ATI records are often released in non-searchable digital formats. The growing accessibility of free and open source optical character recognition algorithms has made it easier to search through releases by making image format text searchable. The capacity to convert image format records into machine readable texts presents opportunities to analyze government releases at scale using increasingly popular “text-as-data” (Grimmer et al., 2022) techniques that rely on machine learning. Although many public administration scholars do not yet possess training in text-as-data techniques and research designs, there are growing numbers that do as these methods become popularized in disciplines like sociology and political science. For example, Berliner and colleagues (Berliner et al., 2021; Berliner et al., 2018) use an unsupervised machine learning approach called topic modeling to analyze over 1 million requests for official information in Mexico. They find that system users from regions that are more pro-government receive higher quality responses to information requests. Although currently few in number, we anticipate that more public administration scholars will develop competence with such methods as they become more mainstream in social sciences training at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The goals of open scholarship—“to improve openness, integrity, social justice, diversity, equity, inclusivity and accessibility in all areas of scholarly activities” (Parsons et al., 2022)—are changing how many social scientists, journalists, and other researchers use ATI and what they do with the disclosure packages they receive. Compared to a decade ago, it has become much more common for both the government and requesters to proactively share material. The emergence of “open by default” proactive disclosures is evidence of how open scholarship and open government norms are emerging concurrently. Parallel to the government's own proactive disclosure initiatives, many ATI users are actively sharing the results of their requests with others using a variety of file sharing platforms. Requesters are making their disclosures public because they believe that making information publicly available is good for science, for democracy, and for civil society. Depending on the project and the data, sharing the results of an ATI request may not only be viewed as a good thing to do but a necessity. When conducting a quantitative analysis of data obtained under ATI, sharing the “raw” data is an important part of fostering trust and enabling replication (Freese & Peterson, 2017). Alongside the publication of quantitative datasets, others have created publicly available digital document repositories. In collaboration with Kevin Walby, Director of the Centre for Access to Information and Justice at the University of Winnipeg, we recently launched a dashboard that keeps a running log of previously completed ATI requests and provides access to over 1000 disclosure packages that users can either download or explore using Google Pinpoint and the Internet Archive (Duncan et al., 2023). Canada Declassified (Sayle & Wiseman, 2022) is a digital repository run by historians at the University of Toronto composed of Canadian Cold War-related records declassified under the Access to Information Act. Civic tech advocacy is similarly driving innovation in government transparency. Volunteer “data activists” and nonprofit organizations are filling in gaps where governments are unable or unwilling to provide services that facilitate citizens' demand for information (Milan & Van der Velden, 2016). For example, Alivateli is an open-source platform created by the UK-based not-for-profit, mySociety. The platform serves as an intermediary between people and governments by facilitating requests for information. The platform maintains a public repository of previous requests made through the platform with all communications between requesters and the government that anyone can search and download. Alivateli's platform first launched in the UK as WhatDoTheyKnow.com and has since been adopted in over 25 jurisdictions. Data activists around the globe are creating public interest datasets (often using maps) designed to provide access to information that is otherwise not available. In the US, the advocacy organization Data for Black Lives aggregated state-level public health data to publish data on race-based disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths (Data for Black Lives, 2022). Mexican engineer and activist, María Salguero systematically tracked and mapped media coverage of femicides (murders targeting women and girls) in Mexico because government figures, as demonstrated by her project, vastly undercount this type of violence against women (Sim, 2018). In Canada, the Policing the Pandemic Project used a similar “counter-mapping” (Kidd, 2019) technique relying on media coverage and information requests to track instances of police enforcement of COVID-19 mandates and restrictions as Canadian police were not proactively releasing this information (Luscombe & McClelland, 2020). These activist-generated datasets are created for different reasons, are born out of varying social and political contexts, and are not always accompanied by a level of methodological transparency that would allow one to properly validate them. This is not to say that such datasets should not be used for academic research, but that they should be approached critically with an understanding of what motivated their creation and investigation into how they were assembled. As part of any research project using data generated through ATI, researchers must always carefully reflect on what the data can and cannot tell them about the work of government while always keeping in mind that the very creation and disclosure of data itself can be and often is leveraged by government officials as a strategic means of securing legitimacy (Rappert, 2012). The values of openness and accountability that motivate data activism should be understood as models for open government rather than replacements for government intervention. An open-source mentality has many strengths. As demonstrated by successful software projects like the Linux operating system or the R programming language, open-source initiatives encourage the formation of active communities. Projects that attract diverse and engaged stakeholders often produce more robust and flexible systems than their proprietary counterparts (Weber, 2004). While often developed for a niche community of users (like government transparency wonks), such projects are frequently sources of innovation that have effects far beyond the core community of project stakeholders. Nonetheless, relying purely on data activists' altruistic endeavors is both insufficient and unsustainable in the long run. While the examples we draw upon in this article are full of promising ideas, relatively few are as effective as they could be and many fizzle out as their creators and the communities around them turn to other pursuits. Data activism initiatives highlight gaps in official information. They should be understood not merely as supplementary to open government initiatives but reflective of information that governments could be making available to citizens using government resources. What is the role of scholars in engaging with ATI as a form of data politics? How might academics balance the goals of producing rigorous knowledge about ATI while promoting government policies that enable high impact, high quality public administration research through access to data? How and to what extent is the datafication of governance creating new avenues to study how governments work? In what ways is datafication foreclosing or reshaping the traditional concerns of public administration scholarship? In what ways might norms of open scholarship and open government enable more robust forms of collaboration between social scientists and the government institutions that they study? How and to what extent are governments actively learning from civic tech and data activism initiatives? How does or how could civic tech advocacy translate into core government programs, services, or policies supported by public rather than private resources? What new research questions can access to government databases open up for public administration scholars? What challenges and opportunities currently exist for researchers to obtain access to large data sets or databases from federal institutions under ATI law? What kinds of established and innovative (e.g., text-as-data) methodologies and skill sets are required of researchers who hope to maximize the value of data accessed through ATI? The digitization of government and broader datafication of society have shifted how ATI is understood both by governments and their stakeholders. The norms and practices of open scholarship are frequently complementary to those of civic technologists and data activists, giving common cause to calls for more effective forms of open government to enrich both scholarship and advocacy. ATI implicates researchers in the conduct of data politics as brokering access is often a fraught process of negotiation. Even for public administration scholars who would wish to distance themselves from claims that their work is politically motivated, we contend that ATI scholarship is inseparable from the datafication of governance. Thus, even ATI research aspiring to political neutrality is embedded in the broader context of data politics. It is these transformations that we suggest require a conceptual shift toward data politics in ATI research and practice.

This paper examines the performance of public administrators at the local government level in Nigeria. It traces the development of local governments in Nigeria from 1945 to present times. It argues that the shift in the critical decision‐making powers and functions of local government requires its public administrators to be better‐trained professionals. However, without citizens' participation in governance, public servants' accountability will be low. The study addresses the following questions: How do public sector performance and development of actions by citizens affect accountability in the local governments? How much training do public administrators in Nigeria's local governments have in public management? What is the relationship between performance and citizenship participation in local governments' development process? The question of interests in this study is how public administration at the local government level can better serve Nigeria's communities and in so doing develop authentic relationship with citizen groups, and equitably enhance public trust, legitimacy, and performance of the public sector in the nation.

Participatory and responsive governance in universal health coverage (UHC) systems synergistically ensure the needs of citizens are protected and met. In Thailand, UHC constitutes of three public insurance schemes: Civil...

For development to occur by the current paradigm, citizens must be actively engaged in all elements of policymaking, decision-making, and service supply. This is true for every phase of the planning process, including the identification of goals, formulation of policies, and their implementation. Public participation in local government is prioritized to enhance efficient administration and provide high-quality services at the neighborhood level. An efficiently managed local government is characterized by active citizen participation and competent leadership that effectively steers the institutions under its jurisdiction toward their primary goal. In its pursuit of establishing itself as the economic center of South Asia, Bangladesh is diligently striving to establish a robust and dynamic municipal government. A new paradigm centered on grassroots democracy is supplanting the traditional mode of public participation in governance via elected officials. The Bangladeshi Constitution and the rules regulating local governments ensure the creation of local governments and the development of numerous projects. To gain a thorough grasp of the dynamics of participation without resorting to direct primary data collection, this study utilizes secondary data to conduct a qualitative investigation into people's involvement in grassroots local government in Bangladesh, specifically in the context of the Union Parishad. This research aims to identify the many avenues via which individuals from underrepresented groups might engage in local government in Bangladesh, namely the Union Parishad (UP). It also seeks to evaluate the extent to which each of these avenues contributes to the empowerment of these groups.

The present article is part of a more broaden study regarding the integrated systems of information. The focus of this research is the informational accessibility in museums under the perspective of the universal design and the ergonomic information and cognition. Its objective is to report the research regarding new information and communication technologies, based on bibliographic researches and synchronic analysis in Brazilian and European museums. This work was carried out under the intention to gather data about the state of the art in the area, aiming to understand it enough to find more proper solutions to be applied in the object of study – the Kahal Zur Israel synagogue.

The study explored how information access through different dimensions of Social Capital (SC) (structural, relational and cognitive) affects the mitigation of business opportunism. Data were collected from 373 Small Enterprises (SEs) in Sri Lanka, conducting face-to-face interviews with the owners of SEs. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyse data. The results revealed that information accessed through different dimensions of SC have significant negative effects with business opportunism of exchange partners. Therefore, the study recommends SEs to develop SC while having strong relationships with exchange partners in order to access information leading to the mitigation of opportunism of exchange partners.

The study explored how information accessed through Social Capital (SC) affect the improvement of rational ability of Owner Manager Small Enterprises (OMSEs) in Sri Lanka. Data were collected from 373 Small Enterprises (SEs) located all the Provinces in Sri Lanka, conducting face to face interviews with respondents. The data were analysed using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling. The results provided sufficient evidences to conclude that information access through different dimensions of SC (structural, relational and cognitive) have significant positive effects on the improvement of rational ability of OMSEs in Sri Lanka. The empirical results expand the understanding the relative efficacy of SC and rational ability in the context of SEs in a less develop country and deliver an alternative insights for policy makers to develop SEs by creating a conducive environment for strengthening SC of SEs in order to access more information.

Social stigma within Korean society hinders structural efforts to reduce HIV disparities among sexual minority men (SMM). To date, however, there have been limited intervention efforts to reduce HIV disparities among SMM in Korea. Therefore, the current mixed-methods study (n = 180) explored young Korean SMM’s perspectives on the acceptability of HIV prevention mHealth interventions to inform effective strategies for future intervention studies. We then analyzed participants’ comments and suggestions on HIV research and examined associations with the acceptability of mHealth interventions. Through our textual coding and analysis, we identified four primary themes for comments and suggestions for HIV research in Korea: the centrality of stigma, health service accessibility, informational accessibility, and cultural adaptation. Our study suggests culturally adapted HIV intervention addressing stigma, health service accessibility, and information accessibility and mHealth interventions disseminating information and resources for stigmatized young SMM in Korea.

There is a need to provide a mobile network architecture that delivers quality concurrent access to personalized information and services - whether distributed by the broadcast media, over the Internet or via the telephone. Current information appliances either lack adequate display capabilities (e.g. cellular phones) or mobility (e.g. WebTV). Nevertheless, in the near future, the volume of information accessed through appliances will exceed that through PCs and therefore many consumer electronics devices will have to be network-enabled. We present an architecture for ubiquitous access to personalized information services on appliances through a mobile link (PAMLink). PAMLink is a cell phone-centric mobile network architecture and access method developed to add the envisioned information access capabilities to any PAMLink enabled consumer electronics device or vehicle. Besides providing a wireless communication link, the cellular phone is used to identify the user as well, conveniently enabling personal profiles. Thus, information is provided to the user in a highly customized form according to the end-user's profile and to the appliance being used.

BackgroundMovement towards evidence-based practices in many fields suggests that public health (PH) challenges may be better addressed if credible information about health risks and effective PH practices is readily available. However, research has shown that many PH information needs are unmet. In addition to reviewing relevant literature, this study performed a comprehensive review of existing information resources and collected data from two representative PH groups, focusing on identifying current practices, expressed information needs, and ideal systems for information access.MethodsNineteen individual interviews were conducted among employees of two domains in a state health department – communicable disease control and community health promotion. Subsequent focus groups gathered additional data on preferences for methods of information access and delivery as well as information format and content. Qualitative methods were used to identify themes in the interview and focus group transcripts.ResultsInformants expressed similar needs for improved information access including single portal access with a good search engine; automatic notification regarding newly available information; access to best practice information in many areas of interest that extend beyond biomedical subject matter; improved access to grey literature as well as to more systematic reviews, summaries, and full-text articles; better methods for indexing, filtering, and searching for information; and effective ways to archive information accessed. Informants expressed a preference for improving systems with which they were already familiar such as PubMed and listservs rather than introducing new systems of information organization and delivery. A hypothetical ideal model for information organization and delivery was developed based on informants' stated information needs and preferred means of delivery. Features of the model were endorsed by the subjects who reviewed it.ConclusionMany critical information needs of PH practitioners are not being met efficiently or at all. We propose a dual strategy of: 1) promoting incremental improvements in existing information delivery systems based on the expressed preferences of the PH users of the systems and 2) the concurrent development and rigorous evaluation of new models of information organization and delivery that draw on successful resources already operating to deliver information to clinical medical practitioners.

Women involvement in decision making processes in governance for sustainable development is very critical, not only because they constitute majority of the Ghanaian population but they are discriminated and underrepresented in the socio-economic and political development activities thereby widening gender gap. This study sought to ascertain the factors responsible for low women participation in local government in Ghana. With a mixed method approach, this paper examines the underlining factor of low women participation in governance. With the feminism and notion of social gender perspective, inadequate financial resources, the perception of politics as a “dirty” game, lack of capacity and confidence on the part of women candidates among others were major factors affecting women participation in local government. To give women facelift in local government, the study recommended that government should pass a legislation aimed at reserving special quota for women and provision of special funds by NGO’s and philanthropists to support women candidates.

An efficiently managed local government is characterized by active citizen participation and competent leadership that effectively steers the institutions under its jurisdiction toward their primary goal. In its pursuit of establishing itself as the economic center of South Asia, Bangladesh is diligently striving to establish a robust and dynamic municipal government. A new paradigm centered on grassroots democracy is supplanting the traditional mode of public participation in governance via elected officials. This research aims to identify the many avenues via which individuals from underrepresented groups might engage in local government in Bangladesh. It also seeks to evaluate the extent to which each of these avenues contributes to the empowerment of these groups. To gain a thorough grasp of the dynamics of participation without resorting to direct primary data collection, this study utilizes secondary data to conduct a qualitative investigation into people's involvement in grassroots local government in Bangladesh, specifically in the context of the Union Parishad. The study reveals that while Bangladesh’s local government mechanisms promote public participation, engagement remains largely symbolic due to limited influence over decision-making. Despite efforts like elections and community meetings, active involvement is minimal. The results highlight a disconnect between the established public participation mechanisms and citizen engagement in Bangladesh. Despite efforts like local elections and public forums, participation remains largely symbolic due to a lack of perceived influence. This suggests a need for reforms to foster meaningful public involvement and strengthen local governance.

China’s changing urban development policies and urban landscapes in the transition from socialist to a market economy have been focused on entrepreneurialism and elite-dominance. However, with decentralization as a major feature of changes in governance in China in recent years, differences among localities in approaches to the planning and development of city regions are found to be diverse. Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, is proving to be an exceptional case in its approaches toward inclusiveness in decision-making, access to land, and its relationships with its rural hinterlands. Based on policies and programs adopted by local government to narrow urban-rural disparities in Chengdu, this paper explores the progressive features of governing of Chengdu from an analytical assessment of reflexive interrelationships among land property reform, participatory governance, and grassroots democracy. The central question addressed is whether or not and how the adopted land property reform enhances the involvement of residents in participatory governance and the rise of local grassroots democracy. The case of Chengdu shows that even in a state-dominated political system, progressive features are gradually becoming apparent and prominent.

This article discusses the accessibility of public information on the Internet by people with disabilities, and in particular people with visual deficits. Web accessibility standards, content and basic principles have been considered. A survey on the accessibility of public websites in the Republic of Bulgaria was conducted. Information on the group that conducted the study is given, the purpose of the study, the methodology of the study is described. The surveys were conducted on 100 public administration sites, which are divided into 5 groups. The results of the study are presented. Conclusions were made for the accessibility of information in the public sphere of the Republic of Bulgaria. In recent months accessibility of these sites has been re-evaluated. The results show that not enough is being done to achieve accessibility while maintaining public administration websites in Bulgaria. Despite the overall increase in web accessibility of the sites being tested, there is still much work to be done on this.A statistical analysis of the different groups of public sites was conducted, and the group in which the accessibility was the best was examined.Тhe conclusion is that the accessibility of the websites of the public administration in the Republic of Bulgaria is not at the necessary level of accessibility, which does not allow the users with visual disability to access these sites easily. It is, therefore, necessary for the public administration and web application developers to implement the accessibility guidelines proposed in the standards and improve the accessibility of these websites. This will be a step forward in ensuring the rights of people with disabilities. Тhe paper of this survey is original and not previously published.

Based on the data of cities in China from 2005 to 2015, this paper examines the impact of the sandwiching approach involving the media governance model on government responsiveness with a quasi-natural experiment of participation in politics on television (PPTV). The study found that PPTV can help strengthen government responsiveness. After a series of robustness tests, the conclusion is still valid. The heterogeneity analysis shows that PPTV can effectively enhance government responsiveness in technology, social security, and employment sectors. Furthermore, government responsiveness is more effectively enhanced by adopting PPTV in form of annual live broadcast activities with public rating and cooperation with print media. This policy has a stronger role in enhancing government responsiveness in cities with high levels of economic development and high government competition. Considering officials characters, the longer the tenure of the mayor and the secretary of the municipal party committee, the stronger the government responsiveness.