How IT and social change facilitates public participation: A stakeholder-oriented approach

Abstract

The participation of the public in political decisions is a subject with a long history, in which public participation was subject to many development processes and has been gaining in importance particularly in the past years. The key issues therein are the influence of social developments and the increasing impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on the structures of political decision making. In this context, the identification of potential developments and the underlying incentive structures of involved stakeholder groups play a particularly important role. Therefore, in this study, we offer a comprehensive overview of potential developments in the field of public participation that are driven by ICT and social developments. We also demonstrate how differently these developments are evaluated by politics, public administration and citizens. Furthermore, we find significant differences between the evaluation by citizens and the public sector regarding the desirability of developments. Conclusions about the existence of diverse incentive structures are also drawn. We use data from three concurrently but independently conducted real-time Delphi surveys with 172 experts from the political, 168 experts from the administrative and 104 experts from the citizenry sectors as the basis of our analysis.