Rethinking Open Government Data for Citizen Participation. An Introduction to a Special Issue

Abstract

Citizen participation has always been considered one of the key pillars of open government: providing citizens with government information should enable them to participate effectively in decision-making or other government procedures. Despite this obvious connection between open government data (OGD) and citizen participation in theory, their relationship turns out to be much more complicated in practice, as OGD is hardly used in practice to hold the government accountable or change government policy. This introduction argues for a reconceptualization of the idea of citizen participation in relation to OGD, moving away from the ‘more is better’ approach towards a more refined understanding of different levels of citizen participation.