Using Social Media for Citizen Participation: Contexts, Empowerment, and Inclusion

Stijn Kant,Yanliu Lin

doi:10.3390/su13126635

Abstract

Social media have been increasingly used by governments and planning professionals to gain public opinions, distribute information, and support participation in planning practices. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted to understand the influence of local contexts and the extent to which social media can enhance citizen power and inclusion. This study investigates the role of social media in citizen participation by taking case studies in the Netherlands. It adopts a mixed methods approach that combines interviews, web scraping, and content analysis to understand the characteristics of social media participation. There are several key findings. First, support policies and a high level of social media penetration rate are preconditions for more inclusive participation. Second, social media enhance social inclusion by engaging many participants, who may not be able to participate via traditional methods. Third, they facilitate interactions and different levels of citizen power, though the government still plays a leading role within top-down approaches. Finally, they improve the effectiveness of participation regarding transparency, accessibility, and workable solutions. However, there are several potential political and social bias associated with social media technology. The combination of online and offline participation methods is properly necessary to engage different groups in the planning process.

Highlights

IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
The real-time and open characteristics make social media become a powerful tool to engage a large number of participants and facilitate new forms of interactions between government and citizens
As argued by Lin [15], the technological context is one of the key factors influencing the success of applying digital tools in supporting participation and collaboration

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Citizen participation has become important for contemporary planning due to increasing complexity and diverse interests [1]. The potential benefits of public participation include the promotion of transparent, inclusive and fair decision making processes [2]. There is a growing body of literature on different levels of citizen power, participation forms and methods, and the evaluation of effectiveness in American, European, Chinese and other contexts [3,4,5,6]. Traditional participation often selected a small number of representatives as stakeholders and required participants to be present in a physical place at a particular time, resulting in many problems such as the issues of inclusion, and the inflexibility of participation

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