Which Target Group Receives More Responses from the Government through a Citizen Participation Policy?: The Fiji Open-Door Policy Based on a Social Construction Framework

Abstract

The influence of social constructions on the policy-making process of any system of government is determined by how deeply valued those constructions have become for the policy decision makers. Considering the social construction of target groups in a Fiji society, this research endeavoured to evaluate whether the presence of such constructions continues to prevail in the current governments’ responsiveness to citizen participation in administration. The study utilised a social construction framework as a tool to analyse whose voices are more heard by the government via a citizenry participation policy—the open-door policy at the Office of the Prime Minister in Fiji. As a result of connecting the social construction framework to citizen participation in administration, the research categorized the participants in the open-door policy into four target groups—advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants—and pairwise comparisons among the four groups indicated that specific target groups’ requests are more greatly taken into account by the government than others’.