Why Public Sector Agencies (Sometimes) Support Participatory Democracy Programs

Four years after the birth of the pioneering US federal Open Data (OD) program, designed to further participatory democracy, scholars still cannot explain why several public sector agencies supported OD and others did not. The paper suggests that agencies purposefully design data release strategies to support agency interests and reputation. First, the paper proposes that agencies strategize the release of datasets: either “hugging” datasets that they can sell or freeing datasets in order to “brand” them and secure public funding. Second, agencies carefully manipulate the type and timing of dataset release to support their reputation. Third, the paper proposes that effective OD portals may rely on cleverly designed incentives and incentivized agencies. Little systematic OD research has been performed to date. The research team designed a unique database and software to enable scholars to study when and how agencies release datasets to support participatory democracy programs. Our software solution will crawl, scrape, collect, cleanse, and upload metadata information about individual OD datasets harvested from hundreds of OD and data-for-sale web pages. Through the diligent tracking of individual agency datasets, our database will become the most complete repository of agency dataset release information for researchers. We plan to present our first findings in Salamanca. To overcome the ‘democratic malaise’ and unleash new innovative participatory democracy programs, we must secure the active support of public sector agencies. My paper prompts an important theoretical discussion on whether public sector agencies are primarily self-maximizers or, alternatively, contain within them a cadre of reformists willing to work to advance the greater common good. A follow-up, practical discussion might address the topic of developing effective strategies to involve agencies in the early design of participatory democracy programs.