Measuring Political Online Participation and its Consequences for Local Governments and its Citizens

The involvement of citizens in political decision-making is demanded not only by those affected by those decisions but increasingly also by those who are responsible for making these decisions because it is perceived to be a possible cure for the democratic malaise of representative democratic systems. Yet the consequences that follow from such participatory processes that are initiated top-down are not well understood. This is in particular the case for the diverse forms of online engagement or e-participation that have been employed by local governments in order to elicit the views of the public on various issues. In other words, the question whether it is worthwhile to pursue such democratic innovations from the perspective of democratic systems still needs more sound empirical evidence. The reasons for this can be traced back to the lack of consensus on a widely shared framework that sets out criteria in order to evaluate participatory processes via the Internet. This poses severe challenges for comparing and ultimately justifying such efforts. As a consequence, for the most part research into the effects of online participation is still based on disparate case studies instead of systematic comparisons of similar procedures let alone comparative research across time, different participation formats or participants and non-participants. In order to address this issue this paper makes three contributions. First, based on a review of the existing evaluation approaches, e.g. from research into political participation, urban planning and evaluation methods, it proposes a universal framework of evaluation criteria that can be applied to participation processes organized by (local) authorities. Taking democratic theory as a starting point it suggests a distinction between process and result criteria (specifically output, outcome and impact) and a differentiation between levels of analysis (micro, meso and macro) as well as stakeholder perspectives. Second, based on established concepts in Political Science and their application in survey research, it proposes a survey instrument that operationalizes these criteria. Third, this questionnaire is applied within a representative survey of the population of a large German city and this paper reports on the results. The aim is to initiate a discussion towards achieving a set of shared criteria that can act as standard to evaluate different forms of invited political participation online, while its potential application for established forms of participation should also be discussed. These contributions derive from a wider research effort of the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy into the effects of participatory online processes employed by local authorities. Its aim is a sound empirical measurement of potential effects of such processes. To this end a number of standardized online participation processes are organized in three different German cities along representative population surveys that allow to systematically compare effects.