Does the Smartness of Cities Matter?

The rise of the internet and new social media has the potential of revolutionizing the nature of urban governance. Voting Advice Applications and other tools may be used to help citizens to make up their mind when voting in local elections. Cities may use electronic platforms to facilitate participatory budgeting and other modes of participatory and deliberative governance. And municipalities can offer a wide range of public services online. Some municipalities proudly present themselves as smart cities that use a wide range of new technologies to allow for more effective services and to stimulate active participation. But at the same time other local governments are very reluctant in adopting such innovations. Our central research question is: To what extent do such variations in the “smartness” municipalities for the citizen satisfaction with local services and with their satisfaction about the way in which local democracy in their city or town works? In this paper we answer this question on the basis of a unique data set that combines aggregate level at the municipal level of analysis (about the smartness of cities) and survey data from 2618 citizens in all 393 municipalities that were recently collected as part of the first Dutch Local Election Studies