Online Citizen Deliberation through New Local Participatory Platforms and Twitter: Barcelona Case Study

Following wins by new left-wing parties in Spain’s 2015 local elections, new participatory platforms were launched to enhance citizen participation and debate relating to local public policies. Platforms rolled out in Barcelona and Madrid are now being adopted by other Catalan, Spanish and European cities (eg Helsinki) and regional governments (eg France). Distinctive features of these new platforms are their focus on citizens’ initiatives and deliberation, and their combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches. The modular design of these platforms allows local governments to open up web pages for participatory deliberation with themed nesting of comments (similar to that of social media), and make it easy to share contents on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. But are these platforms – which are designed to empower discussion – really facilitating meaningful public deliberation? To answer this question, we assess the deliberative capacity of online tools on three levels: 1) the institutional and technical aspects of the platform designs; 2) the communicative aspects of the conversations; and 3) the impact of the deliberative process on the local government's decisions to accept or reject proposals. Our analysis focuses on the local government online participatory platform Decidim Barcelona and specifically on the crowdsourced production and discussion of Barcelona’s Pla d’Actuació Municipal (strategic city planning process), which had 10,860 proposals from citizens, 18,192 comments and 25,435 online participants. Our analysis also includes a study of the Twittersphere relating to the main issues discussed in this planning process. This focused on the structure and content of the Twitter reply network in order to also evaluate the deliberative capacity of Twitter. Our methodology combines big data and network analysis with content analysis of the conversations on these platforms and Twitter.