Designing Digital Democracy in Urban Contexts: Evidences from Italy, Spain and UK

Increasingly in recent years institutions of any level of governance are engaging in the creation and management of participatory and collaborative processes, often accompanied by digital platforms. Nevertheless, those platforms cannot count on a standardized method of evaluation for such initiatives, since supra-national organizations such as the European Commission, the Open Government Partnership or the OECD monitor those phenomena from a macro, country-wide perspective. Our purpose is to fill this gap and provide an original method to evaluate the design of digital participatory and collaborative processes from a micro perspective. Our research focused on digital democratic innovations occurring in Italy, Spain and UK, with a particular emphasis on urban contexts. In order to achieve that, we shifted the unit of analysis from a whole system to digital platforms; we elaborated a codebook organized in multiple dimensions and indicators; and we assessed the design of digital democratic innovations through the intersection of those indicators. We retrieved more than 300 active platforms and analysed them with a manual coding procedure. Results show that the design of urban platforms is mostly characterised by low levels of legitimation and low levels of deliberative quality, although with some differences among the three countries. Of course there are some cases of excellence with high levels in both the dimensions, and a substantive quota of (non-deliberative) platforms maintain high levels of legitimation. Nevertheless, observing the platforms with the best scores, it seems clear that some virtuous institutions are already pacing the way of the integration of different participatory tools in one single platform, which proves to gain better results than a strict adherence to a single participatory model.