Citizen Participation in Digital-Era Governance

The rediscovery of participatory governance in the 1990s coincided with the nascent Internet-era. The agenda was thus forged before digital technology became ubiquitous. It was also heavily influenced by deliberative democratic ideas focused on reasoning together. The proliferation of ‘democratic innovations’ to increase citizen participation in policy-making, thus, remained predominantly analogue. The most common techniques adopted by government were face-to-face mini-publics and collaborative governance mechanisms. Now that digital technologies have become a central part of government and everyday life, it raises the question of their broad impact on this participatory governance agenda. How do these new technologies shape the way citizens and government interact in digital-era governance?  This paper first discusses how digital technologies are transforming the governance context in ways that affect the prospects for participation – for example in decreasing the discretion of street-level bureaucrats and creating pressures to reverse the fragmentation and agencification of previous trends towards network governance. It then examines how digital technologies impact four dominant modes of participation in public policy: knowledge transfer, collective decision-making, choice and voice, and arbitration and oversight. In doing so, it provides a nuanced account of the impacts, demonstrating that whilst some forms of participation are challenged by new developments in digital technologies, others flourish because of them. A key insight is that digital technologies force us to come to terms with a new concept of ‘passive participation’ that challenges the boundaries of what is considered participatory governance.