Do Central Government E-Democracy Reforms Work for Mid-Size Municipalities? A Case Study of the Long-Term Effects of E-Petitioning in Southampton

Because of the relatively young age of the field of E-Democracy, there is not enough knowledge about the long-lasting consequences of online participatory experiments imposed by national governments on local authorities, such as those conducted by British local authorities following the 2009 Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act. Through the case study of the Southampton City Council, this study provides insights about the long-term impact of top-down reforms on e-Democracy in mid-size provincial cities with no strong tradition of citizen engagement. In the last 25 years, the diffusion of the Internet has changed the way citizens and their elected representatives interact and influence each other. In Europe, the UK has been at the forefront of the digitalization of democratic processes. However, the implementation of e-Democracy instruments has given ambivalent results. On one hand, at national level, the UK Government's e-petitioning system has become the most popular e-Democracy institutional instrument ever implemented (Chadwick, 2009). On the other hand, Panagiotopoulos, Moody and Elliman (2012) found that in the short-term the attempt to replicate at the local level the success of e-Petitions through national legislation produced ambiguous effects. Eight years later, semi-structured interviews to Southampton councilors, civil servants and petitioners revealed how institutional actors’ attitudes and agendas influenced the implementation of e-Petitions and reiterated known short-term shortcomings over a longer time frame. In line with Panagiotopoulos et al. (2011;2012), this case study confirms that an organisational culture averse to bottom-up political participation and limited consultation of local stakeholders in drafting top-down democratic innovations are predictors of perfunctory implementation of e-Democracy and self-serving behaviors of institutional actors. In turn, these attitudes result in poor public awareness of the existence of the e-petitioning system, low responsiveness, and frustration of petitioners.