Empowered Participation: How Citizens Use Technology in Local Governance

The partnership between local residents and city officials to inform policy and decision-making about government resources, or participatory governance, has been extensively studied. In addition to numerous ethnographic studies about how citizens engage in-person, there has been increased focus in HCI to understand the impact of technology on citizen participation in local governance. Building upon those studies, this paper provides unique insight from a 3-year longitudinal study on the use of online tools that were organically adapted by citizens to engage in local governance in three diverse Chicago neighborhoods. Though the responsiveness of government officials varied across communities, our results suggest that citizens use technology to heighten the visibility of their concerns, to support mechanisms of government accountability, and to provide various options for resident participation in local governance. We argue that while communities may be effective in their use of ICTs, technology may not increase their political power.

[1]  D. Lewis,et al.  The Reactions to Crime Project , 1979 .

[2]  J. Richardson.  Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education , 1986 .

[3]  W. Wilson,et al.  The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy. , 1988 .

[4]  W. Wilson.  The truly disadvantaged : the inner city, the underclass, and public policy , 1988 .

[5]  R. Sampson,et al.  Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social-Disorganization Theory , 1989, American Journal of Sociology.

[6]  D. Massey.  American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass , 1993 .

[7]  Ernest Gellner,et al.  The Blackwell dictionary of twentieth-century social thought , 1994 .

[8]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[9]  I. Luckey.  : American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass , 1995 .

[10]  R. Nisbet,et al.  The Blackwell dictionary of twentieth-century social thought , 1994 .

[11]  R. Sampson,et al.  Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality , 1995 .

[12]  Susan M. Hartnett,et al.  Community Policing, Chicago Style , 1997 .

[13]  Ingrid Gould Ellen,et al.  Neighborhood Effects on Health: Exploring the Links and Assessing the Evidence , 2001 .

[14]  Robert J. Sampson,et al.  Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of urban violence , 2001 .

[15]  Archon Fung,et al.  Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance , 2001 .

[16]  R. Woodward.  Partnership Working in Rural Regeneration , 2002 .

[17]  P. Bourdieu.  Forms of Capital , 2002 .

[18]  Archon Fung,et al.  Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance , 2003 .

[19]  M. D. Carpini,et al.  Public deliberation, discursive participation, and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature , 2004 .

[20]  R. Sampson,et al.  Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action1 , 2005, American Journal of Sociology.

[21]  R. Couto.  Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy , 2005, Perspectives on Politics.

[22]  T. Tyler.  Policing in Black and White: Ethnic Group Differences in Trust and Confidence in the Police , 2005 .

[23]  E. Uslaner,et al.  Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement , 2005 .

[24]  F. Fischer.  Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment , 2006 .

[25]  S. Bowles,et al.  Durable Inequality: Spatial Dynamics, Social Processes and the Persistence of Poverty in Chicago Neighborhoods , 2006 .

[26]  W. Skogan.  Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities , 2006 .

[27]  Placing health in context , 2007 .

[28]  David R. Williams,et al.  Understanding social disparities in hypertension prevalence, awareness, treatment, and control: the role of neighborhood context. , 2007, Social science & medicine.

[29]  F. Solt.  Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement , 2008 .

[30]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  Designs on dignity: perceptions of technology among the homeless , 2008, CHI.

[31]  Meira L. Levinson,et al.  The Civic Empowerment Gap: Defining the Problem and Locating Solutions , 2010 .

[32]  Susanne Bødker,et al.  Public deliberation in municipal planning: supporting action and reflection with mobile technology , 2011, C&T.

[33]  Jill Palzkill Woelfer,et al.  Improving the safety of homeless young people with mobile phones: values, form and function , 2011, CHI.

[34]  P. Ponsaers,et al.  Tides and currents in police theories , 2012 .

[35]  W. Skogan.  Collective action, structural disadvantage and crime , 2012 .

[36]  Andrea Botero,et al.  A long-term strategy for designing (in) the wild: lessons from the urban mediator and traffic planning in Helsinki , 2012, DIS '12.

[37]  Dan A. Lewis,et al.  Examining technology that supports community policing , 2012, CHI.

[38]  Rebecca E. Grinter,et al.  Health promotion as activism: building community capacity to effect social change , 2012, CHI.

[39]  Amy Bruckman,et al.  Income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use , 2012, CHI.

[40]  Sheena Lewis Erete,et al.  Protecting the home: exploring the roles of technology and citizen activism from a burglar's perspective , 2013, CHI.

[41]  Shelly Farnham,et al.  Whoo.ly: facilitating information seeking for hyperlocal communities using social media , 2013, CHI.

[42]  T. Pratt.  Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect , 2013 .

[43]  Marcel Bilger,et al.  Health in the cities: when the neighborhood matters more than income. , 2011, Journal of health economics.

[44]  Robert J. Sampson,et al.  Divergent Pathways of Gentrification , 2014 .

[45]  Ryan Miller,et al.  Differences in technology use to support community crime prevention , 2014, CSCW Companion.

[46]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  Tensions in scaling-up community social media: a multi-neighborhood study of nextdoor , 2014, CHI.

[47]  Tawanna Dillahunt,et al.  The Promise of the Sharing Economy among Disadvantaged Communities , 2015, CHI.

[48]  V. Doorn,et al.  Pre- and Post-Welfare Reform Media Portrayals of Poverty in the United States: The Continuing Importance of Race and Ethnicity , 2015 .

[49]  Kentaro Toyama,et al.  Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology , 2015 .

[50]  Mark Rouncefield,et al.  HCI, Civic Engagement & Trust , 2015, CHI.

[51]  Amanda Meng,et al.  Twitter democracy: policy versus identity politics in three emerging African democracies , 2015, ICTD.

[52]  Sheena L. Erete,et al.  Engaging Around Neighborhood Issues: How Online Communication Affects Offline Behavior , 2015, CSCW.

[53]  Niharika Sachdeva,et al.  Social networks for police and residents in India: exploring online communication for crime prevention , 2015, DG.O.

[54]  Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj,et al.  Digital Neighborhood Watch: To Share or Not to Share? , 2016, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[55]  Peter Dreier,et al.  Community Empowerment Strategies: The Limits and Potential of Community Organizing in Urban Neighborhoods , 2016 .

[56]  Sheena Erete,et al.  Snitches, Trolls, and Social Norms: Unpacking Perceptions of Social Media Use for Crime Prevention , 2017, CSCW.