Commentary: Grounds for Optimism about Grounds for Optimism: New Digital Metrics for Government Responsiveness

• Author: David G. Robinson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12777
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

352 Public Administration Review • May | June 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 352–353. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12777.

David G. Robinson is cofounder

and principal of Upturn, a think tank in

Washington, D.C., that combines technology

and policy expertise to build a more

inclusive and humane digital future. He

is affiliated with Georgetown University

Law Center as an adjunct professor and

with Yale Law School’s Information Society

Project as a visiting fellow.

E-mail: david@teamupturn.com

Commentary

T he article by Fredrik M. Sjoberg, Jonathan

Mellon, and Tiago Peixoto, “The Effect of

Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen

Participation,” is a careful and lucid piece of

scholarship that contributes to the practice of

public administration on two levels. First, there

is the substance of their analysis, which adds to

our understanding of citizen engagement and

government responsiveness. Second, beyond their

immediate findings, the authors have done excellent

work to demonstrate the value of an emerging

method: they harvest, from the digital traces of

actual citizen contacts, robust insights that enhance

our understanding of public administration.

Readers who admire this study, as I do, may

want to extend their admiration to MySociety,

the nongovernmental organization (NGO) that

built the Fix My Street platform analyzed here

and furnished the data—comprising hundreds of

thousands of citizen engagement activities—to these

scholars.

The outcome that the authors use as a measure of

government ’ s responsiveness to a user, which they

term “objective efficacy,” is the user ’ s first request

being marked as “fixed” by someone else, within

about a month (35 days) of the request ’ s creation.

They find that such an experience does significantly

contribute to a user ’ s likelihood of further engagement

on the platform.

This is an instructive and intriguing finding, and I

read its meaning slightly differently than the article ’ s

authors do. The measure for citizens making a

difference—successful resolution of citizen-submitted

requests—may or may not truly betoken objective

efficacy. Just because a user made a request, and the

problem was subsequently marked as fixed, that does

not mean the user ’ s request actually had an impact:

there may be other, shared reasons that explain

both the presence of a request and the fact of its

resolution, without the request having actually caused

the government to act. For example, a pothole in a

particularly important, highly trafficked location may

be likely both to attract a Fix My Street request and to

come to the attention of responsible officials through

independent means.

Thus, while the article concludes by suggesting that

citizen participation may be best served by “actually

giving [citizens] power” rather than merely “making

them feel empowered,” I do not think the findings

really set those two possibilities apart.

Instead, what I take from the substantive analysis is

that a citizen will tend to be motivated to further

engage with government when she has good reason

to believe that she may have spurred the government

to act (for example, when she thinks, “my request

probably got that pothole fixed”). It may not matter,

in the end, whether the citizen ’ s Fix My Street

request actually was the reason the pothole got

fixed.

Citizen users of Fix My Street are hardly alone in

facing some uncertainty about the relationship

between their entreaties and subsequent government

action. Practitioners know that public actions,

even at the local level, are often overdetermined

by inscrutable and contingent constellations of

factors. The question of what caused a public action

can, at times, assume ontological dimensions. For

example, an imminent local election might spur a

town councilor to embark on a sprint of belated

constituent service, attending to an otherwise-

ignored backlog of citizen requests. Under those

circumstances, one might say that a requester has

gained political power, or instead that he simply

picked the right week (the one before the election) to

request that his streetlight be fixed.

Perhaps the best lesson of this article is that

technological change is creating ever more

opportunities to learn, from real data, about the

dynamics of public administration. As digital

technologies increasingly come to mediate the

David G. Robinson

Upturn

Grounds for Optimism about Grounds for Optimism:

New Digital Metrics for Government Responsiveness