The Effect of Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen Participation

• Author: Jonathan Mellon,Tiago Peixoto,Fredrik M. Sjoberg
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12697
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 340–351.

© 2017 by The American Society for

Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12697.

[The copyright line for this article was

changed on 11 August 2017 after original

online publication.]

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited,

the use is non-commercial and no modif‌i cations or adaptations are made.

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Tiago Peixoto is a senior governance

specialist at the World Bank and team lead

for the Digital Engagement Evaluation

Team. His research interests are at the

intersection of technology, participatory

governance, and public sector management

reforms.

E-mail: tpeixoto@worldbank.org

Jonathan Mellon is a research fellow

at Nuffield College, University of Oxford,

United Kingdom, working on the British

Election Study. He is also a senior data

scientist with the World Bank, works on

the BBC ’ s election night forecasts, and

has worked as a data scientist with the

Organization for Security and Co-operation

in Europe and the Carter Center. He was

awarded his doctorate in political sociology

from the University of Oxford. His research

interests include electoral behavior, cross-

national participation, developing tools for

working with big data in social science, and

social network analysis.

E-mail: jonathan.mellon@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Fredrik M. Sjoberg is a

political scientist who studies political

participation and governance. In his work,

he uses advanced empirical methods,

including experimental methods. He

has worked for the World Bank since

2013. He also has experience with the

European Union and the United Nations

Development Programme. He has

held postdoctoral appointments at Columbia

University and New York University.

E-mail: fredrik.m.sjoberg@gmail.com

Abstract : What effect does bureaucratic responsiveness have on citizen participation? Since the 1940s, attitudinal

measures of perceived efficacy have been used to explain participation. The authors develop a “calculus of

participation” that incorporates objective efficacy—the extent to which an individual ’ s participation actually has

an impact—and test the model against behavioral data from the online application Fix My Street (n = 399,364).

A successful first experience using Fix My Street is associated with a 57 percent increase in the probability of an

individual submitting a second report, and the experience of bureaucratic responsiveness to the first report submitted

has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of responsiveness for

fostering an active citizenry while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory

behavior at the individual level.

Practitioner Points

• For practitioners aiming to promote uptake in participatory processes, the research shows that genuine

responsiveness to citizens’ input encourages greater participation.

• Beyond responding, practitioners should seek to design processes that clearly highlight to individuals the

actual impact of their participation so that their perceived efficacy increases.

• Practitioners using digital platforms in participatory processes should take advantage of the data that

these systems generate to better understand participants’ behavior (e.g., which factors increase repeated

participation).

S cholars have often advocated for a stronger

recognition of the public ’ s role in public

administration (Bingham, Nabatchi, and

O ’ Leary 2005 ; Nabatchi 2010 ; Radin, Cooper,

and McCool 1989 ), including conceptualizing the

provision of public services as a coproduction between

users and providers (Needham 2008 ; Osborne and

Strokosch 2013 ). Simultaneously, a number of authors

have highlighted the importance of government

responsiveness to citizens’ engagement (Cooper, Bryer,

and Meek 2006 ; Halvorsen 2003 ; Stivers 1994 ).

Practitioners should aim to design participation in

ways that outcomes are meaningful to members of the

public (Bryson et al. 2013 ; Fung 2015 ; Kim and Lee

2012 ), demonstrating that participation ultimately

leads to the improvement of public services (Peixoto

and Fox 2016 ; Wang and Van Wart 2007). Yet if

participation and government responsiveness are

closely related issues, to date, no systematic assessment

has been carried out on the effects of government

responsiveness on citizens’ propensity to participate.

A wide range of theories have been put forward to

explain why some participate while others do not:

socialization (Tam Cho 1999), genetic factors (Fowler,

Baker, and Dawes 2008 ), incentives (Rosenstone and

Hansen 1993 ), social dynamics (Gerber, Green, and

Larimer 2008 ), or institutional design (Blais 2006 ;

Smets and Van Ham 2013 ). In this article, we focus

on the role of efficacy and bureaucratic responsiveness

in explaining participation. The literature on efficacy

has suggested that the extent to which citizens feel

that government is responsive to them affects their

participation (Abramson and Aldrich 1982 ; Finkel

1985 ). So far the literature has focused primarily on

the relationship between subjective perceptions of

efficacy and citizens’ levels of participation. Previous

research has generally not questioned whether it

is merely these subjective perceptions of external

efficacy that matter or whether a citizen ’ s objective

efficacy—how much he or she can actually affect

government—is relevant as well. Political scientists

have traditionally made a distinction between a sense

of external efficacy, the belief that government will

be responsive to attempts to influence it, and a sense

of internal efficacy, the belief that one is competent

to understand politics and therefore participate in

politics (Craig 1979 ). We consider both of these

Fredrik M. Sjoberg

World Bank

Jonathan Mellon

Nuffield College, University of Oxford , United Kingdom

Tiago Peixoto

World Bank

The Effect of Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen

Participation