Participatory governance and responsiveness: Do motivational interventions increase engagement with citizen input?
Participatory mechanisms are now widely used by national and local governments in developed and developing countries. While their purpose and form varies greatly, they all rely on the discretion of a professionalised bureaucracy to manage these processes and prepare their outcomes in a manner that they can feed into policy-making. Bureaucrats thus have a gate-keeping role. They can substantially influence whether and how information from participatory processes feeds into policy-making. Bureaucrats can thereby impact to what extent participatory mechanisms can deliver on their promise of giving citizens greater direct control over the policy-making process. Formal political control over the bureaucracy is limited in this case. Could informal controls make bureaucrats comply more with the demands of participatory mechanisms? This study employs a large field experiment (N=7,532) to test (1) whether citizen input filters through to bureaucrats tasked with policy design and implementation and (2) whether bureaucrats’ engagement with citizen input can be in- creased by using non-monetary rewards and value-based communication. The experiment accounts for heterogeneity by bureaucrat seniority, central versus street-level roles and involvement in the collection of citizen input. It finds no meaningful engagement at the baseline (C=0%) but that motivational interventions can significantly increase engagement (T1= 14%, T2=15%). The findings suggest that currently little input from citizens filters through to bureaucrats, but small tweaks substantially increase the democratic potential of participatory initiatives.