scholarly journals The Empowerment of Local Government to Involve the Citizens into Political Decision-Making Process to Use the Social Network "Facebook"

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ieva Aurylaitė
Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Sergey Fedorchenko ◽  
E. Karlyavina

The main purpose of the article is to study technologies of a smart city to identify the prospects for digital democracy and risks of digital totalitarianism. The basic methodological optics is the discourse analysis, which involves the identification and comparative analysis of various concepts on the selected issues. The supporting methodology was the Case Study principles and the big data analysis capabilities of the Google Trends platform. The article makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of the algorithmic nature of modern political power, which is the basis of urban technopolitics, as well as the complex configuration of Policy and Politics. Algorithms, as the fundamental basis of digital applications and smart city technologies, are beginning to permeate the entire life of a citizen, closely intertwining with the mechanisms of digital control, rating, political decision-making, extraction, filtering and sorting of information data. It is particularly emphasized that the traditional social reality is transformed into a sociotechnical reality (the phygital world), in which it is no longer possible to rigidly separate the social from the technical. The conclusions indicate that digital democracy is possible only on the principles of open source, while digital totalitarianism, on the contrary, excludes such a model. Without the inclusion of smart citizens, the process of discussion and political decision-making, digital democracy is simply emasculated into a good, but still narrow service on the part of the authorities. In addition, without comprehensive programs in the field of political education, there will be no digital democracy, no smart citizens, only a smart elite will remain.


Author(s):  
S. А. Shmeleva ◽  

This article analyzes the theoretical research base of the last decade on the use of big data in the decision-making process in public administration and describes the methodology proposed by Van der Voort for eval-uating the influence of the two elements on each other. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that there is an extensive study of the use of big data in public administration with an emphasis on potential benefits and threats that conditionally divides researchers into techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. Most studies are empirical in nature, however, they are fragmented and use different approaches to identify the relationships between big data and political decision making. The question arises as to how can we verify or evaluate the relationship between big data and the political decision-making process, taking into account both the dubious reliability of the data used in the process and the interests of decision-makers. The article describes the methodology proposed by Van der Voort for assessing these relationships taking into account the role of ac-tors in the political decision-making process using big data, as well as their interests and values.


Author(s):  
Milda Radzevičiūtė ◽  
Jurgita Mačiulytė

This article analyzes the share of Lithuanian women in political decision-making. The article discusses the importance of gender balance in politics, the relevance of the topic, the stereotypes of women politicians prevailing in the society and analyzes the situation of Lithuanian politicians in the general context of the European Union states. This study focuses on the change in the proportion of women in the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania during the last three terms of office (2008–2019 period) and the change in the share of women in Lithuanian municipal councils (period 2011–2019). The survey is based on data from the Lithuanian Central Electoral Commission, the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania and the European Institute for Gender Equality. One of the objectives of the European Union is the balance of gender equality in political power. Lithuania‘s situation on this issue in the European Union is rather moderate. In most of the areas of political decision-making that are important to the state, Lithuania is behind the EU average. Although progress in gender equality is generally observed in Europe, there are no more noticeable changes in Lithuania or improvement in the situation - women remain a critical mass (30 % below the threshold) among the heads of state, parliament and municipal councils. Keywords: gender inequality, women‘s political power, European Union, women in Lithuanian political institutions, women in local government.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierce D. Ekstrom ◽  
Brianna A. Smith ◽  
Allison L. Williams ◽  
Hannah Kim

This study investigates the effects of social network disagreement on candidate preferences. Although much research has explored the effects of disagreement on political tolerance and disengagement, less work has examined the relation between disagreement and political reasoning. We predicted that because disagreement reveals conflicting points of view and motivates people to consider these views, it should promote more effortful reasoning—and thus increased reliance on policy preferences and decreased reliance on party identification when choosing between candidates. Using panel data from the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections, we find that respondents in high-disagreement networks tend to shift their candidate preferences to align with their policy preferences regardless of their party identification. In low-disagreement networks, respondents tended to follow party over policy. In sum, the determinants of candidate preferences differ depending on individuals’ social networks. In some cases, disagreement may promote more normatively desirable political decision-making.


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