This contribution introduces Current Sociology’s special subsection ‘The advent of the citizen expert: Democratising or pushing the boundaries of expertise?’, which deals with the increasing ...involvement of ‘ordinary citizens’ as experts into political and social debates. From an integrated perspective that transcends policy fields and societal realms, the special subsection deals with the epistemic and democratic implications of this transformation in civic participation and knowledge validation practice. It pays special attention to the tensions that can be implied by citizen expertise’s ‘double promise’ of tapping into novel channels of participation and idle knowledge resources at the same time. Three promising themes and research avenues are identified that the advent of the citizen expert highlights: The changes in liberal-democratic culture indicated by the emergence of this new actor category, the way societal power relations are impacted by the elevation of citizen expertise and the subsequently shifting boundaries and standards of what can count as knowledge or expertise.
Next Steps for Citizen Science Bonney, Rick; Shirk, Jennifer L.; Phillips, Tina B. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
03/2014, Letnik:
343, Številka:
6178
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Strategic investments and coordination are needed for citizen science to reach its full potential.
Around the globe, thousands of research projects are engaging millions of individuals—many of whom ...are not trained as scientists—in collecting, categorizing, transcribing, or analyzing scientific data. These projects, known as citizen science, cover a breadth of topics from microbiomes to native bees to water quality to galaxies. Most projects obtain or manage scientific information at scales or resolutions unattainable by individual researchers or research teams, whether enrolling thousands of individuals collecting data across several continents, enlisting small armies of participants in categorizing vast quantities of online data, or organizing small groups of volunteers to tackle local problems.
Coproduction of public services means that services are not only delivered by professional and managerial staff in public agencies but also coproduced by citizens and communities. Although recent ...research on this topic has advanced the debate considerably, there is still no consensus on precisely what coproduction means. This article argues that rather than trying to determine one encompassing definition of the concept, several different types of coproduction can be distinguished. Starting from the classical definitions of Elinor Ostrom and Roger Parks, the article draws on the literature on professionalism, volunteering, and public management to identify the distinctive nature of coproduction and identify basic dimensions on which a typology of coproduction can be constructed. Recognizing different types of coproduction more systematically is a critical step in making research on this phenomenon more comparable and more cumulative.
The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates' followers on Facebook. Citizens' reactivity is increasingly important in ...contemporary political communication. The politicians' posts can reach the wider public through the citizens' public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens' political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians' Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians' Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.
Abstract
The burgeoning literature on the democratic deficit of international organizations, and the United Nations in particular, has, for the most part, inherited a pervasive state-centrism ...commonly associated with conventional approaches to international law more generally. While this approach is understandable, it appears incompatible with a holistic account of democracy, especially accounts that seek to situate the locus of power within the
individual
. Drawing on attempts to empower individual citizens to influence global governance decision-making in other contexts—especially the experience of the European Citizens’ Initiative—this Article considers a bold idea: The establishment of a “World Citizens’ Initiative,” through which individuals could directly influence the agenda of the primary organs of the United Nations. This Article critically analyzes the legal feasibility of such an initiative and the challenges of implementation. In doing so, it offers both a theoretical and institutional contribution to the debate about the normative case for the democratization of global governance through effective citizen participation.
We reconstruct the innovation journey of 'citizen panels', as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation ...leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s, to the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory-based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state.
This article examines the use of a Citizens' Jury as a source of voter information in the context of a government-initiated (top-down) referendum. Several studies show the capacity of the Citizens' ...Initiative Review (CIR) to enhance voters' knowledge and capacity of judgement in ballot initiative processes. However, similar procedures have not been tested outside the U.S.A. or in the context of government-initiated referendums. Our case is a Citizens' Jury on Referendum Options organised in the municipality of Korsholm (Finland) in 2019. Even though the referendum concerned a contested municipal merger, we find that jury's participants were nonetheless satisfied with the deliberative process and found it impartial. A large majority of voters in Korsholm had read the statement by the jury and thought it was a useful and trustworthy source of information. Based on a field experiment, we find that reading the statement increased trust in the jury, factual knowledge, issue efficacy and perspective-taking.
This article aims to provide empirical evidence against the theory and practice of immigrant integration through the experience of EU citizens in the UK around Brexit. We demonstrate that, in the ...case of EU citizens, the outcomes of presumably successful "integration" have been achieved while - and, we argue, because of the fact that - EU citizens have been treated as citizens (not migrants) and have been freed from the requirement to "integrate". On the basis of interviews, focus groups and a survey in the period 2016-18 we show meaningful incorporation of a variety of EU citizens of all backgrounds, including those from the so-called "low-skilled" presumably problematic to integrate subgroup. We claim that work, family, locality and time determine much of the intricacies of the incorporation journey. Integration governance which Brexit imposed on EU citizens can only threaten these outcomes.
Objectives
Test the asymmetry thesis of police-citizen contact that police trustworthiness and legitimacy are affected more by negative than by positive experiences of interactions with legal agents ...by analyzing changes in attitudes towards the police after an encounter with the police. Test whether prior attitudes moderate the impact of contact on changes in attitudes towards the police.
Methods
A two-wave panel survey of a nationally representative sample of Australian adults measured people’s beliefs about police trustworthiness (procedural fairness and effectiveness), their duty to obey the police, their contact with the police between the two waves, and their evaluation of those encounters in terms of process and outcome. Analysis is carried out using autoregressive structural equation modeling and latent moderated structural models.
Results
The association between both process and outcome evaluation of police-citizen encounters and changes in attitudes towards the police is asymmetrical for trust in police effectiveness, symmetrical for trust in procedural fairness, and asymmetrical (in the opposite direction expected) for duty to obey the police. Little evidence of heterogeneity in the association between encounters and trust in procedural fairness and duty to obey, but prior levels of perceived effectiveness moderate the association between outcome evaluation and changes in trust in police effectiveness.
Conclusions
The association between police-citizen encounters and attitudes towards the police may not be as asymmetrical as previously thought, particularly for changes in trust in procedural fairness and legitimacy. Policy implications include considering public-police interactions as ‘teachable moments’ and potential sources for enhancing police trustworthiness and legitimacy.
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