Digital Government and Citizen Participation in the United States

This chapter addresses the topic of citizen participation via digital government in several sections: first, we discuss the relationship between digital government and citizen participation from the academic literature. Second, we introduce some best practices of citizen participations through digital government in the United States; third, we offer some principles and implications from these best practices; and fourth, we discuss several potential problems of digitized citizen participation in terms of further research. The best practices described in this chapter include Minnesota’s Department Results and Online Citizen Participation Opportunities, Santa Monica’s Budget Suggestions, California’s California Scorecard, Virginia Beach’s EMS Customer Satisfaction Survey and others. We extract some common features from these best practices, such as citizen as customer, recognizing a citizen’s capacity, and direct participation. Further, we recommend principles for designing digitized citizen participation: operationalize direct policy involvement, enable the citizen to influence policy priorities, enhance government accountability, encourage participatory deliberation and shape digital citizenship.