In recent years, citizen participation has become an important issue for municipalities. Several forms of citizen participation are possible to involve citizens in political-administrative decisions (e.g., noise-action planning or participatory budgeting). For this purpose, some municipalities increasingly use the internet.
So far, there has been no overview of how many municipalities use the internet for which kind of participation processes. The NRW-Fortschrittskolleg “Online-Participation” has taken on this task. Based on a survey of municipalities and counties in North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW), a database of all Internet-based participation procedures of the last ten years has been set up.
In addition to the scientific research on online participation in NRW, this database serves to bring together municipal actors that are interested in internet-supported citizen participation. Primarily, the database can enable an exchange of experience. The information collected in the survey is being presented in an interactive participation map. It can be found here: www.monitor-online-partizipation.de (in German) The data can be retrieved for each individual municipality under an open license.
In November 2015, the survey phase had started by sending the questionnaires to all 396 municipalities and 31 counties in NRW. It was successfully completed in March 2016. In total, more than 90% of all cities, municipalities and counties in NRW took part in the survey. According to our survey, in 130 municipalities as well as in seven counties in NRW, at least one Internet-based citizen participation process has been carried out so far. Thirty-three municipalities have already carried out such procedures before 2010 and thus are quite experienced.
Team
The project was carried out by a team of PhD-students of the NRW Fortschrittskolleg from different disciplines:
- Malte Steinbach (Business Administration)
- Sabrina Schöttle (Sociology)
- Nadja Wilker (Political Science)
- Theresa Witt (Law)
- Peter Gladitz (Political Science)
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Dr. Katharina Gerl
Board, DIID-Team, Political Science
Katharina Gerl has been a research assistant at DIID at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2016. She studied Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and Political Communication (M.A.) at HHU-Düsseldorf. For her dissertation at the Chair of Political Science II at Heinrich Heine University, she studied the impact of digital media on political parties as organizations.
Her research interests lie in the areas of effects and acceptance of digital democratic innovations in politics and administration as well as of artificial intelligence for political opinion-forming and decision-making.
Projects
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Dr. Malte Steinbach
Alumni, Business Administration, Sociology
Dr. Malte Steinbach supervised DIID as scientific coordinator from April 2019 to April 2020. Since 2020, he has been project manager at the DIID cooperation partner Zebralog in Bonn. He wrote his dissertation at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Labor, Human Resources and Organization at the HHU-Düsseldorf as part of the NRW Progress College Online Participation. At the University of Bonn, he studied geography with a minor in urban planning and economics. In his master thesis he investigated the topic of e-participation in urban development using the city of Bonn as an example. His research deals with the providers of online participation processes from an organizational theory perspective.
In his doctoral thesis, he investigated the diffusion of online participation in public organizations based on neoinstitutionalist organizational theories.
Projects
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Dr. Nadja Wilker
Political Science
Nadja Wilker is a research assistant at the Chair of Political Science II at HHU-Düsseldorf. She studied Communication and Political Science (B.A.) in Münster and Political Communication (M.A.) in Düsseldorf. In her master thesis she analyzed participation- and representation-theoretical dimensions of the online-based participation concept of a ‘Liquid Democracy’. In the context of her doctoral thesis she deals with questions of acceptance and legitimacy of online-based participation processes from the perspective of political actors.
Her research and teaching interests lie in the field of political (online) communication and participation in the context of concepts of political representation.
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Theresa Witt
Law
Theresa Witt is a research assistant at the law faculty at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. She studied law in Düsseldorf and passed the first state examination in May, 2015. Her major field of study was international and European law. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Public Law, Legal Theory & Legal Sociology (faculty of law, HHU) for two years. In this period, especially being involved in the process of writing, editing, updating and commenting on juridical texts deepened her affinity to constitutional and state law.
In her doctoral thesis, she addresses top-down initiated, legally non-binding online-participation processes. Her main research question is whether – and if so, in which extent – such processes need to meet legal standards or should be regulated, although they do not produce legally binding results.