When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?

"These cases suggest that while ICT platforms have been relevant in increasing policymakers' and senior managers' capacity to respond, most of them have yet to influence their willingness to do so."

This is a key finding from a review of how 23 information and communication technology (ICT) platforms were used to project citizen voice, with the goal of improving public service delivery. With the increasing accessibility of ICTS around the world, civil society organisations (CSOs) and governments are experimenting with how these platforms can encourage and project citizen voice in order to hold leaders accountable and improve public service delivery. Where evidence is available, the findings from the 23 case studies indicate mixed results, suggesting that "where senior managers are already committed to learning from feedback and using it to bolster their capacity to get agencies to respond, ICT platforms can make a big difference." However, ICTS alone are rarely able to influence the willingness of leaders to respond to citizens voices where this commitment does not already exist.

The study begins with a conceptual framework which differentiates between how ICT-enabled opportunities are being used to express voice (platforms) and the possible resulting institutional responses. This conceptual framework distinguishes between two types of citizen voice. Firstly, upwards accountability, in which users provide feedback directly to decision-makers in real time, allowing policy-makers and programme managers to identify and address service delivery problems - but at their discretion. Secondly, downwards accountability, which occurs either through real time user feedback or less immediate forms of collective civic action that publicly calls on service providers to become more accountable and depends less exclusively on decision-makers' discretion about whether or not to act on the information provided. "This distinction between the ways in which ICT platforms mediate the relationship between citizens and service providers allows for a precise analytical focus on how different dimensions of such platforms contribute to public sector responsiveness."

The subsequent section categorises the 23 ICT platform cases according to a number of factors, or variables. These include the following, which are described in detail in the report: disclosure of feedback, disclosure of response, proactive listening, voicing modality, accountability directionality, uptake, combined offline action, driver, partnerships between public service provider and civil society organisation(s), level of government, and institutional responsiveness. The findings note that uptake is often used as a key outcome for evaluating ICT platforms, yet uptake alone is usually insufficient for triggering institutional response. Citizen voice is not an end in itself, rather "an intermediate output that is relevant to the extent that it informs governmental decisions about whether and how to respond." The majority of the 23 cases studied led to low levels of institutional responsiveness. None of the above mentioned variables appeared to be a sufficient condition for institutional responsiveness, rather "findings suggest multiple pathways to institutional responsiveness - involving the convergence of multiple, mutually reinforcing factors. If one factor does stand out, however, it is government involvement, insofar as four of the six cases of government-led voice platforms were associated with high rates of service delivery responsiveness."

The report concludes that ICT platforms can bolster upwards accountability if they link citizen voice to policymaker capacity to see and respond to service delivery problems, which matters when policymakers already care. In terms of how to get policymakers to care in the first place, "the question is how ICT platforms can bolster downwards accountability by enabling the collective action needed to give citizen voice some bite."