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Article
Does Technologically Enabled Citizen Participation Lead to Budget Adjustments? An Investigation of Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA
The American Review of Public Administration
  • Benjamin Y Clark
  • Tatyana Guzman, Cleveland State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-21-2016
Abstract

Citizen participation in government can provide a broad range of benefits to governments and citizens alike. Advances in information technologies have enabled new types of citizen participation with governments. However, we currently lack an understanding of how these new types of participation, particularly those that generate information on community needs, influence resource allocations. This article focuses on one of these new technologies, 311 systems, and how citizen requests might influence departmental budget allocations. We track budget allocation in the cities of Boston and San Francisco for 106 departments or subunits from FY2005 to FY2013. Our findings indicate that there is no significant resource benefit for departments using 311 versus those that do not. While departments using 311 do have larger budget allocations than those that do not, those departments had larger budget allocations prior to the implementation of 311. And while data generated in the 311-enabled citizen participation are increasingly used to measure departmental performance, the findings of this study show that this information has little to no effect on the allocated share of the budget for departments.

DOI
10.1177/0275074016642568
Citation Information
Clark, B. Y., & Guzman, T. S. (2017). Does Technologically Enabled Citizen Participation Lead to Budget Adjustments? An Investigation of Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA. The American Review of Public Administration, 47(8), 945–961. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074016642568