The haves and the have nots: Civic technologies and the pathways to government responsiveness

Abstract

As civic life has moved online, scholars have questioned whether this will exacerbate political inequalities due to differential access to technology. However, this concern typically assumes that unequal participation inevitably leads to unequal outcomes: if online participants are unrepresentative of the population, then participation outcomes will benefit groups who participate and disadvantage those who do not. In this paper, we combine results from eight previous studies and new analysis to trace the digital inequality process from the digital divide through to policy outcomes for four different forms of online participation: online voting for Participatory Budgeting in Brazil, online local problem reporting in the United Kingdom through Fix My Street, crowdsourced constitution drafting in Iceland, and online petitioning across 132 countries on change.org. In every case, the assumed links in the chain from 1) the digital divide to 2) inequalities in online participation to 3) inequalities in demands made through the platform to 4) inequalities in participation outcomes. In each case, the link broke down because of the platform's institutional features and the surrounding political process. These results show that it is necessary to examine all the steps of online participation and its translation into policy to understand how inequality is created. The simple assumption that inequalities in participation always translate into the same inequalities in outcomes is not borne out in practice.