The Effect of Government Responsiveness on Future Political Participation
What effect does government responsiveness have on political participation? Since the 1940s political scientists have used attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy to explain participation. More recent work has focused on underlying genetic facto...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/09/25051854/effect-government-responsiveness-future-political-participation http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22780 |
| Summary: | What effect does government
responsiveness have on political participation? Since the
1940s political scientists have used attitudinal measures of
perceived efficacy to explain participation. More recent
work has focused on underlying genetic factors that
condition citizen engagement. The authors develop a
‘calculus of participation’ that incorporates objective
efficacy, the extent to which an individual’s participation
actually has an impact, and test the model against
behavioral data from FixMyStreet.com (n=399,364). The
authors find that a successful first experience using
FixMyStreet.com (e.g., reporting a pothole and having it
fixed) is associated with a 54 percent increase in the
probability of an individual submitting a second report. The
authors also show that the experience of government
responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive
power over all future report submissions. The findings
highlight the importance of government responsiveness for
fostering an active citizenry, while demonstrating the value
of incidentally collected data to examine participatory
behavior at the individual level. |
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