Shaping Digital Citizen Participation

Abstract

Our democracies are facing increasing challenges, making it more important than ever to strengthen the relationship between public authorities, such as municipalities, and citizens. One way of doing so is by creating opportunities for participation: spaces in which citizens can make their voices heard and influence important areas of everyday life, including childcare, education, elderly care, and culture. In practice, however, creating such opportunities for participation is far more complex than policy intentions might suggest. Research on digital participation has often focused on its implementation from a policy or design perspective or assumed that participation will emerge through the introduction of digital platforms. This thesis is concerned with understanding how digital participation takes shape within a municipality. Early in the studies, it became evident that digital citizen participation cannot be explained solely by the platforms in use, nor by the policies or design principles intended to guide their implementation. Instead, digital platforms, civil servants, and the broader municipal context needed to be analysed as deeply intertwined. Adopting a practice-oriented and sociomaterial perspective, the thesis draws on qualitative research conducted in one municipality between 2022 and 2025. Employment within the organisation during this period was central to the research design, providing unique access to the field and yielding rich empirical material. This position enabled sustained engagement with the field and the use of a range of methods to make analytical use of that embeddedness. Together, the six articles offer a rare empirical insight into the every day practices of digital citizen participation, from which this thesis makes three key contributions. First, it introduces four archetypes of digital citizen participation: symbolic, instrumental, disruptive, and selective. These archetypes shift the focus from participation as a policy instrument to participation as an emergent pattern of practices. In doing so, the thesis extends and reshapes existing frameworks of participation by showing how participation is continually shaped through sociomaterial arrangements, rather than by policy or design alone. Second, the thesis addresses the gap between promise and practice through the concept of unintentional practices, reframing this gap not as a failure of implementation, but as a structural feature of sociomaterial governance arrangements in digital participation. Unintentional practices are context-dependent, inherently unpredictable. Rather than representing deviations, they constitute an essential part of how digital participation unfolds in public administration. This challenges idealised models of digital participation and instead presents it as ongoing, negotiated, and often contradictory. Third, the thesis offers practical contributions for civil servants and municipal managers. Recognising the diverse forms that participation practices take provides municipalities with a significantly stronger foundation for future development efforts.