Abstract
In many democratic countries, including the European Union Member States, it is increasingly important that policy makers are aware of young people’s opinion. In this respect, the European Union prioritizes the discovery of new forms of participation in democratic processes and access to political decision-making through online and offline tools. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and evaluate the idea of promoting young people’s participation in political decision-making by brokering discussions on Twitter. Towards this end, we present a case study that utilizes and makes a preliminary evaluation of the #ask Dashboard, a software solution for brokering and analyzing discussions on Twitter between policy makers and young people. In terms of the case study, we discovered Twitter handles of 74 policy makers and 229 young people interested in ten topics. We used the #ask Dashboard to broker more than 275 discussions about these topics. So far, we have achieved 367 replies, 15 retweets and 105 likes mostly from young people. Students who participated in brokered discussions for a month performed the evaluation of the case study. Although students believe that the case study gave them the opportunity to be active on political issues, they were sceptical on whether Twitter discussion brokering successfully reaches young people and policy makers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
NEETs stands for young persons who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training”.
- 2.
References
Eurostat. Youth in Europe: A Statistical Portrait (2009). http://pjp-eu.coe.int/documents/1017981/1668203/YouthinEurope.pdf/40f42295-65e4-407b-8673-95e97026da4a. Accessed July 2017
Snell, P.: Emerging adult civic and political disengagement: a longitudinal analysis of lack of involvement with politics. J. Adolesc. Res. 25(2), 258–287 (2010)
European Commission. EU Strategy for Youth (2009). http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2009:0200:FIN:EN:PDF. Accessed July 2017
European Commission. Draft 2015 Joint Report of the Council and the Commission on the implementation of the renewed framework for European cooperation in the youth field (2015). http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52015DC0429&from=EN. Accessed July 2017
Skogerbø, E.: Everybody reads the newspaper: local newspapers in the digital age. In: Biernacka-Ligieza, I., Kocwin, L. (eds.) Local and Regional Media – Democracy and Civil Society Shaping Processes, Wydawnictwo MARIA, Nowa Ruda – Wrocław, pp. 357–373 (2011)
Enli, G.S., Skogerbø, E.: Personalized campaigns in party-centred politics: Twitter and Facebook as arenas for political communication. Inf. Commun. Soc. 16(5), 757–774 (2013)
Effing, R., van Hillegersberg, J., Huibers, T.: Social media and political participation: are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube democratizing our political systems? In: Tambouris, E., Macintosh, A., de Bruijn, H. (eds.) ePart 2011. LNCS, vol. 6847, pp. 25–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23333-3_3
Bonsón, E., Royo, S., Ratkai, M.: Citizens’ engagement on local governments’ facebook sites. An empirical analysis: the impact of different media and content types in western europe. Gov. Inf. Q. 32(1), 52–62 (2015)
Hofmann, S., Beverungen, D., Räckers, M., Becker, J.: What makes local governments’ online communications successful? Insights from a multi-method analysis of Facebook. Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 387–396 (2013)
Bellström, P., Magnusson, M., Pettersson, J.S., Thorén, C.: Facebook usage in a local government: a content analysis of page owner posts and user posts. Transforming Gov. People Process Policy 10(4), 548–567 (2016)
Andersen, K.N., Medaglia, R.: The use of Facebook in national election campaigns: politics as usual? In: Macintosh, A., Tambouris, E. (eds.) ePart 2009. LNCS, vol. 5694, pp. 101–111. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03781-8_10
Robertson, S.P., Vatrapu, R.K., Medina, R.: The social life of social networks: Facebook linkage patterns in the 2008 US presidential election. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government, pp. 6–15. Digital Government Society of North America (2009)
Meijer, A.J., Torenvlied, R.: Social media and the new organization of government communications: an empirical analysis of Twitter usage by the Dutch police. Am. Rev. Publ. Admin. 46(2), 143–161 (2016)
Park, M.J., Kang, D., Rho, J.J., Lee, D.H.: Policy role of social media in developing public trust: Twitter communication with government leaders. Publ. Manage. Rev. 18(9), 1265–1288 (2016)
Kim, S.K., Park, M.J., Rho, J.J.: Effect of the Government’s use of social media on the reliability of the Government: focus on Twitter. Publ. Manage. Rev. 17(3), 328–355 (2015)
Kalampokis, E., Karamanou, A., Tambouris, E., Tarabanis, K.A.: On predicting election results using Twitter and Linked Open Data: the case of the UK 2010 Election. J. Univ. Comput. Sci. 23(3), 280–303 (2017)
Oliveira, G., Welch, E.: Social media use in local government: linkage of technology, task, and organizational context. Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 397–405 (2013)
Haro-de-Rosario, A., Sáez-Martín, A., del Carmen Caba-Pérez, M.: Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? New Med. Soc., 1461444816645652 (2016)
Mossberger, K., Wu, Y., Crawford, J.: Connecting citizens and local governments? Social media and interactivity in major US cities. Gov. Inf. Q. 30(4), 351–358 (2013)
Ruston McAleer, S., Panopoulou, E., Glidden, J., Tambouris, E., Tarabanis, K.: Augmenting social talk: the #ask Project. In: Parycek, P., Edelmann, N. (eds.) CeDEM16 Proceedings of the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2016, Edition Donau-Universität Krems, pp. 61–67, 18–20 May 2016. Danube University Krems, Austria (2016). ISBN 978-3-902505-81-1
Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper was carried out in the course of the #askFootnote 2 project [20], which is funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ Programme.
Disclaimer. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Karamanou, A. et al. (2017). Fostering Active Participation of Young People in Democratic Life: A Case Study Using the #ask Dashboard. In: Katsikas, S., Zorkadis, V. (eds) E-Democracy – Privacy-Preserving, Secure, Intelligent E-Government Services. e-Democracy 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 792. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71117-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71117-1_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71116-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71117-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)