Designing the State for Essentially Digital Governance...

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1 Designing the State for Essentially Digital Governance and the Era of Big Data Helen Margetts*, Scott Hale* Patrick Dunleavy+, Jane Tinkler+ Modern states and public policies rely critically on large-scale administrative processes, supported by IT systems and websites that are now fundamental parts of national infrastructure and facilitate the Digital Era Governance model. With public sector cuts and retrenchments, governments are looking towards ‘digital by default’ services to do more for less. But much of government is still operating in a state of ‘catch up’, lagging years behind citizens’ online activities on social media and neglecting vast amounts of information about citizens’ behaviour and preferences available from 'big data' sources. Governments need to overcome cultural barriers to capitalise on the potential of big data, using it to develop an 'intelligent centre' based on the digital imprint of the online activity of both governments and citizens. By proposing a range of big data methods, including a web metric analysis of the UK government’s electronic presence and data mining from social media platforms, this paper investigates the possibilities to move beyond Digital Era Governance to an 'Essentially Digital' Governance model, using social media applications and big data analysis to identify disjunctures between the state’s electronic presence and citizens’ digital behaviour and preferences. These activities could inform the design of a state that 'sees like a citizen'. * Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford + LSE Public Policy Group, London School of Economics and Political Science Paper to the International Political Science Association XXII nd World Congress of Political Science, July 8 to 12 2012

Transcript of Designing the State for Essentially Digital Governance...

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Designing the State for Essentially Digital Governance and the Era of Big Data

Helen Margetts*, Scott Hale*

Patrick Dunleavy+, Jane Tinkler+

Modern states and public policies rely critically on large-scale administrative processes,

supported by IT systems and websites that are now fundamental parts of national infrastructure

and facilitate the Digital Era Governance model. With public sector cuts and retrenchments,

governments are looking towards ‘digital by default’ services to do more for less. But much of

government is still operating in a state of ‘catch up’, lagging years behind citizens’ online

activities on social media and neglecting vast amounts of information about citizens’ behaviour

and preferences available from 'big data' sources. Governments need to overcome cultural

barriers to capitalise on the potential of big data, using it to develop an 'intelligent centre' based

on the digital imprint of the online activity of both governments and citizens. By proposing a

range of big data methods, including a web metric analysis of the UK government’s electronic

presence and data mining from social media platforms, this paper investigates the possibilities

to move beyond Digital Era Governance to an 'Essentially Digital' Governance model, using

social media applications and big data analysis to identify disjunctures between the state’s

electronic presence and citizens’ digital behaviour and preferences. These activities could

inform the design of a state that 'sees like a citizen'.

* Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

+ LSE Public Policy Group, London School of Economics and Political Science

Paper to the International Political Science Association XXIInd World Congress of Political Science, July 8 to 12 2012

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Designing the State for Essentially Digital Governance and the Era of Big Data

Governments across the industrialised world have long been heavily reliant on large scale

information systems, which are crucial to administrative operations and ‘policy critical’ in terms

of implementing existing policies, facilitating new policy options and even driving policy

innovation (Margetts, 1999). Governments invest heavily in these information systems,

although many have failed to achieve hoped-for productivity gains. With widespread use of the

Internet from the 1990s, governments have responded with the development of an extensive

online presence and electronic service delivery programmes, seeking to move transactions and

information provision online, and usage of such services has steadily risen after disappointing

starts in many countries. The authors of this paper encapsulated these developments in the

Digital Era Governance model (Dunleavy et al, 2005, 2006, 2008), a new quasi paradigm for

public management reform based on re-integration, holism and digitalization, which was set to

replace the previously dominant paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). From the 2000s,

as governments struggle with a prolonged period of austerity and public sector retrenchment,

many have turned to the ‘digital by default’ option, whereby electronic channels become

mandatory, hoping to minimise the pain of cutbacks and at last reap the benefits that

information technology has always seemed to promise. We have argued elsewhere that this

could represent the opportunity for the ‘second wave’ of Digital Era Governance, ‘Essentially

Digital Governance’, where digital technologies finally take centre stage at the heart of

government (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2012).

Meanwhile, the citizens with whom governments interact have moved much more rapidly

into the digital era. In the UK, for example, a majority of citizens enthusiastically and regularly

shop, socialise, work, date, bank, invest, borrow, inform, donate money, educate and entertain

themselves and make plans online and increasingly, using mobile devices. There are seven

million Twitter users in the UK and around half of the UK population are on Facebook as well

as a growing raft of other social media platforms. Even politics has moved online—after two

decades of bemoaning political disengagement—Internet-based forms of engagement are

rising. Posting political content on social media has jumped straight into the ‘ladder of

participation’ measured by the Oxford Internet Survey at nearly 10 per cent of Internet users

(Dutton and Blank, 2011). A study by Facebook’s data team even argued that in the US 2010

Congressional Election, a box showing Facebook users information on friends who had voted

suggested that the application could have increased turnout by around 10 per cent.

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So, what could be done to match these online citizens up with their online governments,

so that citizens get what they want and expect from government, and government gets the cost

savings and efficiency gains it has hoped for from Digital by Default? This paper investigates

this question from both perspectives. First, it looks at the current status of Digital Era

Governance, and investigates ways that political science researchers—and government—

might use web metric and visualization tools to understand the nature and structure of

government online, putting forward a tool for visualizing government online, which will be

demonstrated during the presentation of this paper. Second, it discusses new ways that we can

understand citizen activity online, using so-called ‘big data’ derived from the Internet. Third, it

discusses how these two data sources might feed into each other, so that government and

services are better matched to citizens’ needs, preferences and behaviour in the digital era.

Digital Era Governance We have written elsewhere of how digital changes made feasibly by Internet and web-based

technologies are increasingly vital to executive government operations in all advanced

industrial states, albeit with a ‘culture lag’ compared with business and civil society (Dunleavy,

Margetts et al, 2005, 2006). To encapsulate this shift, we proposed the Digital Era Governance

(DEG) model as a ‘quasi-paradigm’ for public management reform, which was set to replace

the previously dominant New Public Management (NPM), the cohort of changes aimed at

injecting managerialism and private sector practice into the public sector that became popular

across governments of industrialised nations from the 1980s onwards. DEG is based on three

macro-themes of reintegration, needs-based holism and digitalization. Reintegration involves

organizational and budgetary shifts towards reversing the fragmentation resulting from New

Public Management (NPM) years in many states, joining up, de-siloing and simplifying public

sector processes. Holism involves creating client-focused structures and end-to-end redesign

of services from a client perspective. Digitalization involves the adaptation of the public sector

to completely embrace and embed electronic delivery at the heart of the government business

model. More recently, we have argued that with widespread use of social media and web-

based platforms that rely on user generated content, all three of these themes have the

potential to accelerate in a ‘second wave’ of DEG, resulting in an ‘Essentially Digital’ form of

Governance (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2010, 2012).

Digital Era Governance is an ideal type or ‘quasi-paradigm’. There is nothing inevitable

about the processes of reintegration, holism and digitalization that make up the model and we

outlined a number of scenarios as to how DEG might (or might not) develop in governments

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that do not prioritise these main themes, or revert to the New Public Management as a model

for reform (see Dunleavy and Margetts, 2000). In the very early phases of computerization in

the 1950s and 1960s, governments in developed nations were innovators, leading the way in

developing systems well suited to governmental administration of the time (charted in Margetts,

1999). From that time onwards, governments in most industrialized nations made large

investments in information technology, typically around 1 per cent of GDP. Progressively over

the 1980s and 1990s, markets of computer services providers to government developed, so

that most governments were involved in a number of important contract relationships with both

global and domestic companies, although in very different ways in different countries (see

Dunleavy, Margetts et al, 2006 for a discussion of these developments). During this period,

many governments fell behind the private sector in the extent to which their information

systems were modern, effective, and competitively costed. In the UK in particular, the history of

government IT is littered with high profile disasters, troubled contractual partnerships, spiralling

costs and major losses of personal data (Margetts, 1999; Dunleavy, Margetts et al, 2006;

Public Administration Committee, 2011). With the Internet and particularly the social web, the

gap between government and other sectors widened: citizens and companies were innovating

with new technologies much faster than states could respond. Although there are examples of

the spread of rich media and social web technologies into the public sector in smaller countries,

particularly in Scandinavia, this development remains muted in bigger states, and is vulnerable

to austerity pressures. Although all OECD countries expound ‘digital economy’ strategies for

fast broadband and increased skills development, the intra-government component has mostly

attracted insufficient attention so far, outside of a few countries such as South Korea. The

widespread use of the Internet and social media put pressure on government organizations to

innovate in catch-up mode and modernize their dealings with citizens. The widening gulf in

‘look and feel’ for public websites compared to business best practice has led to concerns for

the increasing societal marginalization of the public sector online estate and declining

government ‘nodality’ (Hood and Margetts, 2007, Escher et al, 2006).

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the financial crisis from 2008 onwards, many

governments started to look to digital technologies as a way to deal with a period of public

sector cuts and retrenchment and to do ‘more for less’. The DEG model predicted three

possible scenarios for a period of austerity; a systematic revival of NPM approaches, and

abandonment for the DEG; an austerity squeeze beginning a pause of DEG change that could

lead to a permanent lag in the organization of public services; and a short-lived austerity pause

where digital technologies are used to meet the need to continuously boost government

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productivity (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2012). So far, there is some evidence for the third

scenario in a number of countries. In the UK, the incoming coalition government in the UK from

2010 introduced a ‘Digital by Default’ programme in which all government services are to be

concentrated in a single portal and through which, it has been argued, shifting 30 per cent of

government service delivery contracts to digital channels could deliver annual savings of £1.3

billion. The programme includes the aim of making digital channels the preferred option of both

government and citizens and the so-called ‘G-cloud’ will lead to new ways of joining up

digitalization across departments. In Canada, as part of a systematic programme of public

sector cuts in support of a deficit reduction plan that includes the elimination of some 19,000

federal public service jobs, the federal government have turned to ‘Shared Services’, a new

agency mandated to streamline information technology across the whole of government by

centralizing functions that are at present under the control of over 40 departments and

agencies, with planned savings rising from $75 million in 2013 to $150 million in 2015, although

Shared Services is estimated to cost $1.5 billion in its first year of implementation. So although

in the UK at least there have been some moves to slash IT spending, with a moratorium on all

projects over £100 million, levels of IT expenditure have continued to rise and it seems that

austerity has also brought moves in a DEG rather than an NPM direction; indeed, the UK

Cabinet Secretary Francis Maude observed at the Government Digital Service in April 2012

that ‘the deficit is our friend’ when it comes to pursuing a ‘digital by default’ agenda1.

The current state of Digital Era Governance So what does ‘Digital Era Governance’ look like, and what can it tell us about the nature

and structure of government? During their first fifty years, the information systems making up

the backbone of government administration were largely invisible. In the largest departments,

multiple projects and tranches of system improvements and releases, overlaid with interfaces

and new systems led to the operation of complex networks of systems in what a US official

described to one of the authors as a ‘rats’ nest of logic’ (Margetts, 1999). Multiple layers of

contract relationships further complicates the picture within many governments, with markets of

computer services providers involved in multiple prime and sub-prime contractor relationships

across departments and agencies. This complex array of systems and providing organizations

was largely hidden to most citizens until the advent of the Internet, and any attempt to depict

them graphically was opaque to even the most ardent of public administration specialists. With

                                                                                                               1  First  meeting  of  the  Advisory  Board  of  the  Government  Digital  Service,  25th  

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the Internet, however, so-called ‘electronic government’ finally developed a visible component,

far more accessible to the majority of UK citizens than a building. By the mid-2000s citizens

with Internet access could easily ‘see’ what government looks like online, can search for

specific information and services, undertake transactions, contact representatives and even, if

interested, can find what policies are in force and what legislation is being considered, all from

their own home. By 2010, as discussed below, many governments embarked upon ‘open

data’ and transparency initiatives allowing citizens to scrutinize government spending and

comment on policy initiatives.

Thus Internet-based government offers new opportunities for researchers and scholars

of government to understand what it looks like. By crawling the web and mapping the patterns

of inlinks and outlinks and links between sites, researchers can now produce visualizations of

what government looks like online. Figure 1 shows the result of a webcrawl of the UK central

government, carried out in November 2011, showing both single and reciprocal links between

departments. Because the visualization is developed as an interactive tool, it is not possible to

demonstrate in its full glory in this paper, so only the perspective from the point of view of one

department—the Foreign and Commonwealth office is shown.

Figure 1. UK Government on the Internet shown from the perspective of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

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Note: Green labels are sites that the FCO website links to, blue labels are sites that link to the

FCO, and orange are sites that have links going both directions.

Source: www.governmentontheweb.org, see for interactive version of the UK government

network

Another diagram is shown in Figure 2, this time showing the clusters of departments and

agencies that relate most to each other through hyperlinks.

Figure 2. Network Diagram of UK Government on the Internet, showing clusters of departments and agencies.

Source: www.scotthale.net

Methods like these—both the crawling of governments’ web presences and the

development of indicators to assess how the network is clustered and how easy the network is

for citizens to navigate —can help us to understand the nature and structure of government

online, in ways that were actually more difficult for ‘offline’ government (where obtaining even

organizational charts of departments and agencies is notoriously difficult). In an earlier paper

(Escher, Margetts et al 2006), members of the same research team assessed the online

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presence of three foreign affairs departments in different governments along the criteria of

visibility, outward-lookingness, navigability, accessibility and competition, arguing that the

combination of these criteria could provide an assessment of ‘nodality’, a key tool in

government’s policy toolkit (Hood and Margetts, 2007). Similarly Dunleavy and Margetts (2007)

involved assessing UK central government departments along the dimensions of visibility,

navigability and outwardlookingness, as well as measuring the size of government’s electronic

presence. The work reported above will build on this earlier work by carrying out and

visualizing web crawls and measuring these criteria for seven case study governments in a

new programme of research into the relationship between governance and the internet both

across countries and over time. 2

Online Citizens and Big Data Just as governments have moved online, so have citizens. As noted in the first section, large

tranches of economic, social and political life now take place on the Internet, via a wide range

of increasingly ‘rich’ social media. The digital imprint left behind all this digital activity can be

mined from the Internet to generate large-scale data sets, which make it easier to design

government and services that are matched to citizens’ preferences and behaviour. This is ‘big

data’, a new sort of data for the social sciences—not survey data that tells us what people think

they might do, or think they did—but real-time transactional data about what they really did or

really think. This is data of the kind more habitually available to scientists; that is, it is not based

on a sample, but could allow us to understand the social dynamics of entire populations. Of

course, it also presents challenges to social science research; it has no demographics

attached, we do not know where people came from or where they are going and it is huge;

social scientists must get used (like scientists) to the idea of having ‘too much’ data, rather than

the usual problems of worrying about sample sizes and ‘small numbers’ problems. For

example, Loubser (2010) downloaded the entire edit history of the English edition of Wikipedia

(6 terrabytes at the time), furthering understanding of how the governance arrangements for

Wikipedia are working in practice—and how they might work better in the future. Gonzalez-

Bailon, et al (2011) downloaded half a million tweets to map the structures of networks of

demonstrators in the protests against government in Spain during 2011, finding that rather than

a core of activists as in traditional interest groups—those who ‘seed’ the recruitment process

are scattered all over the network. Analysis of an archive of the UK government domain over

15 years (40 terrabytes of compressed data) currently taking place at the Oxford Internet

                                                                                                               2  See  www.governmentontheweb.org    

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Institute will allow us to use the methods outlined above to map the changing structure of

‘government on the Internet’ over time: a task that has never before been attempted. Big data

ushers in a new kind of social science which could prove increasingly important for policy and

public service design.

Figure 3. Petitions submitted to No. 10 Downing St ‘e-petitions’ site, 2009-10

As an example of ‘big data’, Figure 3 shows what citizens on the Internet, engaging with

the UK state look like. This graph maps the joining curve of 8,326 petitions to the No. 10

Downing Street web site during 2009-10. This site—and the one that followed it—allowed any

citizen to submit a petition and to use whatever they like, such as social media—to gather

signatories. The No. 10 Petitions website ran from 2006 to 2010, and was perhaps the largest

non-partisan democracy site by volume of users ever, with over 8 million signatures from over

5 million unique email addresses, 10 per cent of the entire UK population. One of the petitions

to the site—against government’s road pricing policy—gathered 1.8 signatures and was a clear

factor in the government’s eventual decision to abandon the policy. Petitioning is one of the

most frequently undertaken participatory acts apart from voting (about 20 per cent of the UK

public according to the Oxford Internet Survey). This data was automatically generated by

scraping the site every day, gathering the number of signatures so that we can plot daily

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change. Because it is not fine grained enough to analyse what turn out to be the critical first

days of a petition, we are now gathering data from the site’s successor hourly.

Interpretation of data like this is challenging. Hale and Margetts (2012) analysed the rate

of growth in petition signatures per day and tested the hypothesis that the distribution of daily

change will be leptokurtic (rather than normal) as previous research on agenda setting would

suggest. This hypothesis was confirmed, suggesting that Internet-based mobilization is

characterized by tipping points (or punctuated equilibria) and explaining some of the volatility in

online collective action. The findings also show that most successful petitions grow quickly and

that the number of signatures a petition receives on its first day is the most significant factor

explaining the overall number of signatures a petition receives during its lifetime. These

findings could have implications for the strategies of those initiating petitions and the design of

web sites with the aim of maximising citizen engagement with policy issues.  

The private sector is already using this kind of data. A recent McKinsey report argues

that a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 per

cent and that governments across Europe stood to gain 150 billion euros in administrative cost

savings from the use of big data (although the methodology for costing this out is rather

unclear) (Manyika et al, 2011). Transactional data in digital form provide more accurate and

detailed performance information—exposing variability and boosting performance; they allow

controlled experiments to make better management decisions; basic low-frequency forecasting

to high-frequency “nowcasting” to adjust business levers just in time. Big data allows ever-

narrower segmentation of customers and more precisely tailored products or services.

Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making and allow preventive

measures that take place before failure occurs or is noticed or at the very least before

problems escalate—Netflix, for example, monitors data in social media platforms among other

sources as an indicator of the quality of its content delivery network (Augustine, et al 2012). US

banks such as Citi, SunTrust, First Tennessee and ING Direct use ‘conversations’ on social

media to understand how they are perceived in terms of customer service, monitor reactions to

updates on their account management and to identify which new products their customers love

or hate.  According to the burgeoning array of company reports on big data, the use of big data

will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. Obviously, there are

many issues that will have to be addressed in a big data world; privacy, security, intellectual

property, and even liability take on new dimensions, as well as identifying the talent and

technology to analyse large-scale data and structuring workflows and incentives to optimize the

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use of big data and integrate information from multiple data sources, often from third parties.

But the payoffs for government could indeed make consideration of these issues worthwhile.

Matching government and citizens For the ‘second wave’ of DEG to emerge, future design of governmental arrangements and

policy would involve using the kind of data discussed in the previous section to match digital

government to the needs, preferences and behaviour of digital citizens. This section outlines

two ways of increasing the linkages and feedback loops between the two.

Using Social Media

First, as noted above, government has tended to lag behind citizens in its use of Internet

based technologies in general and social media in particular. Now, citizens are participating

politically in new ways using social media so if governments aim for online engagement with

citizens, they need to reach out to them using the same tools in the same places. They are

starting to try—the newly formed Government Digital Service (GDS) in the UK Cabinet Office

has recently released its guidelines to civil servants for using social media. As the minister for

the Civil Service put it: ‘When civil servants, policy makers and service delivery units alike,

open themselves to dialogue with the public they can glean a much better understanding of the

real needs and concerns of citizens’ (digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk, 17th May 2012). GDS have a

Digital Engagement Strategy to foster collaboration in policy development and service design

which has included the ‘Spending Challenge’ which attracted 36,000 users and 45,000 ideas

on how the Government could cut public spending and ‘Your Freedom’, a crowd-sourcing

exercise for the Freedom Bill which gained 47,000 users and over 97,000 comments. There

has been some success with social media content from individual public servants and

ministers: recently a Department for International Development (DfID) blogger publicised relief

efforts in Pakistan with pictures of trees in Pakistan covered in cobwebs due to the scale and

persistence of recent flooding, which went viral, attracting over 500,000 views on DfID’s Flickr

channel and were republished in over 50 media outlets internationally.

However, these initiatives face massive cultural resistance in many areas of

government. The informality, the lack of organizational boundaries, the different style, the lack

of control that Internet-based activity engenders (see Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002 for a

discussion) - all these characteristics of Internet-based interaction pose cultural barriers to

government officials anyway and are exacerbated by the development of social media. In

Canada, the Treasury Board Secretariat has also published guidelines on ‘External Use of Web

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2.0’, but the 18 pages of formal guidelines received much media criticism; most departments

were already using social media - going "rogue" in the absence of formal rules—so, this

reactive move seemed aimed at stopping rather than facilitating greater use of such platforms.

In the UK DWP in 2009, only 0.2 interactions with DWP’s customers (which include a massive

proportion of the UK population) took place electronically, even though 38 per cent of their

customers were enthusiastic about online services (NAO, 2009). At a time when about half of

UK citizens are on Facebook, the direct.gov Facebook page (the biggest node with the most

content on the government map shown in Figure 1) has just 5,500 likes expressed and 525

comments for posts over the last 2 years (if Facebook had a dislike button, of course, it might

be rather higher!). It has 38,000 followers on Twitter (from the 7 million UK Twitter users).

These numbers are very small. It is always going to be a challenge to government to be agile

enough to keep up with what citizens are doing, shifting between platforms such as YouTube,

Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler—all of these came from seemingly nowhere in very short

periods of time, different platforms in different countries at different times.

However, it is no good hoping that citizens are going to go where governments are.

Figure 3 showed people signing petitions, the most frequently undertaken act of political

participation after voting. Petitions are mobilizations, but not social movements or interest

groups—there may be some kind of organizational involvement but in general these are

individual acts of participation, mostly spread virally through social networks—someone posts

the link to the petition on Facebook and it is advertised to their friends, who then might sign and

so on. It is also a particular sort of engagement that takes place outside government and is to

some extent confrontational, rather than collaborative. Other confrontational engagement

includes organized campaigns by online interest groups such as the UK 38 Degrees or the

global Avaaz, which ministers now take very seriously - 38 Degrees is widely credited with

reversing a policy move to privatize forests and to bringing change to (although not successful

in reversing) controversial NHS reforms. More collaborative policy-making would be citizens

providing government with rankings, ratings, feedback, comments, complaints or policy ideas.

Platforms such as Amazon, Trip Advisor, and YouTube run on people’s willingness to do things

like this. And people have proved themselves willing to do these things in a political context, as

noted above; posting political content on a social media site has jumped into the ‘ladder’ of

participation, joint second after petitions (Dutton and Blank, 2011). Real engagement would

involve a kind of co-creation of public services, where citizens enter the front office of

government through online means, as the ‘holistic’ theme of the Digital Era Governance model

suggests. Using social media effectively to reach out to citizens where they are carrying out

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their lives, as in the smattering of examples starting to emerge above, would be vital to this

kind of collaborative engagement with policy and service delivery. For example, in Spain

Criado (2010: 290-1) notes low usage of and ‘social demand’ for e-services, with 72 per cent of

survey respondents preferring transaction with people in public agencies rather than telephone

or Internet. But Spanish use of social media is reasonably high: of the 26 million Internet users

in Spain, there were in March 2012 16 million users of Facebook, with a penetration of 34 per

cent of the population and 61 per cent of Internet users, and growing rapidly (by 1.4 million

between September 2011 to February 2012)3. So one key to achieving greater engagement

with government’s online presence could be to reach out to this group.

Using Big Data

Second, as noted above, the transfer of social, economic and political life to online

contexts is generating large-scale datasets on citizens’ preferences and behaviour. Another

methodological principal for designing the state in this context is to use this kind of big data in

the same kind of ways that the private sector is already doing. Big data can give government a

much better understanding of citizens' needs for and usage of hospitals and schools, about tax

and social welfare, about initiatives that could—or do—make up civil society or the ‘big’

society—making the most of citizens’ willingness to act collectively and engage with

government. Large scale datasets on public services can highlight problems: mortality rates

can reveal failing organizational units or individual professionals, for example. Big data can be

used to match policy to preferences, match services to what citizens are willing—and are not

willing—to do, in terms of managing their own affairs, for example, as they do with their bank

accounts. It gives information about riots, demonstrations, protest and unrest. Research shows

how online mobilizations are likely to be more volatile, with possible flash mobilizations or

tipping points—those that succeed grow exponentially and rapidly in unpredictable ways. As

noted above, governments can struggle to 'catch up' with citizens using and switching between

increasing arrays of social media platforms (from Facebook to Twitter to Tumblr to Pinterest

and beyond)—different in different countries. Autocratic regimes have fallen into disarray

amidst the demonstrations, mobilizations, riots and generalized unrest of the Arab Spring. In

democratic regimes, the financial crash and crisis has brought social backlash and protest

against state retrenchment, public sector cutbacks and even market capitalism itself—to the

surprise of policy-makers and institutions, from governments to police to the Church of

                                                                                                               3  www.latevaweb.com/web-design-news/usodefacebook.html, 12 March 2012  

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England. All these mobilizations are larger, more effective, more public and more volatile

because of the Internet, and big data can help governments to understand their causes and

implications.

At the time of writing, any moves towards capitalising upon the potential of big data are

somewhat recent. Several governments have embarked on ‘Open Data’ initiatives, with the aim

of increasing transparency and making public data available for re-use, including the UK, the

US, Canada and Australia. In the UK, Open Data was initiated by the inventor of the Web, Tim

Berners Lee, who with Nigel Shadbolt (now leaders of the Open Data Institute) collaborated

with Gordon Brown’s Labour government to persuade departments to open up data and make

it available for public and commercial use from a single web source (www.data.gov.uk). The

incoming Conservative administration from 2010 continued this programme enthusiastically

under the ‘Transparency’ mantra, creating a Transparency Board (led by Tim Kelsey) and a

Transparency and Open Data team in the Cabinet Office. From 2009, a similar initiative in the

US federal government, www.data.gov, managed by the General Services Administration with

the US CIO and CTO, was set up with the aim of ‘democratizing public sector data and driving

innovation’ and by 2012 was making available 450,000 data sets from 172 federal agencies.

Both these programmes were clearly innovative and exciting and represented a major shift,

particularly in the UK with its history of a cultural resistance to ‘opening up’. Some releases of

open data have been extremely popular: in the UK, a police crime map website had an

estimated 47 million visits between February and December 2011, while the Department for

Education reported an 84 per cent increase in the use of its comparative schools data (NAO,

2012). But they have also been criticised for being developer led and commercially oriented,

with little accessibility for citizens, given that the datasets although fully open source compliant,

are in spreadsheet form, with complex coding records and unlikely to appeal to the average

citizen; four fifths of visitors to the data.gov.uk web site leave the site immediately without

accessing any further link. Crucially, there are hardly any examples of data released through

open data initiatives being corrected and improved and fed back to government4. A highly

critical National Audit Office report in 2012 suggested a number of ways in which the UK

government’s transparency and open data agenda was falling between the linked but separate

aims of opening up government to citizens, and capitalising on the potential of big data. It may

be that there is an inevitable tension between these two aims for releasing large scale datasets

for public or commercial consumption, perhaps reflected in the fact that the UK government’s

                                                                                                               4  Discussion  with  Cabinet  Office  officials,  April  2012  

  15  

‘Open Data White Paper’ published in June 2012 (Cabinet Office, 2012) made no mention of

big data.

The US open data initiative has moved more towards the side of big data, and a

glance at the ‘data.gov’ site in 2012 suggests little attempt to appeal to citizens, with data sets

presented for a number of ‘communities’ within the federal government. In March 2012, the US

federal government invested $200 million in big data projects, involving the National Institutes

for Health, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Department of

Defense and the US Geological Survey, with the aim of advancing the ‘state of the art core

technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyse and share huge quantities of

data and to expand the workforce needed to develop and use Big Data technologies’ (ZD Net,

29th March 2012). An accompanying statement from the White House Office of Science and

Technology Policy claimed that ‘In the same way that past Federal investments in information-

technology R&D led to dramatic advances in supercomputing and the creation of the Internet,

the initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for

scientific discovery, environmental and biomedical research, education, and national security.’

As Forbes.com put it, ‘The White House is spending ‘big money on big data’. But other

commentators were more critical, with the editor of Information Week observing that the

speakers at the launch from the federal agencies involved ‘seemed more intent on talking

about their unique initiatives and less focused on how they could collaborate with other

agencies’ (Henschen, 2012). It is too early to judge the extent to which this latest initiative will

reap the kind of benefits of big data for government that are being claimed by private sector

organizations, but certainly the strongly scientific (rather than social scientific) and single

‘mega-agency’ focus of the initiative takes it away from both the ‘reintegration’ and ‘needs-

based holism’ themes of the Digital Era Governance model.

In summary, there are recent internet-based developments – widespread use of social

media, and the increasing potential for generating large-scale ‘big data’ from internet-based

platforms - which could facilitate greater engagement between governments and citizens in the

digital era. Capitalising on these developments would allow governments to progress the

Digital Era Governance model to the ‘second wave’ and austerity pressures can even aid,

rather than hinder this development, as governments look to achieve efficiency savings by

shifting services to digital channels. But there are also indications that there remains a lag

between governments’ and citizens’ capacity to be innovative with social media and barriers to

their ability to realise the potential of big data which leave governments hovering between the

  16  

‘permanent lag’ and ‘investment pause’ scenarios outlined in Dunleavy and Margetts (2012),

and may work against the realisation of an ‘Essentially Digital Governance’ model.

Conclusion This paper has discussed ways that social science research can both understand ‘digital

governments’ and ‘digital citizens’, and contribute to the future design of ‘Digital Era

Governance’ to increase linkages and feedback loops between the two, enabling greater

citizen engagement and a move towards ‘Essentially Digital Governance’: the use of social

media by government, and the use of ‘big data’ to match public policy to citizens’ needs,

preferences and behaviour. Just before the Internet got famous, in 1998, the political

anthropologist James Scott wrote a book called ‘Seeing Like a State’, where he bemoaned the

tendency of states to impose high modernist top-down hierarchical plans on their citizenries

and environments. If they dare, the Internet allows governments to move away from this model.

By using ‘big data’, accepting blurred boundaries between government and society, being agile

enough to anticipate and work with massive shifts between social media platforms,

governments can use the Internet to ‘see like a citizen’, rather than ‘seeing like a state’.

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