Can Social Media be a Tool for Participatory Governance in Slovak Municipalities ?

Abstract

Th is paper presents the fi rst fi ndings of research that focused on the use of social media by Slovak regional towns. Social media, namely Facebook, are considered a powerful tool for various public administration activities that do not relate only to informing citizens, but also having them participate in decision-making and municipality governance. Th e paper points out the ways of social media usage by selected municipalities. Th e research was carried out in the months of February and March 2018 using a special tool for analyzing Facebook pages called Quintly and a questionnaire survey among the employees of the municipalities. Th e results indicate that municipalities use Facebook mainly for ex-ante informing and for asking citizens to vote in various competitions that can help the local government to gain funding for some public services. Calling for participation in decision-making is very limited. Th e paper also shows a comparative perspective that can be used by municipalities but also by other local or even national governments to work further with Facebook and adopt a social media use strategy.

Electronic participation via Facebook: the potential from Brazilian municipalities

“…Variables such as population size, level of income per capita and percentage of people with complete higher education play an important role in municipalities' development and maintenance of their information technology and digital communication structures, as discussed by G alvez-Rodríguez et al (2018) and Ingrams et al (2018). The growing value of the metrics of reach and engagement of social media in Brazilian municipalities is linked to the level of support provided to users, the municipality's socioeconomic structure, the level of digital openness, the strategies used in dialogues, the experience of citizens with social media (specifically Facebook) and the level of democracy, as noted by G alvez-Rodríguez et al (2018), Manoharan (2012) andSvidronõov a et al (2018).…”

“…The literature contains numerous studies related to citizens' electronic participation in municipal governments. Extant work has emphasized electronic participation's presence, forms of use, dialogues and effectiveness in communication (Abdelsalam et al, 2013;Bellström et al, 2016;Lovari and Parisi, 2015;Marino and Presti, 2018;Svidronõov a et al, 2018) and the statistical analysis of engagement metrics (Bons on et al, 2015;Agostino and Arnaboldi, 2015). It has also produced synthetic indicators representing the dissemination of information and dialogue with citizens of municipalities, and identified determinants of government-citizen relationships, using multiple regression models (Guillam on et al, 2016;G alvez-Rodríguez et al, 2018) with socioeconomic factors as independent variables (Ingrams et al, 2018;Manoharan and Ingrams, 2018) and applying structural equation models (Khanra and Joseph, 2019).…”

“…The interpretation of the results in Table 4 was achieved by aggregating the variables that characterize socioeconomic or structural aspects and the characteristic variables of citizen engagement with the municipality website in each municipality (comments and shares) with the average number of posts made by the government (Svidronõov a et al, 2018).…”

“…These are characteristics present in regions of low socioeconomic development, where the interaction with the electronic services offered boils down to the search for general information (Sabioni et al, 2016), which results in incipient levels of citizen interaction with the government. In Group 2, the interaction is higher than in Group 1 to a large extent, to the structural variables that correlate with citizens' interaction variables with the municipal governments' website, which ends up providing a moderate dynamic of citizen engagement (Guillam on et al, 2016;Svidronõov a et al, 2018). The municipalities in Group 3 have a strong positive correlation between socioeconomic variables and measures of interaction with e-government, in particular citizens with higher education and the number of likes, comments and reactions, which leads to a strong dynamic of interaction (Ingrams et al, 2018).…”

Defining Pathways towards African Ecological Futures

“…By strengthening institutions at various scales, including training and financial backing to ensure long term sustainability and reduce dependency on volunteerism, development agencies, among others, can play an important role in supporting African nations to shape their own social and ecological priorities. Likewise, social media and other new technologies (e.g., block chains, artificial intelligence) may play an important role in creating new opportunities to support participatory and effective governance [95,96].…”