TY - GEN
T1 - Collective opinion formation for public decision making in local governments
AU - Tian, Ye
AU - Cai, Guoray
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.
PY - 2016/6/8
Y1 - 2016/6/8
N2 - Democratic decision making on public issues requires that a collective form of public opinion be constructed in order to be legitimate. However, elicitation of collective public opin-ion has been challenging due to conceptual and methodologi-cal dificulties as well as practical constraints. This paper re-visits existing methods of civic engagement through the lens of structured public decision making, and reveals the discon-nects between methods of public opinion and the need for establishing public value and solid decision analysis in demo-cratic decision making. This explains why the current online deliberation systems fail to support formation of decision-relevant public opinions. Based on such understanding, we propose Community Opinion Elicitation (COPE) as a solu-tion to public engagement in local government decision mak-ing. COPE envisions a three-phase process where opinions from the general public are elicited (Phase III) only after public values and solid decision analysis have been estab-lished (Phases I and II). In practice, COPE is implemented by extending traditional online deliberation with two small-group deliberations that address public value identification and decision analysis. This process has been deployed by State College municipal government as a formal method to engage the public. We report our findings from such field exercises and their implications to scaling up online deliber-ation for public decision making.
AB - Democratic decision making on public issues requires that a collective form of public opinion be constructed in order to be legitimate. However, elicitation of collective public opin-ion has been challenging due to conceptual and methodologi-cal dificulties as well as practical constraints. This paper re-visits existing methods of civic engagement through the lens of structured public decision making, and reveals the discon-nects between methods of public opinion and the need for establishing public value and solid decision analysis in demo-cratic decision making. This explains why the current online deliberation systems fail to support formation of decision-relevant public opinions. Based on such understanding, we propose Community Opinion Elicitation (COPE) as a solu-tion to public engagement in local government decision mak-ing. COPE envisions a three-phase process where opinions from the general public are elicited (Phase III) only after public values and solid decision analysis have been estab-lished (Phases I and II). In practice, COPE is implemented by extending traditional online deliberation with two small-group deliberations that address public value identification and decision analysis. This process has been deployed by State College municipal government as a formal method to engage the public. We report our findings from such field exercises and their implications to scaling up online deliber-ation for public decision making.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84978689344&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/2912160.2912194
DO - 10.1145/2912160.2912194
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84978689344
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 174
EP - 183
BT - dg.o 2016 - Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research - Internet Plus Government
A2 - Kim, Yushim
A2 - Liu, Shuhua Monica
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, dg.o 2016
Y2 - 8 June 2016 through 10 June 2016
ER -