1. Data, Dialogue and Democracy: Dissecting the Uneasy Relationship Between Digital Government and New Media in Canada
Dr. Jeffrey Roy (School of Public Administration, Dalhousie University),
News and Media Research Centre (Seminar Series), University of Canberra
April 12th, 2017

2. Overview Three Typologies Public Administration and New Media Usage
Case Study
Canada’s Open Government Action Plan
The absence of dialogue and why
Implications
For traditional media
For governments
For citizens

3. Three Typologies (I) Traditional Public Administration
Information scarcity and control
New Public Management
Information markets and competition
Public Value Management
Information openness and sharing
Sources: Stoker 2008 in Roy 2013

4. Three Typologies (II) Managerial Consultative Participative
Social media platforms used to provide content to citizens
Consultative
Social media platforms used to post information for and receive comments from citizens
Participative
Active social media use, where conversations are started by citizens and governments provide meaningful change
Source: Reddick and Chatfield (2017)

5. Case Study
Open Government Action Plan (Government of Canada, )
Information
Traditional media as adversary: seeking to expose, explain and to hold government to account
Data
Traditional media as partner / promoter of open data awareness
Social media as facilitator of awareness and usage (social – mobile nexus)
Dialogue
Social media as the fundamental enabler of dialogue, collective learning, and public value creation

6. Why has ‘dialogue’ failed to take hold?
Organizational structure and political culture of government (Roy 2016)
Lack of unit & competencies
Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS)
Lack of power-sharing
Westminster mindset of representational democracy
SM as information control rather than engagement
PM Turnbull, April 2017 (bolstering SM apparatus)
The commercial and teleological culture of new media (Roy 2013)
Advertising as the business model
Utilitarian and user-centric
The blurring of information sourcing in a ‘post-fact’ world

7. The New Plan (2016-2018) includes the following commitment:
20. Enable Open Dialogue and Open Policy Making:
Foster enhanced citizen participation through greater collaboration and co-creation with the public and stakeholders within and across government initiatives.

8. Implications & Consequences
Traditional media in crisis
Both financial and existential
‘The Shattered Mirror’ (Public Policy Forum, 2017)
Traditional government under strain
Missing opportunities for collective learning and public value creation
Reddick and Chatfield (GIQ, 2017)
An increasingly fragmented & passive public
Demographically, technologically, politically
A loss of civic engagement (Nabatchi 2010)

9. Key Questions Going Forward
Can new media become a more meaningful stakeholder in facilitating democratic engagement and co-creation of service and policy?
FB’s evolution from an ‘agnostic platform’ to a ‘media company’
Will governments invest in new capacities to facilitate a shift to more participative forms of governance?
Certainly there is some promising experimentation…
Can an online culture of active citizenship and civic engagement be created and sustained?
Is Trump an anomaly or a trend?

10. Federalist Quandaries
Local governments often leading (or are trying to lead) in new governance experimentation – including social media usage, but they are over-shadowed by a traditional media and political (and fiscal in most countries) apparatus that emphasizes national politics and:
Confrontation over collaboration
SM Messaging over dialogue (TPA – NPM / Managerial)
The relationship between social media and the public sector arguably varies considerably nationally, provincially (i.e. state) and locally…

11. References
Nabatchi, T. (2010). Addressing the Citizenship and Democratic Deficits: The Potential of Deliberative Democracy for Public Administration. The American Review of Public Administration 40(4) 376–399.
Reddick, C. and Chatfield, A. (2017). A social media text analytics framework for double-loop learning for citizen-centric public services: A case study of a local government Facebook use. Government Information Quarterly 34 (2017)
Roy, J. (2013). From Machinery to Mobility: Government an Democracy in a Participative Age. Springer: New York.
Roy, J. (2016) Data, Dialogue and Innovation: Opportunities and Challenges for Open Government in Canada. Journal of Innovation Management 4 (1)

12. Thank you!
For more information or follow-up, please contact me: