Public crowdsourcing: Analyzing the role of government feedback on civic digital platforms
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Lisa Schmidthuber,Dennis Hilgers,Krithika Randhawa |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12811 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Public crowdsourcing: Analyzing the role of
government feedback on civic digital platforms
Lisa Schmidthuber
1
| Dennis Hilgers
2
| Krithika Randhawa
3
1
Department of Management, Vienna
University of Economics and Business
(WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria
2
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria
3
University of Technology Sydney, UTS
Business School, Ultimo, New South Wales,
Australia
Correspondence
Lisa Schmidthuber, Department of
Management, Vienna University of Economics
and Business (WU Vienna), Welthandelsplatz
1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Email: lisa.schmidthuber@wu.ac.at
Abstract
Government organizations increasingly use crowdsourcing
platforms to interact with citizens and integrate their
requests in designing and delivering public services. Draw-
ing on attribution theory, this study asks how the causal
attributions of the government response to a citizen
request affect continued participation in crowdsourcing
platforms. To test our hypotheses, we use a 7-year dataset
of both online requests from citizens to government and
government responses to citizen requests. We focus on citi-
zen requests that are denied by government, and find that
the reasoning for denying a request is related with contin-
ued participation behavior. Citizens are less willing to col-
laborate further with government via the platform, when
their requests are denied although the locus of causality is
with the government. This study contributes to research on
the role of responsiveness in digital interaction between cit-
izens and government and highlights the importance of
rationale transparency to sustain citizen participation.
1|INTRODUCTION
Public sector organizations increasingly leverage digital platforms to interact with citizens and enhance their partici-
pation in service design, delivery and decision-making (De Vries et al., 2016). A promising way to stimulate digital
citizen–government interaction is the use of crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008; Liu, 2017a) as an open innovation
Received: 18 January 2021 Revised: 27 October 2021 Accepted: 28 October 2021
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12811
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which
permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no
modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2021 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
960 Public Admin. 2022;100:960–977.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
mechanism by which organizations engage an external voluntary crowd of individuals via digital platforms (Afuah &
Tucci, 2012; Howe, 2008). Crowdsourcing platforms allow government organizations to co-create public infrastruc-
ture and services with citizens by seeking and providing feedback on their inputs (Chesbrough & Di Minin, 2014;
Lember et al., 2019). Previous research has shown that crowdsourcing can reduce the distance between citizens and
government, strengthen mutual understanding and public trust (Ingrams et al., 2020; Mergel & Desouza, 2013), while
also delivering societal benefits (Kohler & Chesbrough, 2019; Randhawa et al., 2019).
Despite the benefits of crowdsourcing platforms for both citizens and government, an ongoing challenge is how
to incentivize platform users and sustain citizen participation (Ansell & Miura, 2020). Although previous research has
investigated citizens' initial motivation to participate in crowdsourcing platforms (Abu-Tayeh et al., 2018;
Schmidthuber et al., 2019; Wijnhoven et al., 2015), how to ensure their continued participation has largely been
ignored so far. This study thus focuses on citizens' continued use of crowdsourcing platforms and in particular, if and
to what extent government feedback has an effect on continued participation.
Till date, there is scant research on the effect of government feedback on subsequent citizen participation, even
though feedback is a commonly seen feature across many crowdsourcing platforms, and citizens who make the
effort to share input and requests with the government may obviously expect that these will be considered and
taken seriously (Ansell & Miura, 2020; Simmons & Brennan, 2017; Thomas, 2013). Accordingly, we posit that the
more transparent the government is about processing citizen requests, the more willing citizens are to continue col-
laborating with the government, in particular, when their requests are denied in the first place. We thus argue that
citizens' continued participation is conditional on rationale transparency (De Fine Licht, 2014; Grimmelikhuijsen
et al., 2021); that is, the government's reasoning for denying a citizen's request provided in the form of a written
response via the crowdsourcing platform. In this article, we use a 7-year dataset from a local government
crowdsourcing platform and draw on attribution theory (Harvey et al., 2014; Heider, 1958) to investigate communi-
cation patterns between citizens and the government, and examine how the type of government response to citizen
requests affects their future participation behavior.
Our study makes three distinct contributions. First, we respond to calls for more research on the effectiveness
and responsiveness of digital government (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018; Simmons & Brennan, 2017), and complement prior
literature on citizen participation in crowdsourcing by focusing on continued participation. We uncover the conse-
quences of a lack of government responsiveness (Mulgan, 2000), that is, when government does not pursue the citi-
zens' expectations by denying their requests, and study how causal attributions associated with the government
response affect continued participation in crowdsourcing platforms.
Second, by using longitudinal data and measuring participation over time, this study complements prior literature
on citizens' motivation to participate in crowdsourcing by investigating the effect of the type of government
response on continued participation. Relatedly, we contribute to research on how governments can design their
response to citizens so as to motivate their continued participation on crowdsourcing platforms. While Sjoberg
et al. (2017) found that government's decision transparency (i.e., decision on whether the citizen requests can be
considered) is related to future citizen participation, this study focuses on rationale transparency. This is not just
important from a theoretical perspective, but also has practical implications on how governments can incorporate
feedback mechanisms in designing platform interactions (Leckel et al., 2021).
Third, by using digital traces of actual citizen–government interaction (see Robinson, 2017), we apply
recent methodological advances in research. When using platforms, individuals produce “massive quantities of
information”(Janssen & van den Hoven, 2015: 662), such as user-generated content, structure of relationships,
or geospatial data. Big data analysis and applying computational social science methodology allow us to analyze
large-scale datasets for the purpose of creating public value and studying social behavior (Mergel et al., 2016).
In doing so, we address the call by Kowalski et al. (2020) to draw on large online datasets for public decision-
making and use citizen requests and government's written responses to understand citizen behavior on digital
platforms.
SCHMIDTHUBER ET AL. 961
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