The Power of Citizens' Voices in Democracy —— Examining the impact of civic input on crowdsourced policymaking

This paper examines the impact of crowdsourcing on policymaking. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we analyze the influence of civic input on the city’s... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the impact of crowdsourcing on policymaking. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we analyze the influence of civic input on the city’s Comprehensive City Plan update. Both manual analysis methods and Natural Language Processing technologies are deployed in the analysis. The findings show that the power of citizens’ voices depend on the volume of the demands and the tone of the demands from the citizens. A higher demand with a stronger tone results in more policy changes. We also found an interesting and unexpected result: the government in Palo Alto mirrors more or less citizen will while citizen representatives filter rather than mirroring the citizen will.