Tobias Polzer, together with Lisa Schmidthuber from WU’s Institute of Public Management and Governance, co-organized a panel entitled “Citizen participation: Digital challenges and opportunities” at the Public Management Research Conference (PMRC) 2023 that was held at the University of Utrecht. The departure point for the panel was that digital technologies enable new and more effective forms of citizen participation. However, when new technologies are driven by factual possibilities – rather than by actual citizens’ needs – citizen participation initiatives might fail. In contrast, such initiatives could be more successful and effective when the digital implementation of these initiatives would be better tailored to the actual needs and preferences of citizens.

Against this background, the panel included three research papers, each looking at the intersection of (new) digital technologies and the effectiveness of (new) citizen participation initiatives. The empirical settings included co-production in contact tracing apps for pandemic mitigation, maturity assessment of citizen reporting platforms and participatory design preferences in citizen co-engineering. In the panel, a lively discussion evolved around the antecedents and contingencies of citizen participation, as well as questions about broader efficiency and effectiveness considerations in using digital technologies to engage citizens.