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The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of citizens’ support for two rival and opposing conceptions of political involvement, political consumerism and stealth democracy, on their attitudes about demand response (flexible consumption) and prosumerism (self-production) in the context of making of Finnish energy policy. Stealth democracy represents an established view on the role of citizens in energy policy making: the energy sector has traditionally been presented as a technocratic domain reserved for experts and businessmen. By contrast, political consumerism can be seen as an expression of “energy democracy”.

The data is based on a postal survey and an internet survey that were conducted in 2016 among a random sample representing Finns who were between 18 and 75 years. The dependence of the support for demand response and prosumerism on the endorsement of political consumerism and stealth democracy will be tested statistically (Pearson chi-square).

The endorsement of demand response mainly depended statistically on citizens’ attitudes towards political consumerism and stealth democracy. However, comparing electricity prices and changing electricity suppliers did not depend on adherence to political consumerism and stealth democracy. Nevertheless, in these cases, support was higher among the supporters of political consumerism than among supporters of stealth democracy. By contrast, the endorsement of prosumerism, for instance, in terms of factors that influence citizens’ decisions to invest in electricity generation in their households, depended statistically on citizens’ attitudes on political consumerism and stealth democracy.

It might be that the variables used in this study to measure stealth democracy are not specific enough. More generally, Finns’ willingness to support for stealth democracy may be based on or at least encouraged by the misunderstandings of democratic politics: more information is needed on the level of knowledge that citizens have about normative principles of democratic decision-making processes.

The implication of this study for energy policy making is that there are (at least in Finland) good preconditions for developing a decentralized energy system: citizens are ready to adopt a more active role as energy citizens in terms of demand response and prosumerism – irrespective of their attitudes on macro-level attitudes on governmental institutions. Democratization of the energy system could strengthen the legitimacy of energy policy making.

Citizens’ attitudes indicate that their potential for involvement needs to be strengthened in the spirit of energy democracy: the idea of energy democracy needs to be seen in terms of the demand for increased accountability and democratization of the energy sector that was previously not seen as requiring public involvement and was most often depoliticized and dominated by technocrats. However, strengthening energy democracy through demand response and prosumerism is not without its problems: utilization of these devices requires a relatively large amount of resources which depend on the individuals’ socio-economic position. Thus, energy democracy cannot replace but complement electoral participation as a form of energy policy involvement.

The contribution of this study is to fill a part of the research gap linking to ongoing energy transitions. As a socio-technical transition can take place only if citizens support and participate in it, we need to better understand citizens’ attitudes on energy consumption and production and energy policy involvement. Citizens’ attitudes on energy production and consumption are becoming more and more critical for managing the energy sector as a result of that the share of wind power and solar power is increasing in the energy system. In a decentralized energy system, citizens have to be prepared to change their modes of operation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the originality of this study is to test the impact of citizens’ political attitudes on the endorsement of demand response and prosumerism.

According to the “New Public Management” paradigm, citizens are viewed as active participants through all the different steps of service planning and provision. Nonetheless, citizens' involvement is still far from being systematically applied within local governments. The purpose of this paper is to give a contribution to this stream of research by investigating whether a part of this resistance could be explained by the differences between public administrators and elected officials' perspectives on the role of the citizens in service quality improvement processes.

A mail survey was conducted among a sample of Italian town municipalities in May and June of 2010. A total of 102 questionnaires were returned (59 from politicians and 43 from public managers), and these questionnaires were then analysed through t‐tests and regressions.

Findings support the existence of a statistically significant difference between public administrators' and elected officials' attitudes. Differences exist in three main issues: the relative importance of citizens as sources of inputs to improve public service quality, the objectives of citizens' involvement and the structure of citizens' preferences.

Results could have been influenced by the degree of New Public Management development within the specific research setting (Italian local governments).

Formalising the role, the timing and the contribution of citizens' involvement to the municipal decision‐making process could help to mitigate the mentioned dualism. Creating a favourable cultural background and sharing a citizen‐oriented vision within the whole organisation, from top levels to front‐line employees, is fundamental.

This paper is the first to suggest that these resistances toward involving citizens in quality improvement processes could be due to the differences between administrators' and elected officials' perspectives.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of metaphor “Digital India-Power to Empower” on citizens’ intention to adopt the e-governance while taking citizens’ attitude and emotional attachment with Digital India as mediating variables between citizens’ involvement and intention to adopt e-governance.

After reviewing the extant literature and using the learning from Technology Acceptance Model-Extension (TAME), a conceptual model has been proposed. The model is empirically tested on 224 respondents from India using structural equation modeling technique.

The paper suggested that the metaphoric promotion of E-Governance leads to a higher intention to adopt E-Governance. Metaphoric promotion has a positive influence on citizen involvement with E-Governance, which leads to positive attitude toward E-Governance. This positive attitude leads to citizens’ emotional attachment with E-Governance, which in turn leads to citizens’ positive behavioral intention to adopt E-Governance. In addition, there is a significant difference in attitude toward E-Governance with respect to education level and metro city dwelling, but there is no difference in intention to adopt E-Governance with respect to education and metro city dwelling.

As there is a dearth of research on the usage of metaphor by government and its effect on citizens’ adoption of E-Governance, a conceptual model has been prepared by using learning from metaphor studies majorly in non-government services.

As marketing and metaphors are rarely spoken words in E-Governance research, present study starts the much-needed conversation. In the past, adoption of E-Governance is studied in terms of technology attributes using TAM Model. The present study is first to explore the behavioral impact of E-Governance metaphoric promotion on citizens’ intention to adopt E-Governance based on TAME model. It raises the issue of marketing foundation of E-Governance in mobilizing the citizens’ intention to adopt the E-Governance.

The article applies the citizen science phenomenon – i.e. lay people involvement in research endeavours aimed at pushing forward scientific knowledge – to healthcare. Attention is paid to initiatives intended to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustrative case to exemplify the contribution of citizen science to system-wide innovation in healthcare.

A mixed methodology consisting of three sequential steps was developed. Firstly, a realist literature review was carried out to contextualize citizen science to healthcare. Then, an account of successfully completed large-scale, online citizen science projects dealing with healthcare and medicine has been conducted in order to obtain preliminary information about distinguishing features of citizen science in healthcare. Thirdly, a broad search of citizen science initiatives targeted to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has been performed. A comparative case study approach has been undertaken to examine the attributes of such projects and to unravel their peculiarities.

Citizen science enacts the development of a lively healthcare ecosystem, which takes its nourishment from the voluntary contribution of lay people. Citizen scientists play different roles in accomplishing citizen science initiatives, ranging from data collectors to data analysts. Alongside enabling big data management, citizen science contributes to lay people's education and empowerment, soliciting their active involvement in service co-production and value co-creation.

Citizen science is still underexplored in healthcare. Even though further evidence is needed to emphasize the value of lay people's involvement in scientific research applied to healthcare, citizen science is expected to revolutionize the way innovation is pursued and achieved in the healthcare ecosystem. Engaging lay people in a co-creating partnership with expert scientist can help us to address unprecedented health-related challenges and to shape the future of healthcare. Tailored health policy and management interventions are required to empower lay people and to stimulate their active engagement in value co-creation.

Citizen science relies on the wisdom of the crowd to address major issues faced by healthcare organizations. The article comes up with a state of the art investigation of citizen science in healthcare, shedding light on its attributes and envisioning avenues for further development.

Much of the literature on citizen participation in the budget process links the council-manager form of government with higher levels of citizen participation, assuming the council-manager form represents professional administration. This is contradictory to the reality that different forms of government have “borrowed” features from each other and many now have mixed forms of government (i.e., adapted). The literature also contains ambiguities about city managers’ role in participatory budgeting. We review the literature and identify three competing theories about the role of professional managers in the budget process. We directly examine the effect of city managers in terms of their professional dimensions, institutional environment, and individual willingness to represent citizens. Using survey data from Florida, we demonstrate that managers’ professionalism, perceived political environment, and attitude toward citizen input are important factors explaining local governments’ adoption of participatory budgeting.

This paper aims to discuss the cost of e‐participation from the managerial perspective.

The use of digital media to consult and engage citizens and companies in the decision‐making process is a way of improving the design and legitimatization of decisions, as well as potentially increasing the likelihood of successful implementation of policies. This paper discusses if the potential economic benefits from increased or qualitatively improved involvement inherently are long term and have to compete with other activities undertaken by government.

There are great uncertainties regarding the magnitude of the positive effects on governance since there are not only positive, but also negative externalities of e‐participation; thus, there are major challenges in measuring and capitalizing on the e‐participation. Part of the reason for the uncertainty is the lack of explicit awareness of the choice of technology, communication style and institutional approach to implementing e‐participation. Further, there is the need to be aware of the administrative costs in transferring e‐participation practices and techniques.

The perspective on cost of e‐participation is not well explored. The discussion raised emphasizes the urgency of the issue.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between interactive and personal campaigning on social media and political involvement, and the mechanisms that explain the effects. Specifically, this study examines whether personal and interactive communication on Twitter increases political involvement among citizens through social presence and perceived expertise.

An experimental design – a 2 (low vs high interactivity)×3 (depersonalized vs individualized vs privatized communication) between-subjects design – is used.

The findings show that interactive communication leads to a stronger sense of social presence and source expertise, which positively affect involvement. The effects of personal campaigning differ. Individualized communication positively affects involvement via source expertise. Interestingly, privatized communication positively affects involvement via social presence, but negatively via source expertise.

Although a growing body of work examines the political consequences of social media, there is still very little understanding why social media affect citizens. The current study fills this void by investigating how the use of social media affects political involvement among citizens.

Focusing on municipalities, this study aims to examine whether citizens’ engagement with local public administration activities on Facebook can have a positive effect on citizens’ trust.

Using data from 333 citizens and resorting to structural equation modelling, a conceptual model is tested.

The results show that communicating directly with citizens through social media can enhance the citizens’ involvement in social issues and their identification with their city council. The effect of citizen engagement on trust propensity is mediated by citizens’ identification with the city council and by citizens’ involvement in social issues.

The study provides a conceptual model that can be used by practitioners to improve practices that enhance citizen engagement and build trust in the local government. City councils should promote activities on social media that encourage identification and citizens’ involvement. Furthermore, the findings suggest that municipalities can increase trust by involving citizens in social issues.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the government social media phenomenon, highlighting and empirically testing the effect of citizen engagement on institutional trust. In doing so, a process to build citizens’ trust in their city council through social media is unpacked. The findings show that communicating directly with citizens through social media can enhance the citizens’ involvement in social issues and their identification with the city council. The important role of identification to build institutional trust is emphasized.

Much of the current U.S. academic literature on participatory budgeting is preoccupied with direct citizen involvement in budget formulation, reflecting a particular normative theory of democracy. In this essay we suggest that U.S. academics can learn from a contemporary international community of practice concerned with “civil-society budget work”-a quasi-grassroots, quasi-pluralist movement with member organizations throughout the developing world-as well as from the budget exhibits mounted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research at the turn of the last century. The budget-work movement employs third-party intermediation and advocacy, through all phases of the budget cycle. U.S. academics and budget-work practitioners can learn from each other, and this represents an unexploited opportunity for all concerned. We propose a program of locally based action research and trans-local evaluative synthesis.

This article adopts a prospective approach in an attempt to explore the potential benefit of citizen involvement in decision making concerning future drug R&D. This is one of the first Delphi studies to fully utilize internet technology to collect and process data. The results show an increasing individual autonomy among respondents, which also affects the drug R&D process in general. Human, liberal and ethical values are reported as crucial values to citizens. On this basis, respondents reported that patient organizations, representative citizen groups and ethical councils can contribute with important input to ensure these values in decision making concerning future drug R&D. Paying attention to citizen needs, demands and ideas may protect the research, development and eventual marketing of unacceptable drugs on a societal and ethical level.