E-participation issues in urban public policy: the case of St. Petersburg

Modern public policy is characterized by the ‘participatory turn’ - a widespread expansion of ways and channels the citizens can influence policies with. The ongoing digitalization transformed these civic participation instruments into a new form, now called e-participation. Both experts and authorities around the World believe that integrating such platforms and channels into policy process will facilitate public engaging, involving into it those who were not previously interested in policy making and those, who lost their interest in engaging with the authorities. Digital civic participation has gained significant traction in Russia, but mostly in so-called cities of federal importance, such as St. Petersburg. And while it is investigated by many different scholars, the frameworks applied were mostly of computer science or technologically inclined. This article is an attempt to start closing this gap by analyzing e-participation in Russia from political science perspective. For this task, we interviewed 10 public activists and urban policy experts to get a better understanding of its functioning specifics. The analyses shows that while it is perceived as an effective way to solve basic public policy issues, there are multiple problems undermining its operations. Mainly, these are due the lack of legal support for these channels, which make authorities less responsible for not responding to the citizens’ preferences and complaints. We also discovered that insufficient organization changes and silo mentality prevents the authorities from acting in a fast and efficient fashion, disrupting the whole idea of e-participation. Among other issues are digital divide which in fact excludes certain social groups from engaging with the authorities and having a say in policy process. We conclude by stating that more research is required to understand the dynamics and issues of the Russian e-participation portals.

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