Development of the E-participation ecosystem in Russia in the early 2020s: The role of social media and regional governance centers

Abstract

This article explores the process of creating a centralized system that ensures processing opinions and claims against regional and municipal officials expressed by citizens in social networks, which began in 2020. Previous research by the authors, devoted to a comprehensive study of Russian systems that ensure interaction of authorities with citizens, revealed six channels of electronic participation at the regional and municipal levels. However, the development of social networks and the emergence of new technologies for involving citizens in public policy have created preconditions for the transformation of e-participation systems. This is reflected both in scientific research and in practice — for example, in the Russian Federation in 2020, a new channel of electronic participation began. A network of Regional Governance Centers (RGC) has been created and is developing, one of the components of which is the “Incident Management” system, which allows real-time monitoring of the reaction of users in social networks and ensures the processing of messages or claims of citizens to the authorities. In this regard, it became necessary to further assess the contribution of social networks to the development of the e-participation ecosystem and the place in it of the centralized channels served by the SDG system. The article presents two pilot SDG analyzes conducted by the authors, which made it possible to identify heterogeneity among new structures in terms of institutional affiliation and regional specifics of activities in the social network VKontakte. The important criteria in the issue of measuring efficiency, in the opinion of the authors, are efficiency, the degree of citizen involvement, the fact of solving an incoming problem, organizational and regulatory support of work processes.