Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 2020 NISPAcee On-line Conference for PhD students Program Overview The 2020 NISPAcee On-line Conference for PhD students Author(s) Eduards Lielpeters University of Latvia Riga Latvia Title Fostering citizen participation: communication of Latvian ministries on Facebook File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Eduards Lielpeters Abstract In a democracy, it is important that citizens have access to information about the activities of the institutions, as well as they have various opportunities for participation in the decision-making process of public administration. In Latvia relations between public administration and society is fragile. In the decision-making process important role in Latvia is given to non-governmental organisations that are acting as representatives of citizens in advisory bodies and also in other ways are providing their knowledge to public administration. At the same time, only around 5% of Latvian citizens are members of non-governmental organisations. Thus, in reality, just a small part of the population is participating in the decision-making process. At the same time, only 32% of citizens trust in public administration and often decisions made by institutions are questioned by society and mass media in Latvia. There is a need to foster citizen participation and also their trust in public administration. As a contemporary solution to this problem could be a more thoughtful activity of public administration on the digital environment - to develop closer relations between institutions and citizens, as well as, to provide digital participation opportunities also to those citizens who are not members of non-governmental organizations, hence silent majority of Latvian society. To understand the current situation in Latvia and gather data that could be used to improve relations between public administration and citizens, there is implemented content analysis of Facebook pages maintained by Latvian Ministries. Ministries are selected for the content analysis as they are already obligated to provide opportunities for citizen participation in the decision-making process. And the content of Facebook pages is analysed because this social media is used by all ministries and it is most often used social media in Latvia. In the study is analysed the main Facebook pages of all 13 Latvian ministries in the six months period – from July 2019 until December 2019. In this period all ministries together have published 3181 entries that are analysed according to three groups of indicators: content indicators, message indicators and feedback indicators (overall 13 main indicators that are composed of more than 60 sub-indicators). Results of the study are demonstrating that for now institutions have various and noticeably different habits in the use of digital opportunities that social media are offering for content creation, network building and two-way communication. Ministries have various communication styles - in nine Facebook accounts educational entries are published slightly more often than informative entries, however, the proportions of educational posts vary between ministries, as well as engaging posts are still a minority. As the biggest drawback was recognised that in the analysed period there were only 4% social media posts that are about citizen participation opportunities or decisions made with the participation of citizens or their representatives, thus continuing to maintain the comprehension that decision-making process is mostly happening behind closed doors. Considering the results of the study there is proposed digital participation strategy for public administration institutions. Implementation of strategy could help to combine good practices that are already used by some of the ministries and help to foster two-way dialogue with society, also strengthening citizens participation in the decision-making process.
