ABSTRACT
In this article we analyze 102 case studies of Internet or social media-enabled participatory projects, technologies, platforms and companies in operation between roughly 2005–2015. We assign each case a “signature” representing the degree of presence/absence of seven dimensions of participation and then cluster these signatures to look for patterns of the most common ways of “doing participation” today. Two main clusters become apparent: 1) a “radical-direct” mode that emphasizes direct individual autonomy and influence, commitment to having a voice and setting goals, and individual or collective control over resources thereby produced; and 2) an “experiential-affective” mode that emphasizes the experience of being or becoming part of a collective, and the affective, communicational, and educational features of that experience.
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Notes
1. Canonical political theories that focus on the role of participation in democratic institutions today includes (Pateman Citation1976; Bachrach and Botwinick Citation1992; Fung and Wright Citation2003); as well as related work on representation (Urbinati Citation2006; Pitkin Citation2004) and deliberative democracy (Mutz Citation2006; Dryzek Citation2002; Elster Citation1998). Most scholarship on participation, however, is defined in very domain—or discipline-specific ways, e.g. media studies (Carpentier Citation2011; Barney and Coleman Citation2016; Lutz, Hoffmann, and Meckel Citation2014), art/art history (Bishop Citation2012), genetics and medicine (Prainsack Citation2011), environmental planning (Beierle and Cayford Citation2002), development (Cooke and Kothari Citation2001; Cornwall Citation2011), user generated innovations (Hippel Citation2005), fan cultures and youth media (Henry Jenkins et al. Citation2007; Henry Jenkins Citation1992), collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash Citation2007), architecture (Cupers Citation2013; Jones, Petrescu, and Till Citation2013), participatory budgeting (Wampler Citation2012), and many, many others, including distinctive national variations.
2. We developed a web-based application—CASE, “Comparative Analysis and Study Environment”—to collectively organize and analyze the cases (Erickson Citation2015).
3. We also repeated the above analysis by dividing our cases into high and low confidence sets (by which we mean sets where there was highest consensus amongst the various researchers on the presence/absence of a dimension in a case), no significant difference was detected, but these analyses are not reported here.
4. We compared three different methods (Ward, Complete, and Average), and two distance metrics (Euclidean and Manhattan). We found some interesting variations in these methods but overwhelmingly similar groupings.
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Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation, Grant #1322299.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0253-5554
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