Which Target Group Receives More Responses from the Government through a Citizen Participation Policy?: The Fiji Open-Door Policy Based on a Social Construction Framework

Abstract

The influence of social constructions on the policy-making process of any system of government is determined by how deeply valued those constructions have become for the policy decision makers. Considering the social construction of target groups in a Fiji society, this research endeavoured to evaluate whether the presence of such constructions continues to prevail in the current governments’ responsiveness to citizen participation in administration. The study utilised a social construction framework as a tool to analyse whose voices are more heard by the government via a citizenry participation policy—the open-door policy at the Office of the Prime Minister in Fiji. As a result of connecting the social construction framework to citizen participation in administration, the research categorized the participants in the open-door policy into four target groups—advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants—and pairwise comparisons among the four groups indicated that specific target groups’ requests are more greatly taken into account by the government than others’.

Keywords:

• Fiji open-door policy
• governmental responsiveness to citizen participation
• social construction framework

Notes

1 To improve the quality of judgement of each client’s social construction categories, the standardized procedures of intercoder reliability were followed. Of 2,557 requests from the citizens, 20% were randomly selected, and the initial overall Cohen’s kappa value calculated by the two authors/coders was .84. That is, as pointed out by Kreitzer and Smith (2018) and Bell (2021), the social construction categories of some clients were not fully agreed upon by the two coders. In the cases of clients whom the authors failed to group into the same social construction category during the first intercoder reliability check, the finally determined category of social construction for each client after the authors’ deliberation and reassessment was used in the analysis. Even between each author’s contentious initial grouping of clients into the four types of social constructions, the statistical significance and signals of the estimated coefficients for the social construction variables were not different. The reported results are based on the final client social construction categories agreed upon by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Epeli Vitilevu Tinivata

Epeli Vitilevu Tinivata is a monitoring, evaluation, and learning officer in the Balance of Power Program. He also worked for the Office of the Prime Minister in Fiji. His main areas of interest include public management, citizen participation, performance management, and equal human rights.

Seunghoo Lim

Seunghoo Lim is a professor of public policy in the Graduate School of International Relations at the International University of Japan. His main areas of interest include public policy processes, policy tools, environmental policy, disaster management, and public budgeting. His research has appeared in Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Public Performance & Management Review, Public Administration & Development, Public Personnel Management, and International Review of Administrative Sciences.