Surveying the Role of Social Media on Citizens' Participation in the Participatory Budgeting Process

Abstract

Objective: Citizens’ awareness and participation play a significant role in the improvement of public affairs’ administration and the quality of governmental decisions and policies. The present research aims to explore and theorize the citizens’ participation in the budgeting process. Methods: 18 theoreticians and researchers in the fields of political sciences, social sciences and public administration participated in this grounded-theory based qualitative research. They were selected based on the purposive and snowball sampling methods. Results: The results of the data analysis showed that political awareness of citizens includes cyber political awareness, political empowerment of citizens, knowledge of using cyber networks, familiarity with political tools, citizens’ awareness of political presence on cyber networks, citizens’ cyber activities in parties, and debating on cyber social networks. Furthermore, political/local awareness of citizens includes citizen’s awareness of local priorities, citizens’ awareness of local expenditure, citizens’ awareness of local problems, and knowledge about local investment that are all emerged within the framework of citizens’ cyber participation. Moreover, political participation of citizens involves their budget participation and political/cyber participation. Conclusion: Owing to the necessity of social interactions of citizens on the cyberspaces, local and indigenous social networks should be developed in Iran in order to reinforce the interactions among the citizens and such networks should be supported by the relevant practitioners and organizations accordingly.

Keywords

• citizen participation
• participatory budgeting process
• social media