Organisational Structure and Created Values. Review of Methods of Studying Collective Intelligence in Policymaking

Abstract

The domain of policymaking, which used to be limited to small groups of specialists, is now increasingly opening up to the participation of wide collectives, which are not only influencing government decisions, but also enhancing citizen engagement and transparency, improving service delivery and gathering the distributed wisdom of diverse participants. Although collective intelligence has become a more common approach to policymaking, the studies on this subject have not been conducted in a systematic way. Nevertheless, we hypothesized that methods and strategies specific to different types of studies in this field could be identified and analyzed. Based on a systematic literature review, as well as qualitative and statistical analyses, we identified 15 methods and revealed the dependencies between them. The review indicated the most popular approaches, and the underrepresented ones that can inspire future research.

Keywords

• collective intelligence
• crowdsourcing
• policymaking
• public policy
• e-participation
• literature review