Conference Agenda

Citizen participation through social media engagement has become a core objective of communication in public administrations. While engagement approaches did not emerge with social media, these platforms have created opportunities for participation that public organizations want to seize. Scholars have researched how citizens could be involved in policy-making through the roles they play (Wukich, 2021), and have highlighted the influence of certain factors on engagement. These factors include citizens’ mood, the type and purpose of content, and the characteristics of social media platforms (Contri et al., 2023; Haro-de-Rosario et al., 2018; Gruzd et al., 2018). However, research has approached social media engagement from an administration-centered perspective, despite of its citizen-oriented nature. This translates into a scarcity of research around the study of citizen perceptions of participatory and interactive dynamics on social media. There is a need to better understand citizen expectations, and how they align with governments’ communication practices.

Our study aims to address this gap by collecting data on citizen expectations regarding government communication on social media, how they assess this communication, and what motivates their participation. The main research questions guiding our work are:

• What are the main expectations of citizens regarding government communication on social media?

• And how are citizens’ expectations aligned with governments’ communication practices on social media?

Our study takes place in Quebec, a Canadian province where numerous municipalities use social media, and generally advocate for increased citizen participation on these channels. Using a quantitative exploratory approach, we conducted a survey in collaboration with 12 municipalities, targeting citizens who actively engage with them on social media.

Our study contributes to the understanding of citizen engagement on digital platforms, expanding our knowledge from a citizen perspective. This is important as citizen perceptions shape intentions, which usually conform the citizen behavior that public administrations will face. This reinforces public management paradigms based on citizen-centric approaches, such as Smart Governance (Noveck, 2015). Moreover, our study takes into account previous explanatory factors of citizen engagement, usually treated in an atomized way, and integrates them into a single model to explore engagement. Our findings will help public managers better understand their audiences and tailor their online communication to citizen aspirations.

References

Contri, M., Fissi, S. & Gori, E. (2023) Using social media for supporting engagement in the public sector: a systematic literature review. Local Government Studies, 1-23.

Gruzd, A., Lannigan, J. & Quigley, K. (2018) Examining government cross-platform engagement in social media: Instagram vs Twitter and the big lift project. Government Information Quarterly, 35(4), 579-587

Haro-de-Rosario, A., Sáez-Martín, A., & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, M. (2018) Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? New Media & Society, 20(1), 29-49.

Noveck, B. S. (2015). Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and The Future of Governing. Harvard University Press.

Wukich, C. (2021). Government Social Media Engagement Strategies and Public Roles. Public Performance & Management Review, 44(1), 187-215.

While the use of social media influencers (SMIs) has become a common practice in private-sector marketing, their role in public-sector communication remains underexplored. Yet, public organizations are increasingly turning to SMIs to enhance engagement, particularly with younger or harder-to-reach audiences. This article investigates how public organizations perceive the benefits, risks, and ethical boundaries associated with influencer collaborations in public organizations. It also the types of collaborations these organizations seek when hiring SMIs. Drawing on insights from 19 semi-structured interviews with social media managers in France, Belgium, Canada and Luxemburg, the study proposes a better understanding of influencer engagement in the public sphere. The findings shed light on the evolving role of SMIs as intermediaries in public service communication and contribute to the theoretical development of digital communication in the public sector. The article concludes with practical recommendations to help public organizations balance innovation, transparency, and accountability when incorporating influencers into their communication toolbox.

This study aims to explore the public’s perception and acceptance of governmental digital applications in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as tools for promoting charitable initiatives and enhancing community engagement. With the growing utilization of platforms such as Tawakkalna (health & public services), Absher (e-government portal), Ehsan (charity platform), and Tabarro (national donations platform), these applications are increasingly serving as non-traditional public marketing channels to support philanthropic efforts including donations, volunteering, and awareness campaigns.

The research adopts a descriptive-analytical methodology. It relies solely on a structured online questionnaire to collect data from a diverse sample of users. The study investigates the degree of user acceptance of charitable messaging within official platforms. Additionalloy, it identifies the types of messages perceived as most influential (emotional, informative, or socially framed). It also examines how trust in government applications influences user responsiveness.

The study is grounded in three theoretical frameworks: Social Marketing Theory (to understand behavioral influence for public good), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (to analyze attitudes toward the use of digital platforms), and Message Framing Theory (to assess the role of message design in shaping response). Findings aim to offer strategic recommendations for governmental institutions to enhance the impact of public marketing in advancing national philanthropic objectives through reliable digital channels

Corruption in the public sector constitutes one of the most substantial social problems of our time. It has been argued to lead to undermining trust in public sector organisations by citizens and, eventually, to erosion of governance capacity and democracy.

Public sector organisations have taken various measures to address corruption, one of which is enabling whistleblowing and safeguarding whistleblowers. Whistleblowing has been conceptualised “as a disclosure made by a person with privileged access to an organization’s data or information about a wrongdoing, which implicates the organization” (Culiberg and Mihelič 2017, p. 788). While many countries had already national laws and regulations in place to facilitate whistleblowing and protect reporters, the EU issued in 2019 the Whistleblowing Directive to create a uniform and safe environment for individuals to report breaches without the fear of retaliation (Directive (EU) 2019/1937). The EU Member States were subsequently required to implement the Directive into national law by 2023 at the latest.

Central to the Directive is the establishment of reporting channels for whistleblowers. Also, the Directive details how organisations deal with reports and follow up on reported incidents with respect to timelines. The main interest of this research lies in the implementation of such channels on publicly accessible websites.

Parallel to the development of national legislation, public sector organisations developed or updated online systems and platforms as state-of-the-art reporting channels. However, with this, the issue of acceptance of these channels by potential whistleblowers comes to the fore, connected with issues such as protection of the identity of the whistleblower and confidentiality and safe storage of the reported data. Previous research of e-government acceptance and use by citizens has identified the role of trust in digital systems as central to lower inhibition threshold levels.

Against this backdrop, there is a research gap about how public sector organizations signal and communicate trustworthiness, next to raising awareness, of such reporting channels. Addressing this gap and focusing on organisational websites as major communication instruments of public sector organizations in the present age, our research questions are as follows:

RQ1: What are the dimensions of trustworthiness to be considered in the communication of public sector organizations to lower inhibition threshold to report wrongdoing?

RQ2: To what extent are aspects of trustworthiness considered in the design of whistleblowing systems of public sector organizations from different areas of government in Austria and Germany?

In a nutshell, our results show that the various streams of literature on trustworthiness can indeed be brought together to develop an analytical framework. When subsequently applying this framework, some of the similarities and differences can be led back to how close the organisations operate on markets and on how far organisations have already gained experience with online whistleblowing channels.