Social Media Use from the Citizen Engagement Perspective: The Case of Twitter in New York and Chicago Participatory Budgeting

Recently, social media is regarded as an advanced information and communication tool to enable ordinary citizens and public administrators to more easily and efficiently communicate with each other and work together to address complex social problems. In this study from the public involvement perspective we aimed at examining how social media is used at the local level in the U.S., especially in participatory budgeting (PB) process. We conducted content analysis and social network analysis by using collected data from the Twitter networks of the two U.S. cities implemented PB (Chicago and New York City). We found that Twitter is primarily used for information dissemination from the PB initiatives to citizens, rather than for getting public inputs and facilitating public discourse. Also, too little people currently use Twitter in their PB processes and the communications in the social media networks seem inactive and non-reciprocal. We suggest PB communities to develop integrative strategies for engaging a wide range of citizens and community stakeholders by using social media. And such strategies on social media need to aim at giving more people easy access to not only to government but also to citizens each other, and facilitating collaborations and partnerships between ordinary citizens and public administrators.