Evaluating open government initiatives

Abstract

The advent of social media opens up unexpected new opportunities of engaging the public in government work. While research on Open Government has produced conceptually interesting models that describe how the initiative will or should evolve based on anecdotal evidence from best practice cases, our systematic analysis reveals that previous work on Open Government evaluation has a strong bias in favour of implementing Open Government, while the negative consequences or limitations are not fully incorporated. Seeing this as a major limitation, we highlight why future research should produce more rigorous and relevant knowledge for overcoming practitioners’ concerns of implementation. Moreover, we present the first study examining the consequences of implementing an Open Government initiative at a German university. The results suggest that Open Government initiatives may very well backfire on governments. Thus, as a research community, we should not simply propose new artefacts or solutions how to open up government but should be very explicit about the consequences for the authorizing environment (in particular minorities), government organizations, politicians and the political system as a whole. By the end, the paper presents a research agenda for future research on the evaluation of Open Government initiatives.