Towards Zoomocracy – an Explorative Study on Virtual Democratic Decision Making in Swedish City Council Meetings in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Towards Zoomocracy – an Explorative Study on Virtual Democratic Decision Making in Swedish City Council Meetings in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Files
Date
2022-01-04
Authors
Wihlborg, Elin
Carlsson, Fredrik
Blom, Agneta
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
Governmental decision making is essential to maintain democracy. The decision making formats and processes are institutionalized and follow strict formats for participation, debate and decisions. The constraints and lock-downs due to the covid-19 pandemic led to an extensive increase in the use of digital meeting tools to maintain democratic decision making through virtual meetings. Our main approach in this paper is to inductively explore the changes that occur when democratic meetings take place on-line through a quantitative text analysis and interviews. We delimit our focus to speech duration in recorded meetings. We find that the virtual meeting format changed meeting characteristics compared to on-site meetings. There were some changes in speech duration among councilors which has to be further investigated in a larger sample. The main contribution of this paper is the method to measure actual speech duration and compare how virtual meetings may influence the organization of democratic meetings.
Description
Keywords
Emerging Topics in Digital Government,
digital government,
digital meetings,
local democracy,
zoomocracy
Citation
Extent
10 pages
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Table of Contents
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Collections
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.