Albert Meijer

Utrecht University | UU

Current research on data in policy has primarily focused on street-level bureaucrats, neglecting the changes in the work of policy advisors. This research fills this gap by presenting an explorative theoretical understanding of the integration of data, local knowledge and professional expertise in the work of policy advisors. The theoretical perspe...

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this ‘bystander...

A rich academic understanding of the relation between e-governance and sustainable development is crucial for studying the current ‘twin transition’, i.e. the connection between the digital and sustainability transition. An analysis of current literature highlights that there is a strong emphasis on the question how e-governance can be an instrumen...

Algorithms are rapidly transforming government bureaucracies. The implications of this transformation for the work of public service employees are not yet well understood. So far, the literature has mostly neglected the use of algorithms by these “screen-level bureaucrats”, and this constitutes a major gap in our knowledge about how algorithms affe...

Introduction Governments around the world are struggling to find innovative solutions for complex problems. Key issues are sustainability, the quality of living in cities, and inequalities and tensions between groups of citizens. To address these challenges, new forms of governance are needed which serve to make and implement collectively binding d...

The transition literature argues that governments have an essential role in facilitating societal transitions. The current paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical understanding of this government role by analyzing the work of entrepreneurial civil servants. These civil servants try to execute transition tasks but are often resisted by the...

Smart city projects rely upon dynamic and complex multi-stakeholder collaboration. This collaboration can be challenging. In this study, we use an instrumental lens and argue that tools can help public professionals in dealing with smart governance challenges. Building upon smart governance and collaborative governance models, we conceptualize smar...

Governments across the world are experimenting with smart city technologies but recent studies suggest that not all citizens support this development. However, a comprehensive understanding of citizen discontent with the smart city is missing. This study systematically reviews academic research addressing citizen discontent with the smart city. Bas...

Over de uitlegbaarheid van algoritmen voor politiemedewerkers en burgers Esther Nieuwenhuizen, Carlos Soares en Albert Meijer Voor de ondersteuning van steeds meer processen maakt de politie gebruik van algoritmen. Dit gebruik van algoritmen is niet alleen een technisch proces: het leidt tot zowel een interne als een externe transformatie. De inter...

From the publisher: "New information and communication technologies have drastically changed public management. Public managers are increasingly dependent on information gathered form complex systems and they need to be able to put in place sound IT and communication structures. This accessible text, aimed specifically at those studying and workin...

In terms of the inclusivity of democracy, both the opportunities and risks of using digital media have been highlighted in the literature. Empirical research into the use of digital media and the inclusivity of citizen participation, however, is limited. More specifically, we have a limited understand of the relation between the ‘richness’ of digit...

Transparency and the efficiency of multi-actor decision-making processes : an empirical analysis of 244 decisions in the European Union Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-mak...

This study focuses on an important yet often neglected topic in public personnel competency studies: competencies required for digital government. It addresses the question: Which competencies do civil servants need for data-driven decision-making (DDDM) in local governments? Empirical data are obtained through a combination of 12 expert interviews...

This Element argues that to understand why transparency “works” in one context, but fails in another, we have to take into account how institutional (macro), organizational (meso) contexts interact with individual behavior (micro). A review of research from each of these perspectives shows that the big promises thought to accompany greater transpar...

The transition literature attributes various transition tasks to government to support socio-technical transitions toward overcoming societal challenges. It is, however, difficult for civil servants to execute these transition tasks, because they partly conflict with Public Administration (PA) traditions that provide legitimacy to their work. This...

Algorithmic decision-making in government has emerged rapidly in recent years, leading to a surge in attention for this topic by scholars from various fields, including public administration. Recent studies provide crucial yet fragmented insights on how the use of algorithms to support or fully automate decisions is transforming government. This ar...

Recently, we have seen a rising interest in the study of complex systems in public administration. This paper demonstrates how specific design interventions, also referred to as ‘probes’, can be used to investigate complex systems. The value of this strategy is demonstrated by probing three open data ecosystems in the Netherlands. The probes produc...

Social media institutionalization in public administrations has been conceptualized as the final stage of the adoption process. However, an understanding of organizational models for social media institutionalization in public administration is lacking. This exploratory study of Dutch local governments contributes to the literature by identifying h...

The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change. We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off agains...

The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change. We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off agains...

The current scientific debate on algorithms in the public sector is dominated by a focus on technology rather than organizational patterns. This paper extends our understanding of these patterns by studying the algorithmization of bureaucratic organizations, which is the process in which an organization rearranges its working routines around the us...

This article provides a theoretical understanding of the potential contribution of digital platforms to the co-creation of public value. On the basis of insights from different academic disciplines, a layered model is developed for the relations between technology, governance, users and societal outcomes. The theoretical model proposes that these l...

This chapter develops a theoretical perspective on the path dependency of smart cities. Our perspective will highlight both the physical and social dimensions of path dependency and also reflect on their interrelations. We will present a case study of the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands to show the value of this perspective on the smart city....

Public organisations increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms in performing many of their core activities. It is therefore important to consider how algorithms are transforming the public sector. This article aims to clarify this by assessing algorithms from a public value perspective. Based on a discussion of the literature, it is demonstr...

This article focuses on understanding the dynamics of citizen participation in smart city initiatives. The literature identifies citizens as key actors in smart cities, however, our understanding of their roles and influence is underdeveloped. Using modes of urban governance to provide contextual depth, alongside the literature on citizen participa...

Motivated by the classic work of Max Weber, this study develops an ideal type to study the transformation of government bureaucracy in the ‘age of algorithms’. We present the new ideal type – the algocracy – and position this vis-à-vis three other ideal types (machine bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, infocracy). We show that while the infocra...

This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, an...

Governments around the world are utilizing data and information systems to manage the COVID-19-crisis. To obtain an overview of all these efforts, this global report presents the expert reports of 21 countries regarding the relation between the COVID-19-crisis and the information polity. A comparative analysis of these reports highlights that gover...

The growing expectations to public services and the pervasiveness of wicked problems in times characterized by growing fiscal constraints call for the enhancement of public innovation, and new research suggests that multi-actor collaboration in networks and partnerships is superior to hierarchical and market-based strategies when it comes to spurri...

Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-making processes; however, this assumption has not been tested empirically. This study provides a starting point for investigating the comp...

The positive features of innovation are well known but the dark side of public innovation has received less attention. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical understanding of the dark side of public innovation. We explore a diversity of perverse effects on the basis of a literature review and an expert consultation. We indicate that...

Open Data work : understanding Open Data usage from a practice lens During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential h...

Public organizations often face numerous barriers when it comes to adopting and using social media to communicate and engage with the broader public. This research aims to better understand how barriers to social media adoption can be tackled by zooming in on one specific type of organization: the police. Our research answers the following question...

Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic review of 133 articles develops a better understanding of this scaling process. From the literature, we conceptualize impact as the result of two different pathways: ‘scaling out’ (extending geographical space or volume) and ‘scal...

Our exploration of three bodies of literature – public management, accounting and urban governance – shows that three views on these new technological practices of ‘urban auditing’ are present in the literature: a technocratic, a critical and an emergent view. We use these three views to introduce the six papers in this special issue. We conclude...

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this 'bystander...

This article contributes to the growing body of literature within public management on open government data by taking a political perspective. We argue that open government data are a strategic resource of organizations and therefore organizations are not likely to share it. We develop an analytical framework for studying the politics of open gover...

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on smart governance, defined as technology-enabled collaboration between citizens and local governments to advance sustainable development. The lack of empirical evidence on the positive outcomes of smart cities/smart governance motivated us to conduct this study. Our findings show that empi...

Living labs have become a promising methodology for public administration research to design and study public innovations. Surprisingly, public administration research has paid scant attention to living labs to date. An obvious obstacle to the application of a living lab approach in public administration is unclarities about the value, validity and...

This paper develops a theoretical understanding of the management of value conflicts in public innovation. Drawing from the literatures on public values and on public innovation, various strategic approaches to managing conflict are discussed, conceptualized, and applied to two cases. The paper identifies three basic approaches for dealing with val...

This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action i...

Social media is being used by a large part of local administrations. As a highly disruptive adopted innovation, it is important to understand the process of institutionalization through empirical variables. This paper studies the Dutch case to analyze to what extent social media technologies have being institutionalized within major city councils i...

Open government data are claimed to contribute to transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, economic and public service development. From an innovation perspective, we explore the current gap between the promise and practice of open government data. Based on Strategic Niche Management (SNM), we identify different phases in the open data i...

This literature review illuminates the conceptualization of predictive policing, and also its potential and realized benefits and drawbacks. The review shows a discrepancy between the considerable attention for potential benefits and drawbacks of predictive policing in the literature, and the empirical evidence that is available. The empirical evid...

The complex and technological nature of the introduction of these issues calls for new approaches to citizen engagement and we propose that design may play a role. Design provides highly concrete research tools that can help to define and better understand the root causes of problems (Mulgan 2014). In addition, designers offer various means to stim...

Citizen-generated open data is the data that individuals consciously generate and that are openly available for use in the public domain. The promise of citizen-generated data is that it generates a basis for public governance. We conducted an explorative comparative case study research of 25 cases in different countries to enhance our understandin...

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration debate. In this paper, we apply this view, and a...

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We...

Governments around the world are pressed to develop innovative solutions for the wicked problems they are facing. To develop these solutions, the public innovation capacity—defined as the capacity to develop and realize new ideas for societal problems—is of crucial importance. This article builds a model of the public innovation capacity on the bas...

In the study of public administration, e-government has been the focus of significant studies, and this number has been growing in recent years. This introduction to the virtual special issue of JPART on e-government highlights key contributions of selected JPART articles to the knowledge about information and technologies in government. In that se...

This panel discussion will present the views of editors of digital government journals regarding the process, outcome, and impact of journal publication. Fundamental questions about topics, types of research methods, what makes a journal article good, interesting to readers, related to practitioners and capable of impacting government policy are ad...

Human-driven changes on this planet have been giving rise to global warming, social instability, civil wars, and acts of terrorism. The existing system of global governance is not equipped to effectively address these enormous challenges. It is slow where one must move quickly, favors bureaucracy and politics over authentic deliberations and effect...

This is an appendix to the article "United People: designing a new model of global governance", available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324983643_United_People_Designing_a_New_Model_of_Global_Governance This appendix provides background information on the principles informing the UP model, creating councils within this model, get...

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and qual...

The use of social media produces new value conflicts in public governance. The police force is a public organization directly confronted with these changes. However, there is no systematic understanding of these conflicts in daily police practice or of the coping strategies used. This article presents an explorative understanding of the value confl...

Smart cities are presented as both inevitable and benign futures: the technological development is unstoppable and will bring us wealthier, safer and more sustainable cities. Putting technology to use, however, is never entirely a matter of engineering but of strategic, political and value-laden choices. This article combines the literature on tech...

The rapid deployment of technology in urban settings drastically changes the way urban safety is being governed. This article investigates smart governance of urban safety empirically through an in-depth case study of a project to improve the safety of a street in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. This collaboration between the city government, technolo...

Developments in open data have prompted a range of proposals and innovations in the domain of governance and public administration. Within the democratic tradition, transparency is seen as a fundamental element of democratic governance. While the use of open government data has the potential to enhance transparency and trust in government, realisin...

In this paper we present innovative solutions to the problem of transparency in Public Administrations (PAs) by opening up public data and services so that citizens participation is facilitated and encouraged with a Social Platform and a personalized user-friendly Transparency-Enhancing Toolset.

Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the literature on the types, effects, conditions and user of Open Government Data (OGD). The review analyses 101 academic studies about OGD which discuss at least one of the four factors of OGD utilization: the different types of utilization, the effects of utilization, the key conditions, and the dif...

Open data platforms are hoped to foster democratic processes, yet recent empirical research shows that so far they have failed to do so. We argue that current open data platforms do not take into account the complexity of democratic processes which results in overly simplistic approaches to open data platform design. Democratic processes are multif...

Urban technological innovation—the innovative use of technologies to tackle urban problems—has become increasingly popular under the label smart city. Our understanding of this sociotechnical process is limited, and therefore, this article develops a framework on the basis of the literature on social and technological innovation. This framework ide...

This chapter presents a local emergent perspective on smart city governance. Smart city governance is about using new technologies to develop innovative governance arrangements. Cities all around the world are struggling to find smart solutions to wicked problems and they hope to learn from successful techno-governance practices in other cities. Le...

Purpose Coproduction fundamentally changes the roles of citizens and governments. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the theoretical understanding of the transformative changes in the structural order of the public domain that result from the coproduction of public services. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds upon both the literatu...

Political innovations aim to strengthen democracy but few connect well to the institutionalized democratic context. This paper explores how political innovations can be successfully embedded in existing democratic systems. It builds upon both the literature on political innovation and on new democratic arrangements and studies a practice of aleator...

Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analys...

Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, sm...

This article examines to what extent transparency is a condition for the creation of public value. Transparency is usually narrowly defined as a tool for external stakeholders to monitor the internal workings of an organization, but public value management positions transparency as a broader instrument for actively engaging stakeholders. We investi...