Janne Berg

• PhD in political science and mass communication
• Lecturer at Åbo Akademi University

Democratic innovations are brought forward by political scientists as a response to worrying democratic deficits. This paper aims to evaluate the design, process, and outcome of digital democratic innovations. We study a mobile application for following local politics. Data is collected using three online surveys with different groups, and a worksh...

With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so-called mixed deliberations, is increasing too. While these are important steps towards more deliberative systems, the mixed deliberation setting nonetheless introduces certain risks regarding...

Municipal mergers are typically contentious and polarizing issues among both citizens and politicians. In deciding on these, municipal-level referendums are often commissioned by municipal councils. Referendums, though, are also per se polarizing processes that only exacerbate an already polarizing issue. Adding deliberation to referendum processes...

Civic technology is used to improve not only policies, but to reinforce politics and has the potential to strengthen democracy. A search for new ways of involving citizens in decision-making processes combined with a growing smartphone penetration rate has generated expectations around smartphones as democratic tools. However, if civic applications...

Democratic innovations have been suggested as one way of increasing public participation in political processes. Civic technology may provide resources for improving transparency, publicity, and accountability in political processes. This paper is about the development of a smartphone application that provides users with information on municipal po...

This article reports on deliberation between citizens and politicians in a citizens’ forum about closing small schools and building a school center in a Finnish municipality. This real-world policy issue was highly contested at the time of the deliberation. The purpose of the study was to analyze both the magnitude of opinion changes and potential...

The objective of this thesis is to gain knowledge about citizens’ online political participation in contemporary democracies. Some scholars have regarded the internet as a potential remedy to decreasing levels of traditional political participation. This is partly because the internet expands the political participation repertoire for citizens. On...

This paper analyzes anonymous political participation in the form of e-petition signing. The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about patterns behind anonymous e-petition signing. Since online political participation evokes an important discussion about the balance between the need for transparency on the one hand, and the right for ano...

This paper contributes to the field of e-participation by studying e-petitioning on both formal and informal petition bodies. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the features of formal and informal e-petition platforms as well as the characteristics of the e-petitions. A formal (kansalaisaloite.fi) and an informal e-petition platform (...

The quality of online political discussion is a concern regarding the democratic potential of the Internet. Although there is empirical evidence of the highs and lows in terms of the quality of online discussion, little is known about how different factors affect the discussion quality. Moreover, the effects of anonymity and issue controversiality...

There is a perception that citizen deliberation brings about higher-quality discussions than discussions where deliberative norms are not used. Often, deliberations are realised in mini-publics in which certain contextual features ensure, a priori, that the discussions are likely to be of a high quality. However, few studies have as yet explored th...

As discussoes online entre cidadaos sao objeto de discussao academica e de diversos estudos empiricos ha varios anos, tendo os estudiosos perspetivado estas discussoes como potenciais lugares de deliberacao dos cidadaos. Muitas vezes, contudo, os resultados empiricos nao sustentam estas nocoes. A qualidade da discussao nao e, frequentemente, adequa...

Resumo Online discussions between citizens have been subject to scholarly debate and several empirical studies for a substantial period of time. Scholars have envisioned these as potential venues for citizens’ deliberation. Often, however, empirical findings do not support these notions. The quality of discussion is often not up to the standards o...