One moment, please: can the speed and quality of political contact affect democratic health

Contact between politicians and their constituents is the cornerstone of democracies globally but an area of scholarship that remains relatively underdeveloped. Political contact can help convey authority, provide legitimacy and facilitate governance. This article goes beyond the assumption that representatives need to communicate more with the public and suggests, instead, that the quality of contact matters. Focusing on four processes by which citizens can contact their representatives (face-to-face, by letter, email or social media), we employ an experimental vignette methodology to test whether the character and timeliness of politicians’ responses to citizen communication affects two indicators of democratic health: (a) the latter’s satisfaction with political contact and (b) their likelihood to re-contact representatives. Our findings provide evidence that personalised communication and to a smaller extent, speed of response, can influence citizen satisfaction and their likelihood of re-engagement. This suggests politicians can improve these indicators of democratic health by adjusting the style of political contact and communication

Intelligent Monitoring and Controlling of Public Policies Using Social Media and Cloud Computing

Part 3: Government and InfrastructureInternational audienceLack of public participation in various policy making decision has always been a major cause of concern for government all around the world while formulating as well as evaluating such policies. With availability of latest IT infrastructure and the migration of government think-tank towards realizing more efficient cloud based e-government, this problem has been partially answered, but this predicament still persists. However, the exponential rise in usage of social media platforms by general public has given the government a wider insight to overcome this long pending dilemma. This paper presents a pragmatic approach that combines the capabilities of cloud computing and social media analytics towards efficient monitoring and controlling of public policies. The proposed arrangement has provided us some encouraging results, when tested for the policy of the century i.e. GST implementation by Indian government and established that proposed system can be successfully implemented for efficient policy making and implementation