As part of his Master’s thesis in the MA Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Boris Thome dealt with the classification of participation contributions according to the topics they contain. This thesis continues the work of Julia Romberg and Tobias Escher by examining a finer classification of contributions according to subcategories.
Summary
Political authorities in democratic countries regularly consult the public on specific issues but subsequently evaluating the contributions requires substantial human resources, often leading to inefficiencies and delays in the decision-making process. Among the solutions proposed is to support human analysts by thematically grouping the contributions through automated means.
While supervised machine learning would naturally lend itself to the task of classifying citizens’ proposal according to certain predefined topics, the amount of training data required is often prohibitive given the idiosyncratic nature of most public participation processes. One potential solution to minimize the amount of training data is the use of active learning. In our previous work, we were able to show that active learning can significantly reduce the manual annotation effort for coding top-level categories. In this work, we subsequently investigated whether this advantage is still given when the top-level categories are subdivided into subcategories. A particular challenge arises from the fact that some of the subcategories can be very rare and therefore only cover a few contributions.
In the evaluation of various methods, data from online participation processes in three German cities was used. The results show that the automatic classification of subcategories is significantly more difficult than the classification of the main categories. This is due to the high number of possible subcategories (30 in the dataset under consideration), which are very unevenly distributed. In conclusion, further research is required to find a practical solution for the flexible assignment of subcategories using machine learning.
Publication
Thome, Boris (2022): Thematische Klassifikation von Partizipationsverfahren mit Active Learning. Masterarbeit am Institut für Informatik, Lehrstuhl für Datenbanken und Informationssysteme, der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. (Download)
As part of her master’s thesis in the MA Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Suzan Padjman dealt with the classification of argumentation components in participation contributions. This thesis continues our team’s previous work by looking at cases in which argumentative sentences can contain both a premise and a conclusion.
Summary
Public participation processes allow citizens to engage in municipal decision-making processes by expressing their opinions on specific issues. Municipalities often only have limited resources to analyze a possibly large amount of textual contributions that need to be evaluated in a timely and detailed manner. Automated support for the evaluation is therefore essential, e.g. to analyze arguments.
When classifying argumentative sentences according to type (here: premise or conclusion), it can happen that one sentence contains several components of an argument. In this case, there is a need for multi-label classification, in which more than one category can be assigned.
To solve this problem, different methods for multi-label classification of argumentation components were compared (SVM, XGBoost, BERT and DistilBERT). The results showed that BERT models can achieve a macro F1 score of up to 0.92. The models exhibit robust performance across different datasets – an important indication of the practical usability of such methods.
Publication
Padjman, Suzan (2022): Mining Argument Components in Public Participation Processes. Masterarbeit am Institut für Informatik, Lehrstuhl für Datenbanken und Informationssysteme, der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. (Download)
As part of her project work in the MA Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Suzan Padjman worked on the development of methods for the automated recognition of textually described location information in participation procedures.
Summary
In the context of the mobility transition, consultative processes are a popular tool for giving citizens the opportunity to represent and contribute their interests and concerns. Especially in the case of mobility-related issues, an important analysis aspect of the collected contributions is which locations (e.g. roads, intersections, cycle paths or footpaths) are problematic and in need of improvement in order to promote sustainable mobility. Automated identification of such locations has the potential to support the resource-intensive manual evaluation.
The aim of this work was therefore to find an automated solution for identifying locations using methods from natural language processing (NLP). For this purpose, a location was defined as the description of a specific place of a proposal, which could be marked on a map. Examples of locations are street names, city districts and clearly assignable places, such as “in the city center” or “at the exit of the main train station”. Pure descriptions without reference to a specific place were not considered as locations. Methodologically, the task was regarded as a sequence labeling task, as locations often consist of several consecutive tokens, so-called word sequences.
A comparison of different models (spaCy NER, GermanBERT, GBERT, dbmdz BERT, GELECTRA, multilingual BERT, multilingual XLM-RoBERTa) on two German-language participation datasets on cycling infrastructure in Bonn and Cologne Ehrenfeld showed that GermanBERT achieves the best results. This model can recognize tokens that are part of a textual location description with a promising macro F1 score of 0.945. In future work, it is planned to convert the recognized text phrases into geocoordinates in order to depict the recognized location of citizens’ proposals on a map.
Publication
Padjman, Suzan (2021): Unterstützung der Auswertung von verkehrsbezogenen Bürger*innenbeteiligungsverfahren durch die automatisierte Erkennung von Verortungen. Projektarbeit am Institut für Informatik, Lehrstuhl für Datenbanken und Informationssysteme, der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. (Download)
In this article in the journal Policy & Internet, Tobias Escher and Bastian Rottinghaus explore the question of how participation in local consultation processes (on planning of cycling infrastructure) affects attitudes towards local politics. To this end, in 2018 they examined a total of three participation procedures in which the cities of Bonn, Cologne (district Ehrenfeld) and Moers consulted their citizens on local cycling infrastructure. In each case, for five weeks citizens were able to submit, comment on and evaluate proposals through an online platform. In total, more than 3,000 proposals were collected which were to be incorporated into the subsequent cycling planning (see further information on the Cycling Dialogues project).
Abstract
In order to generate legitimacy for policies and political institutions, governments regularly involve citizens in the decision-making process, increasingly so via the Internet. This research investigates if online participation does indeed impact positively on legitimacy beliefs of those citizens engaging with the process, and which particular aspects of the participation process, the individual participants and the local context contribute to these changes. Our surveys of participants in almost identical online consultations in three German municipalities show that the participation process and its expected results have a sizeable effect on satisfaction with local political authorities and local regime performance. While most participants report at least slightly more positive perceptions that are mainly output-oriented, for some engagement with the process leads not to more, but in fact to less legitimacy. We find this to be the case both for those participants who remain silent and for those who participate intensively. Our results also confirm the important role of existing individual resources and context-related attitudes such as trust in and satisfaction with local (not national) politics. Finally, our analysis shows that online participation is able to enable constructive discussion, deliver useful results and attract people who would not have participated offline to engage.
Key findings
The participation processes we studied and to which citizens were invited by their respective councils do indeed have an influence on the attitudes of those who participate in such consultations.
For many of the participants, the positive effect that was hoped for does indeed occur: they are more positive about the local institutions (mayor, administration) and local politics as a whole. The decisive factor for the assessment is whether one expects local politics to take the citizens’ proposals seriously and act upon them. In other words, the result of the process is more important for attitudes than the process itself.
It is noteworthy that this holds true also for those who have rather negative views of local politics to begin with. However, previous experience with local politics also plays a role: those who already have a higher level of satisfaction and trust in the municipality are becoming more positive by participation.
At the same time, participation can also lead to less satisfaction. We were able to show this, on the one hand, for those who were intensively involved in the participation process and made a lot of proposals. On average, this group was less satisfied in the end, probably because their expectations of the impact of their efforts were disappointed. Those who did not actively participate but only visited the online procedure without making suggestions themselves were also more dissatisfied. These people were apparently mainly concerned about the fact that the process took place exclusively online.
Overall, however, our results show that such online participation processes not only enable constructive participation, but that they also reach additional groups: Almost half of the respondents would not have participated if the process had only been conducted with on-site formats requiring physical presence.
Publication
Escher, Tobias; Rottinghaus, Bastian (2023): Effects of online citizen participation on legitimacy beliefs in local government. Evidence from a comparative study of online participation platforms in three German municipalities. In: Policy & Internet, Artikel poi3.371. DOI: 10.1002/poi3.371.
On 25 & 26 October the three SÖF junior research groups with a focus on mobility met in Hannover to exchange insight from their current research, identify common themes and discuss possible future opportunities for collaboration.
In this article in the journal Raumforschung und Raumordnung, Laura Mark, Katharina Holec and Tobias Escher present the results of a survey on the scope and organisation of consultation in mobility-related municipal planning. From these results, conclusions can be drawn about the participation landscape in Germany.
The results were presented in an earlier version at the 18th annual conference of the Mobility and Transport Working Group (AK MoVe) in June 2023.
Abstract
Municipalities as key actors in the transport transition are increasingly using consultative public participation in planning. So far, however, it is unclear to what extent they use participatory processes in mobility-related planning and how these are designed. Given the challenges associated with the transition to a climate-neutral transport system, taking stock of existing efforts is highly relevant in order to assess the practical significance of participation processes and to better investigate the role of different types of procedures and contexts.
This study fills this gap based on an analysis of the consultative, discursive participation processes for mobility-related planning in German cities since 2015. The study examined ‘participation-oriented’ cities with guidelines for citizen participation, which were compared to a random selection of ‘typical’ municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Saxony as well as the three German city states.
Based on these approximately 180 cities and 350 procedures, it becomes clear that discursive consultations are carried out regularly, in particular in municipalities with guidelines and larger cities. Worth criticizing is that the formats used can usually reach only certain groups of the population and that for a significant proportion of the processes examined no information on the results of participation can be found. This means that the potentials of discursive citizen participation in addressing the municipal transport transition have not yet been sufficiently utilised.
Key Findings
Participation in municipal planning procedures related to mobility is no longer an exception, but not yet the rule either. Based on the data of our sample, it can be presumed that in most municipalities in Germany there was no possibility to participate in such procedures in the period under consideration.
In general, cities with guidelines involved their citizens more frequently, more often and with more diverse topics and formats. Medium-sized and large cities consulted their citizens significantly more often than small towns.
Weaknesses are evident in the participation formats used: The majority of municipalities relied on self-selected selection processes. First attempts with target group-specific formats or random selection can be found mainly in the municipalities with guidelines and in the city states. A large proportion of the procedures were also carried out purely online.
For 5 to 10% of the procedures, no current status could be found, and for a larger proportion it was unclear what happened after the consultation. This is true for all municipalities, although less so for those with guidelines, and can be regarded as a lack of transparency and impact of participation.
Publication
Mark, Laura; Holec, Katharina; Escher, Tobias (2024): Die Beteiligung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern bei kommunalen Mobilitätsprojekten: Eine quantitative Erhebung konsultativer Beteiligungsverfahren in Deutschland. In: RuR (Spatial Research and Planning). DOI: 10.14512/rur.2239
Database
The database, i.e. the systematically collected compilation of the participation processes and their coding according to specific aspects, can be researched and downloaded here.
In the meet the team series, we introduce a member of the research group every week to give an impression beyond the scientific work. For this purpose, our student assistant Philippe Sander asked us a few questions.
Today in the interview: Tobias. As political sociologist his research focuses in particular on the role of citizen participation for legitimacy beliefs and how these are related to the substantial “quality” of citizens’ contributions to such participation processes. In addition, he is leading the research group. More infos on his research are available here.
picture: Tilman Schenk
What inspired you to pursue a career in your research field, and how did you get started in your field?
I think it has always been important to me how people can determine their fate and how to ensure that societies agree on how they want to live together. That is why early on in my studies I was interested in political participation and its role in political decision-making. At the beginning of my research, the main focus was on the influence of the Internet. Many questions were still open at that time. One of them was, for example, whether more people would participate through these digital possibilities, or whether online participation could achieve anything at all. Meanwhile, the new media are no longer new and I’m pursuing other questions beyond that, but I’ve remained true to the topic of participation.
Can you describe your current research project and what you hope to achieve with it? What do you personally find the most interesting about it?
In our current research project, the fundamental question is how local authorities can succeed in making the transition to sustainable mobility and adapting to climate change. After all, mobility is a major factor for emissions. From my point of view, the complex issue of climate change and what we can do about it is not a technical question, but rather a social one. To be precise: How do we manage to do these things – which we know we have to do – in such a way that they are ecologically, socially and economically sustainable and accepted by the population?
How do you go about your research? What methods, theories or frameworks do you use?
Well, I think what’s exciting is that our research group works together with Sociology, Urban Planning and Computer Science in a very interdisciplinary way, and each discipline has its own theories and methods. In the field of participation research, the fundamental question is what function the participation of citizens actually has beyond elections. Of course, participatory theories of democracy provide different answers to this question than liberal or even elitist understandings of democracy. Furthermore, we deal a lot with the question of who participates at all and why, or rather why not. In my research, we are mainly relying on the Civic Voluntarism Model. Otherwise, I am primarily interested in the extent to which participation leads to greater acceptance of decisions and also of those responsible for the decision. We talk about legitimacy and work a lot with Easton, Scharpf and Norris.
Methodologically, the project is also quite exciting, because we work both quantitatively and qualitatively and try to combine both. In my research, we mainly work quantitatively, with standardized surveys and corresponding quantitative analysis methods.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work and how do you overcome them?
That we always have to keep a balance between the actual research, the management of it and the rest of the self-management. In addition, a whole series of challenges arise when science and practice collide, for example in terms of time, because we are often dependent on the planning of the cities with which we work together. In the project itself, it’s extra special because we work with different disciplines. You have to find a common language there. That’s not always easy.
How do you stay on top of the latest trends and developments in your field?
For us as scientists this can be the direct exchange with colleagues, i.e. at conferences. Otherwise, I receive regular updates on the latest articles from journals that I read and that are relevant and pertinent to my topic. I consider this to be a very good way to gain insight into current topics, methods and debates that interest me.
How do you collaborate with other researchers or experts in your field to improve your projects?
I think it is important that we regularly gather feedback, such as at colloquia for dissertations or in workshops that we organize. In the process, we then also receive feedback from people outside our project. In addition, we have a scientific advisory board for our project that gives us valuable tips. In my opinion, it is primarily the constant exchange with others that is important. This can happen informally in the university environment, by meeting in the hallway and talking about some issues, or formally at conferences.
What impact do you hope your research will have on society or the field?
Personally, I consider climate change to be the greatest challenge facing humanity. From my perspective, it is less a technical problem and more a social problem that needs to be solved. We have, for the most part, the technology to do so, but fail to agree on the necessary measures, such as a speed limit. Ideally, our research will help identify a few aspects that are likely to help with this. But we may also find situations for which it turns out that citizen participation is not the right thing to do and other formats or means need to be explored. The big question is how to succeed in bringing about the transformation to more sustainability, and we are trying to provide a small piece of the puzzle.
Can you tell us about any interesting or meaningful experiences you had during your research?
What distinguishes us is our collaboration with practice. It is always exciting to step out of academic debates and be confronted with reality. This might also give new insights. As I said, it’s not always easy, but that’s what I really appreciate. Perhaps a bit more general, but what I also find an important experience: learning how nice it is when other people you accompanied at the beginning of their scientific career do a good job and that you perhaps had a certain part in helping them develop their potential.
What advice do you have for students and aspiring scientists just starting out in their careers?
The first question to ask yourself is: What interests me? The balance between openness and perseverance is important here. In other words, not blindly following trends and hastily dropping topics, but also not being resistant to advice and suggestions of others. The second is more of a formal thing. Academic research holds an incredible amount of possibilities. The upside is, you can always work, the downside is, you will always work: these thoughts and ideas regarding your research cannot be switched off. You have to be aware of that and decide for yourself if it fits with your personal plans in life.
Lastly, can you tell us a little about yourself outside of your work? What hobbies or interests do you pursue in your spare time, and how do they complement your research?
The topic of environmental protection is also one that accompanies me personally. To ask what we can do, and how we can perhaps also convince others to do a bit more than they are doing now. That‘s a nice connection between what is important to me personally and what I can do in my research. And that’s the way it should be. Apart from that, I have a family and can therefore rarely complain about boredom.
In her thesis for the MA Social Sciences: Social Structures and Democratic Governance at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Maria Antonia Dausner has investigated the possibilities of pupil participation during the Covid-19-related school closures, focusing on an analysis of selected elementary schools in North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the meet the team series, we introduce a member of the research group every week to give an impression beyond the scientific work. For this purpose, our student assistant Philippe Sander asked us a few questions.
Today in the interview: Katharina Holec. She is a sociologist and works on descriptive and substantive representation in participatory decision making and legitimacy beliefs. More information on Katharina’s research can be found here.
Foto: Tilman Schenk
What inspired you to pursue a career in your research field, and how did you get started in your field?
I started studying social sciences because I was interested in the dynamics of social inequality. During my studies, I realized that it is really interesting how researchers try to make these dynamics measurable. I learnt a lot about statistics and especially tried to acquire the necessary methods to research them myself. I did not want to stop researching these dynamics at the end of my studies, so I decided to explicitly try to measure how they might be (re)produced by political decisions in the context of political consultation.
Can you describe your current research project and what you hope to achieve with it? What do you personally find the most interesting about it?
My research is about the current biases in consultative participation. I work on questions like (1) who is involved in consultative participation procedures, (2) how are these people involved and (3) how their involvement relates to their legitimacy beliefs. Democracy is built on the thought of inclusion of citizens into the policy-making process through participation. While the approach of consultative participation of issues relevant to questions of everyday life may be a good idea at first, it does not always work. While some (usually resource rich individuals) participate, others do not. So, in the end not every interest is represented. This stands in contrast with the idea of equal democratic participation and is therefore interesting and important to explore.
Wie gehst du bei deiner Forschung vor? Welche Methoden, Theorien oder Frameworks verwendest du?
I try to make differences between socio-economic groups in the field of mobility visible by looking at their social practices. I am particularly interested in the conceptualization of the outcome, i.e., the question for whom living conditions are improved by consultative participation procedure. Methodologically, I take a quantitative approach and work with a mixture of confirmatory factor analyses, OLS-regression, and panel regressions.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work and how do you overcome them?
During the collection of data, I am always confronted with the problem of not being able to represent all social groups equally well, as some participate in surveys while others do not. This makes research in a field that aspires awareness regarding inequality dynamics a bit more difficult. Further, I wonder how to address the issue that data is a great way to approximate realities, but should be interpreted with caution especially when some groups tend to participate more often in surveys than others. Of course, good data and good analysis remain the best way to approximate reality.
How do you stay on top of the latest trends and developments in your field?
Mainly through platforms like Twitter and ResearchGate, but also by meeting with research groups and attending colloquia and conferences, as well as regularly searching for new articles in relevant journals.
How do you collaborate with other researchers or experts in your field to improve your projects?
Primarily through colloquia and conferences, but also through regular exchange with the colleagues from the CIMT project. It definitely helps to establish routines through which one maintains discussion on the research topic.
What impact do you hope your research will have on society or the field?
I am hoping that based on various research (not only done by me) tools can be developed that help to make more perspectives visible in consultative participation.
Can you tell us about any interesting or meaningful experiences you had during your research?
I had some very interesting experiences during the collection process for the survey data in the project. I was the contact person for those who were asked to participate. However, learning about these reasons helps to understand why some groups are less well represented by research than others, which ultimately also enables a better interpretation of the results.
What advice do you have for students and aspiring scientists just starting out in their careers?
I would recommend to be curious and have fun with the topic you are working on. Good research is not produced under much time pressure but with constant and intense work.
Lastly, can you tell us a little about yourself outside of your work? What hobbies or interests do you pursue in your spare time, and how do they complement your research?
I DJ in clubs and am a guitarist/singer in two bands. guitar in two bands and sing. These activities make my everyday life much better.
Legitimacy is the voluntary recognition of political authority, which plays an important role in the stability and governance of political systems. At the system level, it is strongly conditioned by individual legitimacy attitudes at the micro level. The goal of our presentation is to illustrate and understand
How different objects of political support are constructed and interrelated (trust, satisfaction, and legitimacy beliefs)?
How strongly local and national political attitudes toward objects influence each other?
What individual factors ultimately influence local and national legitimacy beliefs?
To measure these relationships, we used survey data collected in the project to first operationalize the constructs of satisfaction with authority, trust in institutions, and legitimacy attitudes at the local and national levels. Methodologically, we use a confirmatory factor analysis and OLS regression.
Key Findings
Higher satisfaction with local than with national authorities, and greater trust in local than in national institutions, while mean differences in legitimacy attitudes vary
Strong correlations between the concepts of trust and satisfaction and legitimacy beliefs
Strong correlations between local and national levels for trust, satisfaction, and legitimacy beliefs
Hardly any systematic influences by individual factors on legitimacy beliefs when controlling for satisfaction and trust as influences on legitimacy
