Coordination between Governmental Resources and Citizen Engagement with Open Government Data: A Coupling Coordinated Model

What is it about?

Abstract: Government resources used for opening data and citizen engagement with open government data (OGD) are expected to have a mutual influence, but this has not been empirically investigated. Therefore, this paper investigates this mutual relationship by measuring both governmental resources and citizen engagement based on resource-based theory. The weight of their measurements is evaluated by the entropy method. Data was collected from 337 Chinese municipal governments to investigate whether governmental resources and citizen engagement with OGD are dependent. The findings by a coupling coordinated model and regression analysis revelated that: Although governmental resources and citizen engagement with OGD have a strong interaction, the coordination between them is low. An explanation for this is that the development of citizen engagement with OGD lags behind the deployment of governmental resources in most Chinese cities.

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Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper focuses on investigating whether the governmental resource and citizen engagement with OGD are coordinated and what factors affect the coordination. Based on the resource-based theory, a model for governmental resources consisting of tangible, intangible, and human resources is developed. 337 Chinese municipal cities are analyzed to investigate its mutual effects and citizen engagement. The findings show that although governmental resources and citizen engagement with OGD have a strong interaction, their coordination is very low. The reason for this low coordination is that the development of citizen engagement with OGD lags behind the governmental resource in most Chinese municipal cities. The coordination between data supply and demand has received attention but lacks empirical investigation. This paper tries to investigate it by building a model of government resources and offering a coupling coordinated analysis. Methodologically, we first introduce the method of a coupling coordinated model in the OGD field. It is a common research method and can also be used in any other social science and natural science domain.

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