Critical Research on the Management of Public Engagement, Vol. 30 - 2023, No. 3
Guest Edited by Ed McLuskie
The Public Engagement Industry: Distancing Publics through Managed Engagement and Ideologised Transparency
“Public Engagement” is a salient term that signifies industry-deployed strategies and tactics to manage public demands for recognition and participation in the formation of public policy. The term also includes government responses to these demands by outsourcing public-government relations to interested organisations. This Public Engagement Industry (PEI) legitimises actions and policies through consulting enterprises, public relations (PR) and commercial organisations that take advantage of weakened public spheres, to which the PEI contributes. The PEI is oriented toward officially planned outcomes by folding public concerns into formulaic engagement practices. A local example highlights generic lines of division between the PEI, its clients and resistance groups. More generally, the PEI's assumptions of communication, dialogue, deliberation, and transparency are criticised, along with its methods of data gathering that pose “public engagement” as though public stamps of approval had been demonstrated, claims that deserve critical analysis.
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Generating Public Engagement to Control Protests: State-managed Vigilantism in Poland
Based on the expanded theory of soft repression and a qualitative news frame analysis, the article traces the dynamics of the mobilisation of non-violent means to block the All-Poland Women's Strike and decrease the cost of hard repression. It unpacks two aspects of generating negative public engagement in controlling protests: the public media's use of ridicule, stigma, and silencing and calls for countermovement violence and legitimising it. The main argument is that the Polish public media used interpretative frames characteristic of soft repression to challenge the movement and determine what ordinary people could do to contain threats to the government and regime stability resulting from protests. The new empirical approach reveals the non-obvious function of soft repression acting as an incitement tool for mobilising opponents of protesters under repression to steer dissent. By going beyond traditional illegitimating and demobilising functions of soft repression, the study provides an in-depth examination of the public media's endeavours to neutralise threats to the government and stabilise the Polish political system. Integrating the theory of soft repression and negative public engagement, the study advances an explanation of a managed change in the model of protest policing, which is making vigilantes the agents of protest control.
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From Public Engagement to Violence: The Fragility and Loss of Public Engagement in Muslim Northern Nigeria
This article focuses on the complexities and losses of public engagement through counterterrorism operations in Northern Nigeria. Though public engagement by the Nigerian government had been yielding results, it dwindled as terrorists gained more acceptance among the inhabitants of Northern Nigeria. Warfare, brutality, and related actions by the government substituted for public engagement, well documented by a dearth of literature that can be read as accounts of the fragility and loss of public engagement in Northern Nigeria. Popular and interviewee accounts describe security challenges and suffering at the hands of terrorists and the Nigerian government. Public engagement gave way to militaristic, coercive, and domineering actions against the citizens of Northern Nigeria by both terrorists and the government. This engagement shift to militaristic counterterrorism operations meant the loss of popular support of the government as a fragile form of public engagement emerged that included paid protection by citizens to terrorists. Taxes paid by the citizens of Northern Nigeria to terrorists also meant protection against Nigeria's security agencies responsible for raping women or girls and destroying the natives' property in counterinsurgency operations. Recommendations conclude this article, arguing for human rights as a framework Q1 for public engagement by the Nigerian government.
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“Managing” Inaction and Public Disengagement with Climate Change: (Re)considering the Role of Climate Change Discourse in Compulsory Education
Discourse constitutes knowledge about something and the processes by which we come to know it. This is true in formal education and everyday life. In this way, both what students know about climate change and how they engage with publics about climate change are intertwined. Implementing teaching and learning about discourse in compulsory education is an opportunity to prepare young people to critically engage in public life by focusing on how to recognise and counter strategies that seek inaction as an appropriate response. In other words, by focusing on the strategies, impacts and effects of discourse in education about climate change, the ill effects of inaction associated with climate anxiety and climate fatigue can be “managed” in a long-term (re)imagination of an engaged public capable of working towards a sustainable, shared future. We contend that education about climate change discourse in global compulsory education curricula can provide young people opportunities to learn not only about climate change science, but about how to (re)consider discursive strategies used by others that otherwise promote and resist calls for action. This can produce a new generation of citizens capable, motivated and prepared to actively engage climate change discourse in public life.
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The Weaponisation of Public Comment Rules in Policy Deliberations
The Covid-19 pandemic heightened already intense and increased scrutiny of public education in recent years. The administrative impulse to stage community engagement efforts to deliberate upon these questions, however well-intentioned, rarely realises full community engagement and reflection. Based on an examination of public engagement events held at Florida schools related to the Covid-19 health crisis, the proposed essay identifies a more concerning transformation of “public comment” into a weaponisable prop for lawmakers seeking the public legitimacy necessary for their agenda, marrying the worlds of critical studies with those of public administration and its orientations. More than merely failing to genuinely engage the public, we argue that such events forestall a more productive arrangement of the democratic form that does not rely on publicness and the leader that secures that space. Ultimately, we suggest a path that affords the possibility of public engagement, but that does not seal off the possibility of that more radical democratic future to come.
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Institutional (Dis)Trust and Online Participation Roles in Vaccination Communication as Public Engagement
The study explores lay online participation in multivocal risk and crisis communication. It looks specifically at how institutional trust shapes such participation in the context of public health risks and crises. Taking the case of vaccination communication as a public engagement site, the study draws on in-depth interviews with Swedish Facebook users communicating about vaccination issues online and investigates how trust in the benevolence and competence of authorities and news media effect lay online participation. The results indicate coexisting trust and distrust when positive expectations regarding one of the dimensions (benevolence) are present alongside negative expectations regarding the other (competence). The study also demonstrates how particular trust beliefs shape online participation by identifying and describing three prominent roles deriving from these beliefs: the critics (low trust in benevolence), the ambassadors (high trust in benevolence), and the mediators (low trust in competence). Finally, the paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of how these roles can impact multivocal risk and crisis communication in the digital environment.
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Gamestop Investors as an Eng(r)aged Digital Public
The trading app Robinhood proclaims to be “on a mission to democratise finance for all,” but, during the GameStop Revolution of January 2021, Robinhood prohibited its users from selling GME. For a vocal group of users, this restricted access revealed that Robinhood’s democratising mission was a farce, and they took to Reddit to critique the company’s actions. Subsequent regulatory hearings were held, including a series by the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services that included testimony from the CEOs of both Robinhood and Reddit. We contend that participants’ arguments reflect rhetorical strategies used by technological innovators, users, and the institutions that regulate them to manage public engagement in the name of “democracy.” Using discourse from CEOs, policy makers, and redditors, we suggest that understanding the GameStop Revolution as a crisis of public engagement helps to theorise how digital publics form, how they are engaged, and how they negotiate public access and input into online infrastructures. We argue that Congressional testimony reflects critical digital publics that are necessary prerequisites for democratising digital infrastructure. While these arguments centre on the economic and the digital universe, we suggest that the insights can inform broader questions about public engagement.
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How Direct Citizen Participation Affects the Local Government Financial Condition: A Case of Participatory Budgeting in South Korea
In theory, direct citizen engagement in budgeting helps local governments reflect the citizens’ budget preferences more precisely, thereby enhancing citizen-government communication. However, the efficacies of budget participation remain ambiguous considering both its democratic values and the cost of deliberation. In this study, we test how direct citizen participation by means of participatory budgeting (PB) affects the financial condition of local governments. We use a sophisticated concept of financial condition that encompasses various abilities of local government. We measure the degree of citizen participation as the availability of institutional mechanisms associated with different levels of inclusiveness and authorities determined by South Korean local government ordinances of formal budget participation. Our empirical analysis based on South Korean local governments’ data between 2012 and 2019 reveals that a PB institution with higher participation level further worsens the local financial condition. The adverse effects are mostly identified in the mid-term and long-term financial conditions, whereas the short-term financial condition remains unaffected. The findings imply that direct participation in theory corrects mismatches between bureaucratic and citizen priorities, but, in practice, the citizens may inappropriately direct mid- and long-term oriented public investment and debt management.
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