Deepening Democracy, Yours Digitally

In the early 2000s, the internet was a tool with infinite possibilities. Leading the way was social media, with its promise of user-generated content, interactivity, and networking. Over the next two decades, it would revolutionise how we communicate, share information, and collaborate online. At no other point in human history have governments had such an opportunity to involve people at the last mile in policy making. While social media’s role in awareness generation and policy implementation is well established, governments can realise its full potential by utilising it for policy formulation and execution.

Social media, in the hands of a savvy government, makes for a powerful tool. Using images, audio and video to frame and drive narratives enhances the state’s communicative power. Social media instantly connects people nationwide, allowing them to be mobilised towards a specific goal with low interaction costs. Governments can use social media analytics to gauge the sentiments and views of target groups. Some governments have even used networking platforms to crowdsource solutions to real-world problems. On this front, the Government of India has made a good start by integrating its citizen engagement platform, mygov.in, with various social media platforms, allowing citizens to co-design policy and create feedback loops on key policy issues.

Increasing the State’s Digital Capacity

It is fair to ask what has held governments back from leveraging the full potential of social media. The two key reasons are the language divide and the digital divide. The ‘language divide’ emanates from the predominance of English in policy drafts leading to a majority of citizens being unable to participate in policy discussions. The India Inequality Report 2022 by Oxfam India views ‘digital divide’ as the sum of two deprivations, namely access to devices and internet, and technological know-how.

These twin divides have real-world consequences when governments attempt to design policies on subjects such as environmental protection. The majority of people most affected by environmental hazards in India are neither homogeneous nor digitally savvy. The government needs to adequately capture their voices, so that its environmental policy is proactive and well-designed. The experience of the last eight years of the Digital India Mission shows that there are ways to achieve this.

In Mass Media, Politics and Democracy, John Street distinguishes three forms of power that mass media exercise – access power, by which it controls the range of voices or interests on any issue; discursive power, by which the media sets agendas and frames narratives; and resource power, or the bargaining power of media organisations to act as the voice of the people. A similar framework can be applied to social media as a tool employed by the state.

Addressing Access

The government must seek to widen the range of voices heard in policy deliberations since evidence-based policymaking is most successful when referring to diversified information sources. Social media can be just the tool policymakers need to expand access. Some local government agencies have led the way. For instance, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority took to Twitter in June 2023 to solicit opinions from citizens, which will inform the design of Chennai’s third master plan. In order to replicate these methods of citizen engagement at the national level, the government must address people in their languages using social networks that they frequent, including regional language media. Government must also make efforts to incorporate public voices at the inception and design stages of policymaking.

Deepening the Discourse

Consensus building can be an arduous and time-consuming task. However, it forms the core of the democratic legitimacy of any government. There are plenty of policies that failed to achieve their objective due to a lack of public consensus. As a collaborative ecosystem, social media to drive wide-ranging discourse between a network of stakeholders. This will involve breaking down various facets of government policies and explaining their implications in relatable terms using podcasts, videos, and reels. By helping citizens build the capacity to analyse and debate public policy, the government can empower communities to set their own governance agendas. These steps will help the government not only to strengthen its reach but also to improve the implementation of its policies.

Resource Mobilisation

The government can leverage various digital resources to strengthen the voice and bargaining power of individuals vis-à-vis entrenched interest groups. For example, the geo-location of most affected populations on social media can help inform resource allocation. The government can use recurrent neural networks and natural language processing to conduct sentiment analysis using social media data to anticipate and pre-empt any likely policy failures. Generative AI can ease translations and create a digital repository of content translated into Indian languages; Project Bhashini of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has spearheaded this work.

The purpose of these efforts is to create capabilities, not dependencies. As citizens understand their role in the policymaking process, they are more likely to participate. In the digital age, fostering citizen-centric governance is more achievable than ever. The result would be greater trust in the democratic process through a deliberative policymaking process that is ‘yours digitally.’

Tarun Nagrani is a senior communications professional. Akshay Bhagwat is an environmental researcher working in the development sector