What makes for effective and meaningful online parliamentary public engagement?

This research primarily aims to develop evaluation methods to effectively harness citizen input from large unstructured data generated automatically through digital engagement activities. It is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project with the House of Commons which combines social science and data science to analyse the online engagement activities of the UK Parliament. Digital Engagement teams within Parliament have introduced various ways of engaging with the public online including consultations and digital debates. These have been popular since they started in 2015 but attract too many responses for staff to process manually and to get a clear picture of what the public is saying. I use machine learning and text mining approaches to analyse the data gathered by Parliament to summarise and reveal the network of participant interactions so Parliament can have a more informed idea of who is participating within which social/ideological clusters. This shows a public who have a diverse set of views but can be influenced based on the channel and type of engagement they are participating in.

As the Members of Parliament are crucial to the engagement process, any way to encourage and facilitate their use of the online engagement is vital. Without input from officials overtly showing that they have listened to and incorporated the public’s opinions into their decisions, the online public engagement efforts from Parliament could be seen as insincere to many of the public. With this in mind, another aim is to explore how public opinion derived through the online engagement activities can be meaningfully incorporated into policy making. This entails working with different teams in Parliament to understand exactly how policy-makers are currently using the outputs of online engagement and how this can be improved. I conduct demonstration tests to test the methods of evaluation developed during the research and find that while these can be applied to digital engagement activities successfully to gain insights from the public, responsibility remains with the institution to ensure internal processes are equipped to make use of the public’s views.