Here’s a link to something I co-authored with Hazel Hall and Bruce Ryan: a paper which explores how elected (yet unpaid) community councillors in Scotland exploit information channels for democratic engagement with the citizens that they represent. We demonstrate that community councillors engage with a range of information sources and tools in their work. The most important of which derives from local authorities: Citizens were not seen as a useful source of information.
The relative lack of interest in citizens might be an unexpected result – but we found that Activity Theory provided a useful tool for understaning why.
Find out more via Practices of community representatives in exploiting information channels for citizen democratic engagement: paper available on OnlineFirst
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