Abstract:
Active and meaningful civic participation is a distinguished feature of democratic societies. Effective civic participation can be measured by analyzing the extent to which a government creates effective participation spaces, including digital spaces, for citizens to hold them accountable on their promises. This study examined digital civic participation in Kenya with a focus on the country’s development goal, the Big Four Agenda, using the government-generated hashtag, #Big4Agenda, initiated on December 31, 2017. The study analyzed the Twitter hashtag #Big4Agenda between July 1, 2018 and December 31, 2018, the first half of the fiscal year 2018-2019. The Honeycomb social media functional model by Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, and Silvestre theoretical framework guided this study, and used content analysis to purposively mine tweets for analysis. Crimson Hexagon, an artificial intelligence-powered consumer insights tool, was used to mine tweets under the hashtag #Big4Agenda. SPSS 24, Microsoft Excel and Word cloud tools were used to analyze the data and also calculate the chi square correlations. The study established a significant use of Twitter for digital participation in Kenya as 986 tweets connected to the hashtag were posted from 645 users. The study established that Kenyans on Twitter (#KOT) were 37.78 per cent at the top of social influencers of the content linked to the Twitter hashtag #Big4Agenda,; these were followed by media personalities and media houses, each scoring 13.33% per cent, followed by government officials at 11.11 per cent were. Official government office accounts, private institutions, and nonprofit organizations each scored 6.67 per cent. The study also established that the hashtag users mainly used it for general information sharing (30.08%) followed by issue discussion (19.92%), then citizen comment and complaints (15.45%). The findings of this study led to a recommendation for the Kenyan government through the PSCU to devise ways to improve digital civic participation by using Twitter to have meaningful conversations with citizens at the intersection of people, technology, and public communication. Specifically, the focus is on sharing content and engaging citizens from a point of knowledge. The study also recommends further scientific research looking specifically at the impact of digital civic participation with the appreciation that social media channels such as Twitter can improve government communication with the public and enhance public participation. Twitter’s privacy setting where demographics data was not available limited this study’s findings and therefore recommends more research using big data to give in-depth analysis on digital civic participation on Twitter.
