People stop taking part when their input visibly changes nothing
Hook
You write a comment on a city consultation and then comes silence. You never learn whether anyone read it.
Claim
Young people not voting, and disengagement in general, are symptoms. When decisions cannot be traced to results and nobody answers, staying out is a reasonable response. The loop has four steps: people speak, views are summarised, the body decides, and it shows publicly how the input changed the decision. Almost everyone skips the fourth. Without it, participation is a survey, not democracy.
Story
Sources
- section 3, this argument and the why-chain
- C5, C7: ideas only, numbers date from July
Check before posting
- Turnout data by age, Croatia against the EU, is still missing.
Counterargument
Apathy exists even where systems respond. And officials cannot act on every input, so some outcomes will always look unchanged.
Post angles
Facebook (Croatian)
- Napišete komentar na javno savjetovanje i nastane tišina. Ne saznate je li ga itko pročitao. Ta tišina je razlog zašto ljudi odustanu, a ne lijenost.
- Kutija za prijedloge ispunila je zakonsku obvezu i nije promijenila nijednu odluku. Pitanje nije koliko je ljudi sudjelovalo, nego što se zbog toga promijenilo.
LinkedIn (English)
- You comment on a public consultation and nothing happens. You never find out if anyone read it. That silence is the reason people give up.
- The last step of participation is the one almost everybody skips: showing publicly how the input changed the decision.
Links
- Systems fail when true information stops reaching the people who can act on it
- Croatia votes at about 62 percent in national elections and about 21 percent in European ones
- Putnam found Italian regional governments worked best where citizens already had civic habits
- Hear the quiet middle instead of the loud forty
- Everything is one tap away except finding out how your city works