Embedding persuasive features into policy issues: Implications to designing public participation processes
基于说服理论，研究在电子参与环境中，将偏好匹配、地点匹配、社会认同和权威等说服性特征嵌入政策议题，能否吸引更多关注、延长思考时间并提高参与度。通过80名英国和土耳其实验者的测试，发现混合中央和外围特征最有效。
Public participation is one of the most important tasks for policy making processes, and public authorities are lacking ideas on designing public participation processes facilitating active citizen participation. Based on a persuasion theory, this paper examines if policy issues embedded with persuasive features draw more attention, longer elaboration time and more participation. Particularly preference matching, location matching, social proof and authority are identified as persuasive features in e-participation context and propositions on their impacts on citizens' participation processes are developed. A prototype mobile participation tool is developed to test the propositions and tested by 80 experiment participants in the UK and Turkey. The findings indicate that the mixture of central and peripheral features is most effective in drawing participation while single feature has limitations. This study also argues that the design of e-participation tools needs to consider the psychological aspects of citizens for motivating their participations.