Targeted policy making by transforming social networks

Abstract

Current economic conditions press governments worldwide to develop more efficient policies with significantly lower budgets. A possible way to achieve this is by exploiting online social networks. The tremendous impact of social networks in everyday life (e.g. obesity, financial situation, smoking etc.) is now well established in the literature. However, up to now, the impact of online social networks in policy making has not been thoroughly investigated. We claim that policies, in addition to their traditional aims, should also aim to improve the online connections of target population as this will enable more targeted thus more efficient and effective policy making. In this paper, we present this idea, relate it to traditional policy making lifecycles, and investigate relevant technological aspects. We anticipate this work will contribute to the on-going discussion on the pros and cons of exploiting online social networks in policy making.