Big Data for Policymaking: Great Expectations, but with Limited Progress?

Abstract

While talk of “Big Data” is now prevalent in many sectors, there are still relatively few examples of Big Data being used to shape public policy. This article reports an international study of Big Data for policy initiatives to understand the role played by data‐driven approaches in the policy process. Drawing on evidence (including policy analysis and interviews with stakeholders) from 58 initiatives, we find that some policy areas, notably efforts to improve government transparency, are far more represented than others, such as use of social media data for policy evaluation. We also find Big Data used more often in the policy cycle for foresight and agenda setting, or interim evaluation and monitoring, rather than for policy implementation and ex post evaluation. Many different types of data are used in the policy process, with traditional sources such as government statistics still favored over new and emerging sources. We find that use of Big Data for public policy is therefore at an early stage, with expectations far outstripping the current reality.

A Data Ecosystem for Data-Driven Thermal Energy Transition: Reflection on Current Practice and Suggestions for Re-Design

“…Big data, and its role in both public and private decision-making, has attracted significant research in the past decade [30,31]. The literature is diverse regarding the definition of big data; a comprehensive definition, which also emphasizes the increase in scale and scope of data, addresses big data as "a step change in the scale and scope of the sources of materials (and tools for manipulating these sources) available in relation to a given object of interest" ( [32], p. 349). This working definition will be applied in this paper due to its comprehensiveness and specificity relative to the more common definition of big data in industry, where it is defined by means of five characteristics, i.e., volume, value, variety, velocity, and veracity [33].…”

“…In the heat transition, climate policy has a significant role to enable and guide the transition. Although the relevance and necessity for big and open data of adequate quality, integrity, and detail is acknowledged by the sector and studied over a wide field of applications in the energy sector, energy policy research is lacking behind other sectors in promoting open and reproducible data and methods [32,48].…”

Data Science for Local Government

“…70 Another growth area is in the form of repurposed data from sources such as social media and mobile phone companies. 71,72,73,74 These 'soft' datasets are potentially even more significant than IoT data because they are potentially much cheaper to obtain and process. 75 Fully 54 of our survey respondents (43%) mentioned making use of social media data, often in the context of public relations, whilst 31 (24%) mentioned using third party business datasets such as mobile phone data.…”

Big Data and government: Evidence of the role of Big Data for smart cities

“…There is growing optimism that government use of Big Data-the massive amount of digital data collected from various sources-will make public policymaking more citizen-focused by taking citizen preferences into account more accurately than before (Batty, 2013;Clarke and Margetts, 2014;Kim et al, 2014;Kitchin, 2014a;Malomo and Sena, 2017;Manzoor, 2015;Margetts, 2012;Margetts and Sutcliffe, 2013;Poel et al, 2018;Taylor et al, 2014). 1 Policymakers can directly observe the choices of citizens as recorded by a variety of digital systems, including mobile devices, social media, and the Internet.…”