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Citizen participation has always been considered one of the key pillars of open government: providing citizens with government information should enable them to participate effectively in decision-making or other government procedures. Despite this obvious connection between open government data (OGD) and citizen participation in theory, their relationship turns out to be much more complicated in practice, as OGD is hardly used in practice to hold the government accountable or change government policy. This introduction argues for a reconceptualization of the idea of citizen participation in relation to OGD, moving away from the 'more is better' approach towards a more refined understanding of different levels of citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance indicators have had to endure severe criticism. They are said to lack accuracy, encourage gaming and ultimately fail to improve performance. Yet, despite their well-documented weaknesses, performance indicators abound in governance. This article asks under which conditions performance indicators can improve performance outcomes, despite these proven weaknesses and dysfunctions. Our case study is the stress test of the European banking system, a high-profile performance indicator used for risk regulation. Based on interviews with risk managers in Belgian banks as well as staff at the European Central Bank, the European Banking Authority and the National Bank of Belgium, we find that the process of calculating the stress test improves performance outcomes in itself. It does so by fostering banks' capacity to self-regulate, tying into Foucault's notion of governmentality. As such, practitioners and academics should not only pay attention to how performance results can be used, but also examine how the process of calculating the performance indicator might be designed to improve performance outcomes latently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stress test of the European Central Bank has become one of the primary regulatory tools for the European banking system. In order to make such a regulatory indicator, different national banks need to be commensurated. They need to be made comparable according to a common metric. Despite a substantive literature, little empirical work has been done to further our understanding of the social and political processes through which these indicators are made. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to enrich the existing literature with an in-depth account of how commensuration is negotiated. We find that despite a preference for commensuration, regulators allow 'incommensurable' categories to exist due to largely unrecognized regulatory benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]