Costa Rica

Your Local Representatives

Your Local Representatives is a collaborative platform that allowed people to learn more about the candidates for the municipal elections of February 7, 2016. The project website made it possible for citizens to search for or add information about candidates for mayors and councilors in the 81 Cantons of the country. The website was a database of collective creation, so the goal was for the same citizens to enter information about the candidates who will represent them at the local level during the next four years. The information that could be included for each candidate included his or her photograph, email, social network accounts, official website, position in the party list, profession and important positions, among others. Unlike the information located on the website of the Supreme Election Tribunal, which is official and includes only the information provided by the parties, Your Local Representatives - as a citizen initiative - had greater flexibility in investigating and collecting data, which can come from sources as varied as party publications on social networks, press articles or interviews with candidates in local media. An important aspect of the platform was that all data collected was made available to the public under an open license.

Institutional design

?

Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?

Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?

Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?

Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?

Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?

Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?

Formalization
not backed by constitution nor legislation, nor by any governmental policy or program 
Frequency
single
Mode of selection of participants
open 
Type of participants
citizens  
Decisiveness
democratic innovation yields no decision  
Co-Governance
no 

Means


  • Deliberation
  • Direct Voting
  • E-Participation
  • Citizen Representation

Ends


  • Accountability
  • Responsiveness
  • Rule of Law
  • Political Inclusion
  • Social Equality

Policy cycle

Agenda setting
Formulation and decision-making
Implementation
Policy Evaluation

Sources

How to quote

Do you want to use the data from this website? Here’s how to cite:

Pogrebinschi, Thamy. (2017). LATINNO Dataset. Berlin: WZB.

Would you like to contribute to our database?

Send us a case