People's outcomes for public decision making in Russia

This paper aims to investigate the outcomes of participatory processes in an e-petition portal. In order to understand the decisions made by governmental bodies based on the proposals for policy changes provided by citizens this research uses a qualitative, case study-based approach. The selected case is the e-petition portal called "Russian Public Initiative" (RPI), since this portal is the one officially recognized tool for collection citizens' petitions at all levels (federal, regional, and municipal). The data collected includes 9800 initiatives on the portal. The findings show that only 25 initiatives (0.26%) received any solution, being 88% of the successful petitions at the federal level, and the rest 12%- at the municipal level. We have revealed that Russian Public Initiative pretending to serve as a decision- tool in practice presents more a consultation tool.