The digital revolution enables civil servants to create innovation with others, across organizational boundaries and with larger groups. Traditional bureaucracies are challenged to put additional conditions and incentives in place to make this possible. The program ‘civil servant 2.0’, aimed at enabling and awareness raising among civil servants, itself also makes use of modern possibilities. One example is Pleio, a digital meeting place for civil servants and other officials and persons who want to share knowledge in a thematic, transboundary way. A dilemma civil servants face is that the hierarchy and the political leadership have to be open to opportunities and input generated from outside. The level of hierarchical support can be discovered when the opportunity emerges. This takes entrepreneurial civil servants: taking initiative with the aim of discovering emerging opportunities in the outside world before it is known how these will be evaluated by the hierarchy. Other enabling conditions are that this activity needs to be possible without taking-up too much of their time, a culture of transparency, the possibility to link with the world through modern ICT (despite possible risks), a safe hierarchical environment, and novel ways of accounting for their output.

Not only companies and citizens, but also governmental agencies are exploring the possibilities of new technologies to communicate with citizens. This article analyzes the challenges, risks and dilemmas of social media for Dutch civil servants. The theoretical framework that is used consists of a classical and a modern approach to public administration. In the classical ‘Weberian’ model, politicians are responsible for policy-making (and communication about it) and civil servants have to implement policies (‘the primacy of politics’). This principal approach implies a limited role of civil servants in social media. However, the modern approach to civil servants highlights their expertise and distinctive responsibilities. The pragmatical approach leaves more space for active participation of civil servants on the internet. Nevertheless, a fundamental reflection about the primacy of politics, the role of governmental communication and culture in the social media landscape remains necessary.

In this literature review we present and discuss the key concepts of this symposium issue: (good) governance, (public) values, and the management of tensions between public values. The article concludes with an overview of strategies on how to deal with public values as a prelude to the remainder of the symposium, and discusses the implications of the distinguished strategies for public administration practice.

Whilst embedding democratic innovations that increase and deepen citizen participation in decision making now is a common policy of governments in many countries, and theorists in democratic theory also tend to emphasize how good citizen participation is to democracy, the empirical evaluation of democratic innovations is still a rather unexplored area of research.

This article evaluates two types of democratic innovations, participatory governance and deliberative forums in the Netherlands and a large number of other Western countries. The findings show, for both types of innovation, that citizen participation contributes to the quality of democracy in several ways. The analysis also makes it clear that different designs produce different democratic effects, which also reflects tensions between democratic values; participatory governance projects are better at giving citizens influence, whereas deliberative forums appear to be better at promoting the exchange of arguments. Also, whereas cases of participatory governance are more open than deliberative forums, representation is higher for the deliberative type of cases. As a consequence politicians and policy makers can have a major impact on democracy; by choosing for a specific design of citizen participation they may encourage certain aspects of democracy more than others.