Presenter: Antonis Athanasiou, AUEB
Date: 22 April 2024

Public consultations and eParticipation initiatives have been a subject of research for many years. The Greek ICT-enabled consultation platform, Opengov, is used as a case study to measure consultation impact on voted law. Literature generally agrees that the goal of consultations is — among others — impact on developed policy, however there is not a universally accepted way of measuring this impact. This thesipos takes its own approach to defining impact as the similarity between draft legislation and voted legislation. Work from the public consultation field and the Natural Language Processing is presented. An extensive data collection and extraction process was necessary for this analysis which is also shown. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analysis was used to assert and quantify impact. Results show, among other explanatory variables, that the more contributions draft legislation gets, the more it changes on average. The thesis finishes with discussion of the results, the limitations of the selected approach and suggests ideas for improvement.