Assessing the Maturity of Citizen Reporting Platforms: Unpacking Dimensions, Disparities, and Determinants

Citizen reporting platforms (CRPs) are widely adopted and frequently framed as tools for citizen involvement in service assessment. Yet little is known about the extent to which these platforms move beyond one-way issue reporting to support more substantive forms of citizen involvement. This article develops a multidimensional framework and applies it to 194 CRPs across German mid-sized municipalities, a group overlooked in prior research. Drawing on the DeLone and McLean information systems success model and co-production research, we conceptualize maturity as the breadth and combination of platform features across four dimensions: communication, usability, responsiveness, and accountability. We find substantial variation in overall maturity. Usability is the most developed dimension, whereas responsiveness and accountability are markedly less common, producing an accountability gap in the conditions for visible, traceable, and evaluable forms of citizen involvement. Responsiveness and accountability tend to co-occur on platforms with more developed usability infrastructures—a cumulative pattern. Regression analyses identify external implementation as the strongest and most consistent correlate of maturity, while municipal responsiveness to a platform-related inquiry is a more limited but significant factor. The study provides a transferable assessment framework and highlights the gap between basic reporting and the platform-side design conditions for fuller co-assessment.