The Domestication of Open Government Data Advocacy in the UK: A Neo-Gramsican Analysis

The article adopts a neo-Gramscian analytical framework developed in the field of International Political Economy in order to analyze the relationship between an online collective of civil society actors and U.K. government policymakers in the case of the UK's Open Government Data (OGD) initiative. The aim of the article is to consider the neo-Gramscian notion of trasformismo as a useful conceptual tool for exploring the relations between the OGD advocates and policymakers within the U.K. state. Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the notion of trasformismo is able to illuminate some of the political processes of absorption, adaptation, and distortion which have emerged during the development of the UK's OGD initiative, and which have functioned to restrict the counterhegemonic potential of OGD in order to shape the initiative toward a distinctly neoliberal framework for action.