The Effect of Citizenship on Enhancing Social Accountability in the Ministry of Social Development. Ramallah and Al-Bireh Governorate as a Model.

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the impact of citizenship on reinforcing social accountability in Ramallah and Al-Bireh Governorate, as well as to identify the availability for legal, social and affiliational citizenship scopes. The researcher adopted the descriptive analytical approach to achieve the desired goals of this study. The study population consisted of citizens who benefited from financial aid provided by the Ministry of Social Development in Ramallah and Al-Bireh Governorate, and their number reached (2623) families according to the citizen’s budget for the year 2021, which had issued by the Ministry of Social Development. A simple random sample of (15%) was selected from the study population, and the sample size was (400) families. The study questionnaire distributed to them, and the number of returned questionnaires was (396). Among the most prominent results of the study is that the field of citizenship obtained an arithmetic average of (4.08), with a high rank, which indicates the clarity of the ‘citizenship’ concept among citizens and their knowledge of their duties and rights. The field of social accountability obtained a middle rank with an arithmetic average of (2.09), which reflects a gap in the citizens’ knowledge of their ability to undertake social accountability or the extent of their participation in it, in addition to the existence of a positive statistically significant relationship at the significance level of (0.05≥α) between citizenship, social accountability and its sub-domains (community work, transparency, community censorship, and societal responses). This relationship is a positive relationship between the medium and the weak scopes. As for the recommendations, the most prominent recommendations of the study were the need to strengthen citizenship through a set of measures at the national and societal level by strengthening its dimensions; the legal, affiliational , and social among citizens due to its importance in creating good citizenship which enhances societal accountability of both the Ministry of Social Development and citizens as well, and the need to enhance transparency within the Ministry of Social Development through the implementation of the national policy agenda and the directions of the Ministry of Social Development contained in its strategic plan, being one of the requirements of Governance, and strengthening the response of the Ministry of Social Development being one of the pillars of social accountability.