Some Countries Like ‘Nudges’ More Than Others

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg: “All over the world, private and public institutions have been adopting “nudges” — interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but that steer people in a particular direction.

A GPS device nudges you. So does a reminder from your doctor, informing you that you have an appointment next Wednesday; an automatic enrollment policy from your employer, defaulting you into a 401(k) plan; and a calorie label at fast-food restaurants, telling you that a cheeseburger won’t be great for your waistline.

Recent evidence demonstrates that nudges can be amazingly effective — far more so, per dollar spent, than other tools, such as economic incentives. But a big question remains: Across different nations, do nudges have the same impact? Here’s a cautionary note.

One of the most famous success stories in the annals of nudging comes from the U.K. To encourage delinquent taxpayers to pay up, British officials simply informed them, by letter, that the overwhelming majority of British taxpayers pay their taxes on time.

It worked. Within just a few weeks, the letters produced millions of dollars in additional revenue. Consistent with standard findings in behavioral science, recipients of the letters didn’t like learning that they were deviating from the social norm. Like most of us, they didn’t want to be creeps or shirkers, and so they paid up.

For other nations, including the U.S., that was an intriguing finding. So our Department of Treasury tried the same approach. It sent letters to delinquent taxpayers, informing them (accurately) that 91 percent of American taxpayers pay on time. On the basis of the British data, the expectation was that a lot of people would be ashamed, and pay their taxes.

Except they didn’t. The U.S. Treasury didn’t get any more money.

How come? It’s reasonable to speculate that in the U.S., delinquent taxpayers just don’t care about the social norm. If they learn about it, they still aren’t motivated to pay.

This finding demonstrates that different groups can react very differently to nudges. It’s well known that when people are told that they are using more energy than their neighbors, they scale back — so that information is an effective nudge. But a study in California suggests that things are a bit more complicated….

In general, we don’t yet have a lot of evidence of international differences on the impact of nudges. But it would be surprising if such evidence doesn’t start to accumulate. Wherever people begin with strong preferences, and don’t like the direction in which they are being nudged, nudges are going to have a weaker effect.

For many nudges, that’s just fine. Actually, it’s part of the point….(More)”.

Government initiative offers Ghanaians chance for greater participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Openness and transparency are key ingredients in building an accountable and effective democratic government. An “open” government is transparent, accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere; and is responsive to new ideas and demands. The key to this is providing access to accurate data to all citizens. However, in many countries, a low rate of citizen participation and involvement has led to poor accountability from government officials. In Ghana, a new project, TransGov, is developing innovative tools to foster participation in local governance of marginalised groups, and improve government accountability to those who need it most.

TransGov’s research found that many Ghanaians were not aware of the status of local development projects, and this has led to a general public apathy, where people felt they had no influence on getting the government to work for them. TransGov created a platform to enhance information disclosure, dissemination and to create ways for citizens to engage with the local leaders in their communities. The TransGov platform allows all citizens to track the progress of government projects in their area and to publish information about those projects. TransGov has four integrated platforms, including a website, mobile app, voice response technology (IVR) and SMS – to allow the participation of people from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds.

The organization has recently partnered with the government-sponsored Ghana Open Data Initiative, to share resources, tools, and research and hold workshops and seminars. This is aimed to strengthen various government agencies in collecting and managing data for public use. The hope is that making this information more accessible will help create more business opportunities and drive innovation, as well as increasing democratic participation. We have seen this in educational radio broadcasts in Cairo subways and an app that allows citizen feedback on city development….(More)”.

How Africa’s Data Revolution Can Deliver Sustainable Development Outcomes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Donald Mogeni at Huffington Post: “…As a demonstration of this political will, several governments in Africa are blazing the trail in numerous ways. For instance, the Government of Senegal now considers investment in data as important as it would treat investment in physical infrastructure such as roads. In Ghana and Sierra Leone, more policy-makers and legislators are now using data to inform their work and make planning is continuously evidence-based.

Despite the progressive developments, several cautionary statements are worth noting. Firstly, data is not a silver-bullet to addressing present development challenges and/or problems. To be transformative, use of data and evidence must include political agency and citizen mobilization. Thus, while data may highlight important development cleavages, it may not guarantee change if not used appropriately within the various political contexts. ‘Everyone Counts’, a new global initiative by CARE, KWANTU and World Vision (that was also showcased in the meeting) seeks to contribute to this agenda.

Secondly, there is need for data ‘experts’ to move beyond the chronic obsession with big numbers to ensure greater inclusion of marginalised and vulnerable segments of the population. Achieving this will require a ‘business unusual’ approach that devises better data collection methodologies and technologies that must collect more and better than ever before. This ‘new’ data should then be used together with administrative and open data to ensure that ‘no one is left behind’.

Thirdly, the utility of citizen-generated data is still contentious – especially within state institutions. Increasing the value of this data must therefore involve standardization of data collection tools and methodologies across the board (to the extent possible), making consideration for ethical approvals, subjecting this data to quality audits and triangulation, as well as adhering to quality assurance standards.

Fourthly, the emergence of various data communities within African countries has made the roles of National Statistical Offices in the data ecosystem even more crucial. However, significant capacity and technical disparities exist between the various National Statistical Offices (NSOs) in Africa. To realise the potential of data and statistics in achieving sustainable development outcomes, financial and human capacities of these institutions must to be enhanced….(More)”.

Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard: “Cyber troops are government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media. In this working paper, we report on specific organizations created, often with public money, to help define and manage what is in the best interest of the public. We compare such organizations across 28 countries, and inventory them according to the kinds of messages, valences and communication strategies used. We catalogue their organizationalforms and evaluate their capacities in terms of budgets and staffing. This working paper summarizes the findings of the first comprehensive inventory of the major organizations behind social media manipulation. We find that cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon. Many different countries employ significant numbers of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online, sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign publics.

  •  The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries.
  • Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political‐party‐supported campaigns target domestic voters. 
  • Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high‐profile elections.
  • Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns….(More)”

A New Framework for Free Movement of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Lisbon Council: “How can we make Europe a leader in the global data economy? How can we make sure that the important advances in data analytics – the diseases that will be cured, the traffic congestions alleviated, the social problems correctly analysed – are there for citizens to enjoy and companies and institutions to develop? In this ground-breaking study, the Lisbon Council explores A New Framework for Free Movement of Data in the Digital Age: Making Europe a Data Economy. The paper analyses an array of state-of-the-art proposals for facilitating data flows and proposes a three-point roadmap for improving the “free movement of data” in Europe: adopt “once-only” at the European level; strengthen European-level cyber security and crack down on unjustified data localisation; and develop more open and transparent policies for data sharing around a new concept of “co-ownership.”…(More)”.

Digital Government Units: Origins, Orthodoxy and Critical Considerations for Public Management Theory and Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amanda Clarke: “From 2011 onwards, Digital Government Units (DGUs) have quickly emerged as a preferred solution for tackling the over-cost and under-performing digital services and lagging digital transformation agendas plaguing today’s governments. DGUs represent a common machinery of government phenomenon insofar as they all exist at the centre of the state, and adopt a shared orthodoxy, favouring agile, user-centric design, open-source technologies, pluralistic procurement, data-driven decision-making, horizontal ‘platform’ based solutions and a ‘delivery-first’ ethos. However, DGUs are differentiated in practice by their governance structures, resources and powers, adding notable complexity to this recent public management trend. Acknowledging the speedy policy transfer that has seen DGUs spread globally despite a lack of critical appraisal of their value and shortcomings, the paper highlights four critical considerations that governments and their observers should account for when assessing DGUs as a potential instrument of digital era public management renewal….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Government: Lessons from Multiple Disciplines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Helen Liu in the Public Administration Review: “Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design—alignment, motivation, and evaluation—identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector.

Practitioner Points

  • Crowdsourcing studies in the public sector show that properly designed crowdsourcing platforms can empower citizens, create legitimacy for the government with the people, and enhance the effectiveness of public services and goods.
  • Research suggests that crowdsourcing decisions should be based on both solutions necessary to resolve public problems and appropriate tasks for participants who have knowledge or skills.
  • Evidence shows that prizes and rewards can increase participation rates, but opportunities for learning and skill building are essential for enhancing the quality of participants’ contributions.
  • Studies indicate that a crowdsourcing approach empowers participants through peer review by adopting constructive competition and supportive cooperation designs in the review process.
  • Studies illustrate that the establishment of an effective reputation system in the crowdsourcing process can ensure legitimate evaluation….(More)”.

Open data on universities – New fuel for transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

François van Schalkwyk at University World News: “Accessible, usable and relevant open data on South African universities makes it possible for a wide range of stakeholders to monitor, advise and challenge the transformation of South Africa’s universities from an informed perspective.

Some describe data as the new oil while others suggest it is a new form of capital or compare it to electricity. Either way, there appears to be a groundswell of interest in the potential of data to fuel development.

Whether the proliferation of data is skewing development in favour of globally networked elites or disrupting existing asymmetries of information and power, is the subject of ongoing debate. Certainly, there are those who will claim that open data, from a development perspective, could catalyse disruption and redistribution.

Open data is data that is free to use without restriction. Governments and their agencies, universities and their researchers, non-governmental organisations and their donors, and even corporations, are all potential sources of open data.

Open government data, as a public rather than a private resource, embedded in principles of universal access, participation and transparency, is touted as being able to restore the deteriorating levels of trust between citizens and their governments.

Open data promises to do so by making the decisions and processes of the state more transparent and inclusive, empowering citizens to participate and to hold public institutions to account for the distribution of public services and resources.

Benefits of open data

Open data has other benefits over its more cloistered cousins (data in private networks, big data, etc). By democratising access, open data makes possible the use of data on, for example, health services, crime, the environment, procurement and education by a range of different users, each bringing their own perspective to bear on the data. This can expose bias in the data or may improve the quality of the data by surfacing data errors. Both are important when data is used to shape government policies.

By removing barriers to reusing data such as copyright or licence-fees, tech-savvy entrepreneurs can develop applications to assist the public to make more informed decisions by making available easy-to-understand information on medicine prices, crime hot-spots, air quality, beneficial ownership, school performance, etc. And access to open research data can improve quality and efficiency in science.

Scientists can check and confirm the data on which important discoveries are based if the data is open, and, in some cases, researchers can reuse open data from other studies, saving them the cost and effort of collecting the data themselves.

‘Open washing’

But access alone is not enough for open data to realise its potential. Open data must also be used. And data is used if it holds some value for the user. Governments have been known to publish server rooms full of data that no one is interested in to support claims of transparency and supporting the knowledge economy. That practice is called ‘open washing’. …(More)”

Features of Parliamentary Websites in Selected Jurisdictions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The Law Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center: “In recent years, parliaments around the world have enhanced their websites in order to improve access to legislative information and other parliamentary resources. Innovative features allow constituents and researchers to locate and utilize detailed information on laws and lawmaking in various ways. These include tracking tools and alerts, apps, the use of open data technology, and different search functions. In order to demonstrate some of the developments in this area, staff from the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress surveyed the official parliamentary websites of fifty countries from all regions of the world, plus the website of the European Parliament. In some cases, information on more than one website is provided where separate sites have been established for different chambers of the national parliament, bringing the total number of individual websites surveyed to seventy.

While the information on the parliamentary websites is primarily in the national language of the particular country, around forty of the individual websites surveyed were found to provide at least limited information in one or more other languages. The European Parliament website can be translated into any of the twenty-four official languages of the members of the European Union.

All of the parliamentary websites included in the survey have at least basic browse tools that allow users to view legislation in a list format, and that may allow for viewing in, for example, date or title order. All of the substantive websites also enable searching, often providing a general search box for the whole site at the top of each page as well as more advanced search options for different types of documents. Some sites provide various facets that can be used to further narrow searches.

Around thirty-nine of the individual websites surveyed provide users with some form of tracking or alert function to receive updates on certain documents (including proposed legislation), parliamentary news, committee activities, or other aspects of the website. This includes the ability to subscribe to different RSS feeds and/or email alerts.

The ability to watch live or recorded proceedings of different parliaments, including debates within the relevant chamber as well as committee hearings, is a common feature of the parliamentary websites surveyed. Fifty-eight of the websites surveyed featured some form of video, including links to dedicated YouTube channels, specific pages where users can browse and search for embedded videos, and separate video services or portals that are linked to or viewable from the main site. Some countries also make videos available on dedicated mobile-friendly sites or apps, including Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. In total, apps containing parliamentary information are provided in just fourteen of the countries surveyed. In comparison, the parliamentary websites of thirty countries are available in mobile-friendly formats, enabling easy access to information and different functionalities using smartphones and tablets.

The table also provides information on some of the additional special features available on the surveyed websites. Examples include dedicated sites or pages that provide educational information about the parliament for children (Argentina, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey); calendar functions, including those that allow users to save information to their personal calendars or otherwise view information about different types of proceedings or events (available on at least twenty websites); and open data portals or other features that allow information to be downloaded in bulk for reuse or analysis, including through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces) (at least six countries)….(More)”.

Formalised data citation practices would encourage more authors to make their data available for reuse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Hyoungjoo Park and Dietmar Wolfram at the LSE Impact Blog: “Today’s researchers work in a heavily data-intensive and collaborative environment in order to further scientific discovery across and within fields. It is becoming routine for researchers (i.e. authors and data publishers) to submit their research data, such as datasets, biological samples in biomedical fields, and computer code, as supplementary information in order to comply with data sharing requirements of major funding agencies, high-profile journals, and data journals. This is part of open science, where data and any publication products are expected to be made available to anyone interested.

Given that researchers benefit from publicly shared data through data reuse in their own research, researchers who provide access to data should be acknowledged for their contributions, much in the same way that authors are recognised for their research publications through citation. Researchers who use shared data or other shared research products (e.g. open access software, tissue cultures) should also acknowledge the providers of these resources through formal citation. At present, data citation is not widely practised in most disciplines and as an object of study remains largely overlooked….

We found that data citations appear in the references section of an article less frequently than in the main text, making it difficult to identify the reward and credit for data authors (i.e. data sharers). Consistent data citation formats could not be found. Current data citation practices do not (yet) benefit data sharers. Also, data citation was sometimes located in the supplementary information, outside of the references. Data that had been reused was often not acknowledged in the reference lists, but was rather hidden in the representation of data (e.g. tables, figures, images, graphs, and other elements), which may be a consequence of the fact that data citation practices are not yet common in scholarly communications.

Ongoing challenges remain in identifying and documenting data citation. First, the practice of informal data citation presents a challenge for accurately documenting data citation. …

Second, data recitation by one or more co-authors of earlier studies (i.e. self-citation) is common, which reduces the broader impact of data sharing by limiting much of the reuse to the original authors..

Third, currently indexed data citations may not include rapidly advancing areas, such as in the hard sciences or computer engineering, because approximately 90% of indexed works were associated with journal articles…

Fourth, the number of authors associated with shared datasets raises questions of the ownership of and responsibility for a collective work, although some journals require one author to be responsible for the data used in the study…(More). (See also An examination of research data sharing and re-use: implications for data citation practice, published in Scientometrics)