Voting could be the problem with democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernd Reiter at The Conversation: “Around the globe, citizens of many democracies are worried that their governments are not doing what the people want.

When voters pick representatives to engage in democracy, they hope they are picking people who will understand and respond to constituents’ needs. U.S. representatives have, on average, more than 700,000 constituents each, making this task more and more elusive, even with the best of intentions. Less than 40% of Americans are satisfied with their federal government.

Across Europe, South America, the Middle East and China, social movements have demanded better government – but gotten few real and lasting results, even in those places where governments were forced out.

In my work as a comparative political scientist working on democracy, citizenship and race, I’ve been researching democratic innovations in the past and present. In my new book, “The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead: Alternatives to Political Representation and Capitalism,” I explore the idea that the problem might actually be democratic elections themselves.

My research shows that another approach – randomly selecting citizens to take turns governing – offers the promise of reinvigorating struggling democracies. That could make them more responsive to citizen needs and preferences, and less vulnerable to outside manipulation….

For local affairs, citizens can participate directly in local decisions. In Vermont, the first Tuesday of March is Town Meeting Day, a public holiday during which residents gather at town halls to debate and discuss any issue they wish.

In some Swiss cantons, townspeople meet once a year, in what are called Landsgemeinden, to elect public officials and discuss the budget.

For more than 30 years, communities around the world have involved average citizens in decisions about how to spend public money in a process called “participatory budgeting,” which involves public meetings and the participation of neighborhood associations. As many as 7,000 towns and cities allocate at least some of their money this way.

The Governance Lab, based at New York University, has taken crowd-sourcing to cities seeking creative solutions to some of their most pressing problems in a process best called “crowd-problem solving.” Rather than leaving problems to a handful of bureaucrats and experts, all the inhabitants of a community can participate in brainstorming ideas and selecting workable possibilities.

Digital technology makes it easier for larger groups of people to inform themselves about, and participate in, potential solutions to public problems. In the Polish harbor city of Gdansk, for instance, citizens were able to help choose ways to reduce the harm caused by flooding….(More)”.

We are finally getting better at predicting organized conflict

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tate Ryan-Mosley at MIT Technology Review: “People have been trying to predict conflict for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But it’s hard, largely because scientists can’t agree on its nature or how it arises. The critical factor could be something as apparently innocuous as a booming population or a bad year for crops. Other times a spark ignites a powder keg, as with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in the run-up to World War I.

Political scientists and mathematicians have come up with a slew of different methods for forecasting the next outbreak of violence—but no single model properly captures how conflict behaves. A study published in 2011 by the Peace Research Institute Oslo used a single model to run global conflict forecasts from 2010 to 2050. It estimated a less than .05% chance of violence in Syria. Humanitarian organizations, which could have been better prepared had the predictions been more accurate, were caught flat-footed by the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in March 2011. It has since displaced some 13 million people.

Bundling individual models to maximize their strengths and weed out weakness has resulted in big improvements. The first public ensemble model, the Early Warning Project, launched in 2013 to forecast new instances of mass killing. Run by researchers at the US Holocaust Museum and Dartmouth College, it claims 80% accuracy in its predictions.

Improvements in data gathering, translation, and machine learning have further advanced the field. A newer model called ViEWS, built by researchers at Uppsala University, provides a huge boost in granularity. Focusing on conflict in Africa, it offers monthly predictive readouts on multiple regions within a given state. Its threshold for violence is a single death.

Some researchers say there are private—and in some cases, classified—predictive models that are likely far better than anything public. Worries that making predictions public could undermine diplomacy or change the outcome of world events are not unfounded. But that is precisely the point. Public models are good enough to help direct aid to where it is needed and alert those most vulnerable to seek safety. Properly used, they could change things for the better, and save lives in the process….(More)”.

Geolocation Data for Pattern of Life Analysis in Lower-Income Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Shreyan Sen and Eric Lewandowski: “Urbanization processes in the developing world are often associated with the creation of informal settlements. These areas frequently have few or no public services exacerbating inequality even in the context of substantial economic growth.

In the past, the high costs of gathering data through traditional surveying methods made it challenging to study how these under-served areas evolve through time and in relation to the metropolitan area to which they belong. However, the advent of mobile phones and smartphones in particular presents an opportunity to generate new insights on these old questions.

In June 2019, Orbital Insight and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Arab States Human Development Report team launched a collaborative pilot program assessing the feasibility of using geolocation data to understand patterns of life among the urban poor in Cairo, Egypt.

The objectives of this collaboration were to assess feasibility (and conditionally pursue preliminary analysis) of geolocation data to create near-real time population density maps, understand where residents of informal settlements tend to work during the day, and to classify universities by percentage of students living in informal settlements.

The report is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the data and its limitations. In Section 3 we briefly explain the methodological background. Section 4 summarizes the insights derived from the data for the Egyptian context. Section 5 concludes….(More)”.

A Constitutional Right to Public Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chad G. Marzen: “In the wake of the 2013 United States Supreme Court decision of McBurney v. Young (569 U.S. 221), this Article calls for policymakers at the federal and state levels to ensure governmental records remain open and accessible to the public. It urges policymakers to call not only for strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act and the various state public records law, but to pursue an amendment to the United States Constitution providing a right to public information.

This Article proposes a draft of such an amendment:

The right to public information, being a necessary and vital part of democracy, shall be a fundamental right of the people. The right of the people to inspect and/or copy records of government, and to be provided notice of and attend public meetings of government, shall not unreasonably be restricted.

This Article analyzes the benefits of the amendment and concludes the enshrining of the right to public information in both the United States Constitution as well as various state constitutions will ensure greater access of public records and documents to the general public, consistent with the democratic value of open, transparent government….(More)”.

Beyond the Valley

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ramesh Srinivasan: “How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input, or our opinions—only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It’s time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley.

Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the “design labs” of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures—including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them….(More)”

Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ashu M. G. Solo: “Technology and particularly the Internet have caused many changes in the realm of politics. Aspects of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science can be applied to politics. Politicians and candidates use their own websites and social network profiles to get their message out. Revolutions in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have started in large part due to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has also played a role in protests and riots in numerous countries. The mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on political commentary as anybody can set up a blog or post a video online. Now, political activists can network together online.

The Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age is a pivotal reference source that serves to increase the understanding of methods for politics in the computer age, the effectiveness of these methods, and tools for analyzing these methods. The book includes research chapters on different aspects of politics with information technology, engineering, computer science, or math, from 27 researchers at 20 universities and research organizations in Belgium, Brazil, Cape Verde, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, and the United States of America. Highlighting topics such as online campaigning and fake news, the prospective audience includes, but is not limited to, researchers, political and public policy analysts, political scientists, engineers, computer scientists, political campaign managers and staff, politicians and their staff, political operatives, professors, students, and individuals working in the fields of politics, e-politics, e-government, new media and communication studies, and Internet marketing….(More)”.

African countries are missing the data needed to drive development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Pilling at the Financial Times: “When statisticians decided to track how well African countries were doing in moving towards their 2030 UN sustainable development goals, they discovered a curious thing: no one had the faintest idea. More accurately, on average, African governments keep statistics covering only about a third of the relevant data. To be fair, the goals, which range from eradicating poverty and hunger to creating sustainable cities and communities, are overly complicated and sometimes unquantifiable.

The millennium development goals that they superseded had eight goals with 21 indicators. The SDGs have 17, with 232 indicators. Yet statisticians for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which compiled the report, are on to something. African states don’t know enough about their people. 

In this age of mass surveillance, that might seem counterintuitive. Surely governments, not to mention private companies, have too much information on their citizenry? In fact, in many African nations with weak states, big informal economies and undocumented communities, the problem is the reverse. How many people are there in Nigeria? What is the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe? How many people in Kibera, a huge informal settlement in Nairobi, have access to healthcare? The answers to such basic questions are: we don’t really know.  Nigeria last conducted a census in 2006, when the population — a sensitive topic in which religion, regionalism and budget allocations are messily intertwined — came out at 140m. These days it could be 180m or 200m. Or perhaps more. Or less.

President Muhammadu Buhari recently complained that statistics quoted by international bodies, such as those alleging that Nigeria has more people living in absolute poverty than India, were “wild estimates” bearing “little relation to facts on the ground”. The riposte to that is simple. Work out what is happening and do something about it. Likewise, unemployment is hard to define, let alone quantify, in a broken economy such as Zimbabwe’s where cited jobless statistics range from 5 to 95 per cent. Is a struggling subsistence farmer or a street-side hawker jobless or gainfully employed?

For that matter what is the status of a government employee who receives her salary in a useless electronic currency?  According to Seth Berkley, chief executive of the Vaccine Alliance, keeping tabs on unregistered people in the sprawling “slums” of Africa’s increasingly massive megacities, is harder than working out what is going on in isolated villages. If governments do not know whether a person exists it is all too easy to ignore their rights — to healthcare, to education or to the vote. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation found that only eight countries in Africa register more than 90 per cent of births. Tens of millions of people are literally invisible. Mr Ibrahim, a Sudanese billionaire, calls data “the missing SDG”….(More)”

Data gaps threaten achievement of development goals in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sara Jerving at Devex: “Data gaps across the African continent threaten to hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s first governance report released on Tuesday.

The report, “Agendas 2063 & 2030: Is Africa On Track?“ based on an analysis of the foundation’s Ibrahim index of African governance, found that since the adoption of both of these agendas, the availability of public data in Africa has declined. With data focused on social outcomes, there has been a notable decline in education, population and vital statistics, such as birth and death records, which allow citizens to access public services.

The index, on which the report is based, is the most comprehensive dataset on African governance, drawing on ten years of data of all 54 African nations. An updated index is released every two years….

The main challenge in the production of quality, timely data, according to the report, is a lack of funding and lack of independence of the national statistical offices.

Only one country, Mauritius, had a perfect score in terms of independence of its national statistics office – meaning that its office can collect the data it chooses, publish without approval from other arms of the government, and is sufficiently funded. Fifteen African nations scored zero in terms of the independence of their offices….(More)”.

How to ensure that your data science is inclusive

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Samhir Vasdev: “As a new generation of data scientists emerges in Africa, they will encounter relatively little trusted, accurate, and accessible data upon which to apply their skills. It’s time to acknowledge the limitations of the data sources upon which data science relies, particularly in lower-income countries.

The potential of data science to support, measure, and amplify sustainable development is undeniable. As public, private, and civic institutions around the world recognize the role that data science can play in advancing their growth, an increasingly robust array of efforts has emerged to foster data science in lower-income countries.

This phenomenon is particularly salient in Sub-Saharan Africa. There, foundations are investing millions into building data literacy and data science skills across the continent. Multilaterals and national governments are pioneering new investments into data science, artificial intelligence, and smart cities. Private and public donors are building data science centers to build cohorts of local, indigenous data science talent. Local universities are launching graduate-level data science courses.

Despite this progress, among the hype surrounding data science rests an unpopular and inconvenient truth: As a new generation of data scientists emerges in Africa, they will encounter relatively little trusted, accurate, and accessible data that they can use for data science.

We hear promises of how data science can help teachers tailor curricula according to students’ performances, but many school systems don’t collect or track that performance data with enough accuracy and timeliness to perform those data science–enabled tweaks. We believe that data science can help us catch disease outbreaks early, but health care facilities often lack the specific data, like patient origin or digitized information, that is needed to discern those insights.

These fundamental data gaps invite the question: Precisely what data would we perform data science on to achieve sustainable development?…(More)”.

Why policy networks don’t work (the way we think they do)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by James Georgalakis: “Is it who you know or what you know? The literature on evidence uptake and the role of communities of experts mobilised at times of crisis convinced me that a useful approach would be to map the social network that emerged around the UK-led mission to Sierra Leone so it could be quantitatively analysed. Despite the well-deserved plaudits for my colleagues at IDS and their partners in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Wellcome Trust and elsewhere, I was curious to know why they had still met real resistance to some of their policy advice. This included the provision of home care kits for victims of the virus who could not access government or NGO run Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs).

It seemed unlikely these challenges were related to poor communications. The timely provision of accessible research knowledge by the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform has been one of the most celebrated aspects of the mobilisation of anthropological expertise. This approach is now being replicated in the current Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  Perhaps the answer was in the network itself. This was certainly indicated by some of the accounts of the crisis by those directly involved.

Social network analysis

I started by identifying the most important looking policy interactions that took place between March 2014, prior to the UK assuming leadership of the Sierra Leone international response and mid-2016, when West Africa was finally declared Ebola free. They had to be central to the efforts to coordinate the UK response and harness the use of evidence. I then looked for documents related to these events, a mixture of committee minutes, reports and correspondence , that could confirm who was an active participant in each. This analysis of secondary sources related to eight separate policy processes and produced a list of 129 individuals. However, I later removed a large UK conference that took place in early 2016 at which learning from the crisis was shared.  It appeared that most delegates had no significant involvement in giving policy advice during the crisis. This reduced the network to 77….(More)”.