Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 for the SSRC: “A key characteristic of a democracy,” according to Robert Dahl, is “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.” Much empirical research over the past half century, most of it focusing on the United States, has examined the relationship between citizens’ policy preferences and the policy choices of elected officials. According to Robert Shapiro, this research has generated “evidence for strong effects of public opinion on government policies,” providing “a sanguine picture of democracy at work.”

In recent years, however, scholars of American politics have produced striking evidence that the apparent “strong effects” of aggregate public opinion in these studies mask severe inequalities in responsiveness. As Martin Gilens put it, “The American government does respond to the public’s preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens. Indeed, under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”

One possible interpretation of these findings is that the American political system is anomalous in its apparent disregard for the preferences of middle-class and poor people. In that case, the severe political inequality documented there would presumably be accounted for by distinctive features of the United States, such as its system of private campaign finance, its weak labor unions, or its individualistic political culture. But, what if severe political inequality is endemic in affluent democracies? That would suggest that fiddling with the political institutions of the United States to make them more like Denmark’s (or vice versa) would be unlikely to bring us significantly closer to satisfying Dahl’s standard of democratic equality. We would be forced to conclude either that Dahl’s standard is fundamentally misguided or that none of the political systems commonly identified as democratic comes anywhere close to meriting that designation.

Analyzing policy responsiveness

“I have attempted to test the extent to which policymakers in a variety of affluent democracies respond to the preferences of their citizens considered as political equals.”

To address this question, I have attempted to test the extent to which policymakers in a variety of affluent democracies respond to the preferences of their citizens considered as political equals. My analyses focus on the relationship between public opinion and government spending on social welfare programs, including pensions, health, education, and unemployment benefits. These programs represent a major share of government spending in every affluent democracy and, arguably, an important source of public well-being. Moreover, social spending figures prominently in the comparative literature on the political impact of public opinion in affluent democracies, with major scholarly works suggesting that it is significantly influenced by citizens’ preferences.

My analyses employ data on citizens’ views about social spending and the welfare state from three major cross-national survey projects—the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the World Values Survey (WVS), and the European Values Survey (EVS). In combination, these three sources provide relevant opinion data from 160 surveys conducted between 1985 and 2012 in 30 countries, including most of the established democracies of Western Europe and the English-speaking world and some newer democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I examine shifts in (real per capita) social spending in the two years following each survey. Does greater public enthusiasm for the welfare state lead to increases in social spending, other things being equal? And, more importantly here, do the views of low-income people have the same apparent influence on policy as the views of affluent people?…(More)”.

Public Data Is More Important Than Ever–And Now It’s Easier To Find

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Meg Miller at Co.Design: “Public data, in theory, is meant to be accessible to everyone. But in practice, even finding it can be near impossible, to say nothing of figuring out what to do with it once you do. Government data websites are often clunky and outdated, and some data is still trapped on physical media–like CDs or individual hard drives.

Tens of thousands of these CDs and hard drives, full of data on topics from Arkansas amusement parks to fire incident reporting, have arrived at the doorstep of the New York-based start-up Enigma over the past four years. The company has obtained thousands upon thousands more datasets by way of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Enigma specializes in open data: gathering it, curating it, and analyzing it for insights into a client’s industry, for example, or for public service initiatives.

Enigma also shares its 100,000 datasets with the world through an online platform called Public—the broadest collection of public data that is open and searchable by everyone. Public has been around since Enigma launched in 2013, but today the company is introducing a redesigned version of the site that’s fresher and more user-friendly, with easier navigation and additional features that allow users to drill further down into the data.

But while the first iteration of Public was mostly concerned with making Enigma’s enormous trove of data—which it was already gathering and reformating for client work—accessible to the public, the new site focuses more on linking that data in new ways. For journalists, researchers, and data scientists, the tool will offer more sophisticated ways of making sense of the data that they have access to through Enigma….

…the new homepage also curates featured datasets and collections to enforce a sense of discoverability. For example, an Enigma-curated collection of U.S. sanctions data from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) shows data on the restrictions on entities or individuals that American companies can and can’t do business with in an effort to achieve specific national security or foreign policy objectives. A new round of sanctions against Russia have been in the news lately as an effort by President Trump to loosen restrictions on blacklisted businesses and individuals in Russia was overruled by the Senate last week. Enigma’s curated data selection on U.S. sanctions could help journalists contextualize recent events with data that shows changes in sanctions lists over time by presidential administration, for instance–or they could compare the U.S. sanctions list to the European Union’s….(More).

Computational Propaganda Worldwide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “The Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, has researched the use of social media for public opinion manipulation. The team involved 12 researchers across nine countries who, altogether, interviewed 65 experts, analyzed tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents. Each case study analyzes qualitative, quantitative, and computational evidence collected between 2015 and 2017 from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks. We find several distinct global trends in computational propaganda. •

  • Social media are significant platforms for political engagement and crucial channels for disseminating news content. Social media platforms are the primary media over which young people develop their political identities.
    • In some countries this is because some companies, such as Facebook, are effectively monopoly platforms for public life. o In several democracies the majority of voters use social media to share political news and information, especially during elections.
    • In countries where only small proportions of the public have regular access to social media, such platforms are still fundamental infrastructure for political conversation among the journalists, civil society leaders, and political elites.
  • Social media are actively used as a tool for public opinion manipulation, though in diverse ways and on different topics. o In authoritarian countries, social media platforms are a primary means of social control. This is especially true during political and security crises. o In democracies, social media are actively used for computational propaganda either through broad efforts at opinion manipulation or targeted experiments on particular segments of the public.
  • In every country we found civil society groups trying, but struggling, to protect themselves and respond to active misinformation campaigns….(More)”.

How Libraries Became Public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Barbara Fister at Inside HigherEd: “Of all of our cultural institutions, the public library is remarkable. There are few tax-supported services that are used by people of all ages, classes, races, and religions. I can’t think of any public institutions (except perhaps parks) that are as well-loved and widely used as libraries. Nobody has suggested that tax dollars be used for vouchers to support the development of private libraries or that we shouldn’t trust those “government” libraries. Even though the recession following the 2008 crash has led to reduced staff and hours in American libraries, threats of closure are generally met with vigorous community resistance. Visits and check-outs are up significantly over the past ten years, though it has decreased a bit in recent years. Reduced funding seems to be a factor, though the high point was 2009; library use parallels unemployment figures – low unemployment often means fewer people use public libraries. A for-profit company that claims to run libraries more cheaply than local governments currently has contracts to manage only sixteen of over 9,000 public library systems in the U.S. Few public institutions have been so impervious to privatization.

I find it intriguing that the American public library grew out of an era that has many similarities to this one – the last quarter of the 19th century, when large corporations owned by the super-rich had gained the power to shape society and fundamentally change the lives of ordinary people. It was also a time of new communication technologies, novel industrial processes, and data-driven management methods that treated workers as interchangeable cogs in a Tayloristic, efficient machine. Stuff got cheaper and more abundant, but wages fell and employment was precarious, with mass layoffs common. The financial sector was behaving badly, too, leading to cyclical panics and depressions. The gap between rich and poor grew, with unprecedented levels of wealth concentrated among a tiny percentage of the population. It all sounds strangely familiar.

The changes weren’t all economic. A wave of immigration, largely from southern and eastern Europe and from the Far East before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, changed national demographics. Teddy Roosevelt warned of “race suicide,” urging white protestant women to reproduce at the same rate as other groups to make America Anglo-Saxon again. The hard-won rights of emancipated African Americans were systematically rolled back through voter suppression, widespread acts of terror, and the enactment of Jim Crow laws. Indigenous people faced broken treaties, seized land, military suppression, and forced assimilation.

How interesting that it was during this turbulent time of change when the grand idea of the American public library – a publicly-supported cultural institution that would be open to all members of the community for their enjoyment and education – emerged….(More)”.

New cycling system helps riders beat red lights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There are few things more frustrating for cyclists than red lights, especially when riders have built up a good speed only to have to apply the brakes and lose all that momentum. To make things easier Dutch operation Springlab has designed a new system called Flo, which is being tested out in the city of Utrecht and has been set up to work alongside the city’s cycling lanes.

It works by using speed cameras placed 100 metres before each set of traffic lights, and calculates whether or not the cyclist should change speed to hit the green light. It uses animals to inform a cyclist if they should change speed, so a rabbit means speed up, a turtle means slow down, a cow means users are hitting the red light no matter what, and a simple thumbs up indicates the cyclist is doing the right speed.

It’s currently being tested out on Utrecht’s main road Amsterdamsestraatweg and all being well it’s hoped it’ll expand across the rest of the city and hopefully across Holland. Although it’s possible a nation so well known for its love of cycling will embrace such a system, whether or not it’ll go global is another matter. Another recent Dutch-based innovation ByCycling illustrates just how big cycling is in Holland, and in Poland a solar-powered glow in the dark bike lane is a genuinely impressive safety development….(More)”

Not everyone in advanced economies is using social media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Pew: “Despite the seeming ubiquity of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan do not report regularly visiting social media sites. But majorities in all of the 14 countries surveyed say they at least use the internet.

Social media use is relatively common among people in Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia and the U.S. Around seven-in-ten report using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but that still leaves a significant minority of the population in those countries (around 30%) who are non-users.

At the other end of the spectrum, in France, only 48% say they use social networking sites. That figure is even lower in Greece (46%), Japan (43%) and Germany (37%). In Germany, this means that more than half of internet users say they do not use social media. 

The differences in reported social media use across the 14 countries are due in part to whether people use the internet, since low rates of internet access limit the potential social media audience. While fewer than one-in-ten Dutch (5%), Swedes (7%) and Australians (7%) don’t access the internet or own a smartphone, that figure is 40% in Greece, 33% in Hungary and 29% in Italy.

However, internet access doesn’t guarantee social media use. In Germany, for example, 85% of adults are online, but less than half of this group report using Facebook, Twitter or Xing. A similar pattern is seen in some of the other developed economies polled, including Japan and France, where social media use is low relative to overall internet penetration….(More)

Can Democracy Survive the Internet?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nathaniel Persily in the Journal of Democracy: “…The actual story of the 2016 digital campaign is, of course, quite different, and we are only beginning to come to grips with what it might mean for campaigns going forward. Whereas the stories of the last two campaigns focused on the use of new tools, most of the 2016 story revolves around the online explosion of campaign-relevant communication from all corners of cyberspace. Fake news, social-media bots (automated accounts that can exist on all types of platforms), and propaganda from inside and outside the United States—alongside revolutionary uses of new media by the winning campaign—combined to upset established paradigms of how to run for president.

Indeed, the 2016 campaign broke down all the established distinctions that observers had used to describe campaigns: between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and nonmedia, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment, and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication. How does one characterize a campaign, for example, in which the chief strategist is also the chairman of a media website (Breitbart) that is the campaign’s chief promoter and whose articles the candidate retweets to tens of millions of his followers, with those tweets then picked up and rebroadcast on cable-television news channels, including one (RT, formerly known as Russia Today) that is funded by a foreign government?

The 2016 election represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of the legacy institutions that had set bounds for U.S. politics in the postwar era. It is tempting (and in many ways correct) to view the Donald Trump campaign as unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics. Yet this type of campaign could only be successful because established institutions—especially the mainstream media and politicalparty organizations—had already lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world….(More)”

Measuring results from open contracting in Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathrin Frauscher, Karolis Granickas and Leigh Manasco at the Open Contracting Partnership: “…Ukraine is one of our Showcase and Learning (S&L) projects, and we’ve already shared several stories about the success of Prozorro. Each S&L project tests specific theories of change and use cases. Through the Prozorro platform, Ukraine is revolutionizing procurement by digitizing the process and unlocking data to make it available to citizens, CSOs, government, and business. The theory of change for this S&L project hypothesizes that transparency and the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, promotion and monitoring of the procurement system, is having an impact on value for money, fairness and integrity.

The reform introduced other innovations, including electronic reverse auctions and a centralized procurement database that integrates with private commercial platforms. We co-created a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plan with our project partners to quantify and measure specific progress and impact indicators, while understanding that it is hard to attribute impacts to distinct aspects of the reform. The indicators featured in this blog are particularly related to our theory of change.

We are at a crucial moment in this S&L project as our first round of comprehensive MEL baseline and progress data are coming in. It’s a good time to reflect on key takeaways and challenges that arose when defining and analyzing these data, and how we are using them to inform the Prozorro reform.

Openness can result in more competition and competition saves money.

One of the benefits of open contracting appears to be improving market opportunity and efficiency. Market opportunity focuses on companies being able to compete for business on a level playing field.

From January 2015 to March 2017, the average number of bids per tender lot rose by 15%, demonstrating an increase in competition. Even more notable, the average number of unique suppliers during that same time grew by 45% for each procuring entity, meaning that agencies are now procuring from more and more diverse suppliers….

High levels of responsiveness can benefit procuring entities.

Those agencies that leverage their opportunities to interact with business and citizens throughout the contracting cycle, by actively responding to questions and complaints via the online platform, tend to conduct procurement more smoothly, without high levels of amendments or cancellations, than those who don’t. Tenders with a 100% response rate to feedback have a 66% success rate, while those with no response, show a 52% success rate. The portal provides procuring entities with the resources needed to address questions and problems, saving time, effort and money throughout the contracting process.

People are beginning to trust the public procurement process and data more.

According to a survey of 300 entrepreneurs conducted by USAID, most respondents believed that Prozorro significantly (27%) or partially (53%) reduces corruption. Additionally, fewer respondents who participated in procurement said they faced corruption when using the new platform (29%) compared to the old system (54%). These numbers only tell a part of the story, as we do not know what those outside of the procurement system think, but they are a necessary first step towards measuring increased levels of trust for the public procurement process. We will continue looking at trust as one of the proxies for health of an open procurement process.

Citizens are actively seeking out procurement information.

Google search hits grew from 680 in the month of January 2015 to more than 191,000 in the month of February 2017 (tracking 43 related keywords). This means the environment is shifting to one where people are recognizing that this data has value; that there is interest and demand for it. Implementing open contracting processes is just one part of what we want to see happen. We also strive to nurture an environment where open contracting data is seen as something that is worthwhile and necessary.

The newly established www.dozorro.org monitoring platform also shows promising results…..

The main one is feedback loops. We see that procuring entities’ responsiveness to general questions results in better quality procurement. We also see that only one out of three claims (request to a procuring entity to amend, cancel or modify a tender in question) is successfully resolved. In addition, there are some good individual examples, such as the ones in Dnypro and Kiev. While we do not know if these numbers and instances are sufficient for an effective institutional response mechanism, we do know that business and citizens have to trust redress mechanisms before using them. We will continue trying to identify the ideal level of institutional response to secure trust and develop better metrics to capture that….(More)”.

Welcome to E-Estonia, the tiny nation that’s leading Europe in digital innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “Big Brother does “just want to help” – in Estonia, at least. In this small nation of 1.3 million people, citizens have overcome fears of an Orwellian dystopia with ubiquitous surveillance to become a highly digital society.

The government took nearly all its services online in 2003 with the e-Estonia State Portal. The country’s innovative digital governance was not the result of a carefully crafted master plan, it was a pragmatic and cost-efficient response to budget limitations.

It helped that citizens trusted their politicians after Estonia regained independence in 1991. And, in turn, politicians trusted the country’s engineers, who had no commitment to legacy hardware or software systems, to build something new.

This proved to be a winning formula that can now benefit all the European countries.

The once-only principle

With its digital governance, Estonia introduced the “once-only” principle, mandating that the state is not allowed to ask citizens for the same information twice.

In other words, if you give your address or a family member’s name to the census bureau, the health insurance provider will not later ask you for it again. No department of any government agency can make citizens repeat information already stored in their database or that of some other agency….The once-only principle has been such a big success that, based on Estonia’s common-sense innovation, the EU enacted a digital Once Only Principle and Initiative early this year. It ensures that “citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once, because public administration offices take action to internally share this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.”…

‘Twice-mandatory’ principle

Governments should always be brainstorming, asking themselves, for example, if one government agency needs this information, who else might benefit from it? And beyond need, what insights could we glean from this data?

Financier Vernon Hill introduced an interesting “One to Say YES, Two to Say NO” rule when founding Metro Bank UK: “It takes only one person to make a yes decision, but it requires two people to say no. If you’re going to turn away business, you need a second check for that.”

Imagine how simple and powerful a policy it would be if governments learnt this lesson. What if every bit of information collected from citizens or businesses had to be used for two purposes (at least!) or by two agencies in order to merit requesting it?

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board is, perhaps unexpectedly given the reputation of tax offices, an example of the potential for such a paradigm shift. In 2014, it launched a new strategy to address tax fraud, requiring every business transaction of over €1,000 to be declared monthly by the entities involved.

To minimise the administrative burden of this, the government introduced an application-programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company’s accounting software and the state’s tax system.

Though there was some negative push back in the media at the beginning by companies and former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves even vetoed the initial version of the act, the system was a spectacular success. Estonia surpassed its original estimate of €30 million in reduced tax fraud by more than twice.

Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and several others have taken a similar path for controlling and detecting tax fraud. But analysing this data beyond fraud is where the real potential is hidden….(More).”

Fighting Corruption in Health Care? There’s an App for That

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Akjibek Beishebaeva at Voices (OSF): “As an industry that relies heavily on approvals from government officials, the pharmaceutical field in places like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan—which lack strong mechanisms for public oversight—is particularly susceptible to corruption.

The problem in those countries is exacerbated by the absence of any reliable system to monitor market prices for drugs. For example, a hospital manager bribed by a pharmaceutical representative could agree to procure a drug at a price 10 times higher than at a neighboring hospital. In addition, those medicines procured by the state and meant to be dispensed freely to patients often appear for sale at hospital-based pharmacies instead.

These aren’t victimless crimes. The most needy patients are often the first to suffer when funds are diverted away from lifesaving treatments and medicines.

To tackle this issue, last year the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan and the International Renaissance Foundation jointly conducted the Health Data Hackathon in the Yssyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan. Two teams from Ukraine and three teams from Kyrgyzstan—consisting of coders, journalists, and activists—took part. Their goal was to find innovative solutions to address corruption in public procurements and access to health services for vulnerable populations.

Over the two-and-a-half-day effort, one of the Ukrainian teams developed a prototype for a software application to improve the e-tendering platform for all public procurement in Ukraine—ProZorro.

ProZorro itself revolutionized the tender process when it first launched in 2015. It combined a centralized database of online markets and was made accessible to the public. Journalists, activists, and patients today can log in to the system and scrutinize tenders approved by the government. The transparency provided by the system has already shown savings of more than a billion UAH (US$37 million). However, the database is huge and can be tricky to navigate without training.

The application developed at the hackathon makes it even easier to monitor the purchase prices of medicines in Ukraine. Specfically, it will allow users to automatically and instantly compare prices for the same products—a process which previously took many days of manual effort.

The application also offers a more intuitive interface and improved search functionality that will help further reduce corruption and save money—savings that can be redirected towards treatments for people living with HIV, cancer, and hepatitis C. The team is now testing the software and working with the government to introduce it early this year.

Another team came up with the idea to let patients monitor supplies of medicine at facilities in real time. If a hospital representative says that a patient needs to buy drugs that should be readily available, for example, the patient can check online and hold the hospital accountable if the medicines are meant to be provided for free. The tool, called WikiLiky, has already been implemented in the Sumy region of Ukraine.

Likewise, one of the Kyrgyz teams looked at price monitoring in their own country, focusing on the inefficient and mistake-prone acquisition process. For instance, the name of one drug might be misspelled in several different ways, making it difficult to track prices accurately. The team redesigned the functionality of the government e-procurement portal called Codifier, creating uniformity across the system of names, dosages, and other medical specifications….(More)”