Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Survey by Pew Global: “Signs of political discontent are increasingly common in many Western nations, with anti-establishment parties and candidates drawing significant attention and support across the European Union and in the United States. Meanwhile, as previous Pew Research Center surveys have shown, in emerging and developing economies there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way the political system is working.

As a new nine-country Pew Research Center survey on the strengths and limitations of civic engagement illustrates, there is a common perception that government is run for the benefit of the few, rather than the many in both emerging democracies and more mature democracies that have faced economic challenges in recent years. In eight of nine nations surveyed, more than half say government is run for the benefit of only a few groups in society, not for all people.1

However, this skeptical outlook on government does not mean people have given up on democracy or the ability of average citizens to have an impact on how the country is run. Roughly half or more in eight nations – Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the U.S., India, Greece, Italy and Poland – say ordinary citizens can have a lot of influence on government. Hungary, where 61% say there is little citizens can do, is the lone nation where pessimism clearly outweighs optimism on this front.

Many people in these nine nations say they could potentially be motivated to become politically engaged on a variety of issues, especially poor health care, poverty and poor-quality schools. When asked what types of issues could get them to take political action, such as contacting an elected official or taking part in a protest, poor health care is the top choice among the six issues tested in six of eight countries. Health care, poverty and education constitute the top three motivators in all nations except India and Poland….(More)

Three ways to grow the open data economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shadbolt in The Guardian: “…here are three areas where action by the UK government can help to support and promote a flourishing open data economy

Strengthen our data infrastructure

We are used to thinking of areas like transport and energy requiring physical infrastructure. From roads and rail networks to the national grid and power stations, we understand that investment and management of these vital parts of an infrastructure are essential to the economic wellbeing and future prosperity of the nation.

This is no less true of key data assets. Our data infrastructure is a core part of our national infrastructure. From lists of legally constituted companies to the country’s geospatial data, our data infrastructure needs to be managed, maintained, in some cases built and in all cases made as widely available as possible.

To maximise the benefits to the UK’s economy and to reduce costs in delivery of public services, the data we rely on needs to be adaptable, trustworthy, and as open as possible….

While we do have some excellent examples of infrastructure data from the likes of Companies House, Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Defra, core parts of the data infrastructure that we need within the UK are missing, unreliable, or of a low quality. The government must invest here just as it invests in our other traditional infrastructure.

Support and promote data innovation

If we are to make best use of data, we need a bridge between academic research, public, private and third sectors, and a thriving startup ecosystem where new ideas and approaches can grow.

We have learned that properly targeted challenges could identify potential savings for government – similar to Prescribing Analytics, an ODI-incubated startup which used publicly available data to identify £200m in prescriptions savings per year for the NHS – but, more importantly, translate that potential into procurable products and services that could deliver those savings.

A data challenge series run at a larger scale, funded by Innovate UK, openly contested and independently managed, would stimulate the creation of new companies, jobs, products and services. It would also act as a forcing function to strengthen data infrastructure around key challenges, and raise awareness and capacity for those working to solve them. The data needed to satisfy the challenges would have to be made available and usable, bringing data innovation into government and bolstering the offer of the startups and SMEs who take part.

Invest in data literacy

In order to take advantage of the data revolution, policymakers, businesses and citizens need to understand how to make use of data. In other words, they must become data literate.

Data literacy is needed through our whole educational system and society more generally. Crucially, policymakers are going to need to be informed by insights that can only be gleaned through understanding and analysing data effectively….(More)”

How to Succeed in the Networked World: A Grand Strategy for the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne-Marie Slaughter in Foreign Affairs: “Foreign policy experts have long been taught to see the world as a chessboard, analyzing the decisions of great powers and anticipating rival states’ reactions in a continual game of strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century British statesmen openly embraced this metaphor, calling their contest with Russia in Central Asia “the Great Game.” Today, the TV show Game of Thrones offers a particularly gory and irresistible version of geopolitics as a continual competition among contending kingdoms.

Think of a standard map of the world, showing the borders and capitals of the world’s 190-odd countries. That is the chessboard view.

Now think of a map of the world at night, with the lit-up bursts of cities and the dark swaths of wilderness. Those corridors of light mark roads, cars, houses, and offices; they mark the networks of human relationships, where families and workers and travelers come together. That is the web view. It is a map not of separation, marking off boundaries of sovereign power, but of connection.

To see the international system as a web is to see a world not of states but of networks. It is the world of terrorism; of drug, arms, and human trafficking; of climate change and declining biodiversity; of water wars and food insecurity; of corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion; of pandemic disease carried by air, sea, and land. In short, it is the world of many of the most pressing twenty-first-century global threats… (More)”.

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

The power of prediction markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mann in Nature: “It was a great way to mix science with gambling, says Anna Dreber. The year was 2012, and an international group of psychologists had just launched the ‘Reproducibility Project’ — an effort to repeat dozens of psychology experiments to see which held up1. “So we thought it would be fantastic to bet on the outcome,” says Dreber, who leads a team of behavioural economists at the Stockholm School of Economics.

In particular, her team wanted to see whether scientists could make good use of prediction markets: mini Wall Streets in which participants buy and sell ‘shares’ in a future event at a price that reflects their collective wisdom about the chance of the event happening. As a control, Dreber and her colleagues first asked a group of psychologists to estimate the odds of replication for each study on the project’s list. Then the researchers set up a prediction market for each study, and gave the same psychologists US$100 apiece to invest.

When the Reproducibility Project revealed last year that it had been able to replicate fewer than half of the studies examined2, Dreber found that her experts hadn’t done much better than chance with their individual predictions. But working collectively through the markets, they had correctly guessed the outcome 71% of the time3.

Experiments such as this are a testament to the power of prediction markets to turn individuals’ guesses into forecasts of sometimes startling accuracy. That uncanny ability ensures that during every US presidential election, voters avidly follow the standings for their favoured candidates on exchanges such as Betfair and the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). But prediction markets are increasingly being used to make forecasts of all kinds, on everything from the outcomes of sporting events to the results of business decisions. Advocates maintain that they allow people to aggregate information without the biases that plague traditional forecasting methods, such as polls or expert analysis….

Prediction markets have also had some high-profile misfires, however — such as giving the odds of a Brexit ‘stay’ vote as 85% on the day of the referendum, 23 June. (UK citizens in fact narrowly voted to leave the European Union.) And prediction markets lagged well behind conventional polls in predicting that Donald Trump would become the 2016 Republican nominee for US president.

Such examples have inspired academics to probe prediction markets. Why do they work as well as they do? What are their limits, and why do their predictions sometimes fail?…(More)”

 

Reframing Data Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Recently, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (“CIPL”) at Hunton & Williams LLP, a privacy and information policy think tank based in Brussels, London and Washington, D.C., and Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications company in the world, issued a joint white paper on Reframing Data Transparency (the “white paper”). The white paper was the outcome of a June 2016 roundtable held by the two organizations in London, in which senior business leaders, Data Privacy Officers, lawyers and academics discussed the importance of user-centric transparency to the data driven economy….The issues explored during the roundtable and in the white paper include the following:

  • The transparency deficit in the digital age. There is a growing gap between traditional, legal privacy notices and user-centric transparency that is capable of delivering understandable and actionable information concerning an organization’s data use policies and practices, including why it processes data, what the benefits are to individuals and society, how it protects the data and how users can manage and control the use of their data.
  • The impact of the transparency deficit. The transparency deficit undermines customer trust and customers’ ability to participate more effectively in the digital economy.
  • Challenges of delivering user-centric transparency. In a connected world where there may be no direct relationship between companies and their end users, both transparency and consent as a basis for processing are particularly challenging.
  • Transparency as a multistakeholder challenge. Transparency is not solely a legal issue, but a multistakeholder challenge, which requires engagement of regulators, companies, individuals, behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists.
  • The role of data protection authorities (“DPAs”). DPAs play a key role in promoting and incentivizing effective data transparency approaches and tools.
  • The role of companies. Data transparency is a critical business issue because transparency drives digital trust as well as business opportunities. Organizations must innovate on how to deliver user-centric transparency. Data driven companies must research and develop new approaches to transparency that explain the value exchange between customers and companies and the companies’ data practices, and create tools that enable their customers to exercise effective engagement and control.
  • The importance of empowering individuals. It is crucial to support and enhance individuals’ digital literacy, which includes an understanding of the uses of personal data and the benefits of data processing, as well as knowledge of relevant privacy rights and the data management tools that are available to them. Government bodies, regulators and industry should be involved in educating the public regarding digital literacy. Such education should take place in schools and universities, and through consumer education campaigns. Transparency is the foundation and sine qua non of individual empowerment.
  • The role of behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists. Experts from these disciplines will be crucial in developing user-centric transparency and controls….(More)”.

Empowering cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The real story on how citizens and businesses are driving smart cities” by the Economist Intelligence Unit: “Digital technologies are the lifeblood of today’s cities. They are applied widely in industry and society, from information and communications technology (ICT) to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which objects are connected to the Internet. As sensors turn any object into part of an intelligent urban network, and as computing power facilitates analysis of the data these sensors collect, elected officials and city administrators can gain an unparalleled understanding of the infrastructure and services of their city. However, to make the most of this intelligence, another ingredient is essential: citizen engagement. Thanks to digital technologies, citizens can provide a steady flow of feedback and ideas to city officials.

This study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Philips Lighting, investigates how citizens and businesses in 12 diverse cities around the world—Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—envision the benefits of smart cities. The choices of the respondents to the survey reflect the diverse nature of the challenges and opportunities facing different cities, from older cities in mature markets, where technology is at work with infrastructure that may be centuries old, to new cities in emerging markets, which have the opportunity to incorporate digital technologies as they grow.

Coupled with expert perspectives, these insights paint a fresh picture of how digital technologies can empower people to contribute-giving city officials a roadmap to smart city life in the 21st century….(More)”

NYC cyclists crowd-source map showing cars in bike lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Founded by a cyclist frustrated at the lack of local government action on enforcing bike safety, the Cars In Bike Lanes map geo-tags and time-stamps each contribution. New York City riders upload their photos, including a description of the cross streets where the incident occurred. License plate details are made visible, and users of the map can click to find out if a driver is a repeat offender.

The interactive map is open source, and the founder says he hopes other cities and developers customize the site for their areas. Development plans for the site will focus on increasing the numbers of cyclists using, and contributing to, it. And ideally, it will put pressure on local governments to actively enforce safety regulations designed to protect cyclists.

Cycle safety is a common urban problem, and cities around the world are designing different solutions. In The Netherlands,flashing LED lights warn cars of approaching cyclists at busy intersections. In Denmark, bikes fitted with radio frequency identification tags turn traffic lights in favor of the cyclist….(More)”

From Brexit to Colombia’s No vote: are constitutional democracies in crisis?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation Global: What do Colombia’s recent plebiscite and Brexit have in common? The surface similarities are clear: both referendums produced outcomes that few experts or citizens expected.

And many considered them a blow to core the social values of peace, integration, development and prosperity.

The unanticipated and widely debated results in Colombia and Great Britain – indeed, the very decision to use the mechanism of popular consultation to identify the citizenry’s will – obliges us to reflect on the future of democratic systems.

Both the British and Colombian plebiscites can be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of a crisis in representative democracy that affects not just these two countries but many others around the world.

The nature of democracy

Democracies recognise that only the people have the legitimacy to decide their destiny. But they also acknowledge that identifying the will of a collective isn’t simple: modern democracies are constitutional, which means that decisions made by the people – usually through their representatives – are limited by the content of the national constitution.

Decisions occasionally made by a constitutional assembly or by a supermajority in congress – say, to ban torture – prevent the government from authorising such action, no matter how dramatic the current social circumstance (a terrorist attack, for instance, or war), or how much a national majority favours the measure.

Constitutional rights and the rules of the democratic game cannot be modified by governments or even by a majority of the people. Democratic communities are bound by the deep constitutional commitments they’ve made to respect human rights and the rule of law.

These beliefs may, of course, be threatened by an occasional challenge. A terrorist attack that fills people with fear and resentment may make them forget, momentarily, that yesterday or two centuries ago – when they were mentally and emotionally far from this blinding, overwhelming event – they made the choice never to torture, anticipating that their desire to do so would be motivated by basic human instinct such as survival or vengeance.

That’s what a constitution is for: defining our shared basic values and goals as a nation, external factors be damned.

Decisions like the ones the Colombian and British people were asked to vote on do not represent mere political choices, such as whether to raise the sales tax or expand free trade.

They were much more akin to constitutional decisions that, depending on their outcomes, would usher in a new era in the lives of those nations. Community identity, rights, the rule of law and peace itself were some of the basic and fundamental values at stake.

The problem with plebiscites

There are many ways to make, validate, and build consensus around fundamental constitutional decisions: parliamentary super-majorities in Chile, constitutional assemblies in Argentina, or state legislature approvalin Mexico and the United States.

In some, such as the current Chilean process designed by Michelle Bachelet’s administration, the people themselves are called to deliberate constitutional choices in public forums.

And yet in the Colombian and the British cases, the government chose the riskiest of all known methods for identifying popular constitutional will. In this kind of process, complex questions are put forth in a way that makes it seem quite simple, because they must be answered in a single word: yes or no….

these difficult and deep concerns cannot be decided via a confusing question and a binary response.

Plebiscites are not necessarily democratic for those of us who believe that the justification of democracy as a superior political system superior is not because it counts heads, but because of the deliberative process that precedes decisions.

Thus, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s famous plebscita were not democratic exercises. A democratic exercise only exists when a diverse exchange of perspectives, opinions, and information can take place. The more diverse those inputs, the more legitimate the outcome of the vote.

The plebiscite constitutes the opposite of everything that we hope will happen in constitutional decision-making: the question is designed and imposed by those in power and the probability or suspicion that their formulation is biased is very high.

What’s more, public deliberation about the question may happen, but it’s not a certainty. Are people talking to their neighbours? Are they developing their position and hearing alternative approaches, which is the best way to make an educated decision?…

Constitutional decisions, which is to say the decisions political communities make rarely but carefully over the course of their history – what Bruce Ackerman calls “constitutional moments” – cannot be decided by plebiscite.

The popular will is too elusive for us to fool ourselves into thinking we can capture it with a single question….(More)”

For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.

The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.

One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.

China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.

When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.

“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.

The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.

What else could lotteries do?

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.

Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.

More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.

The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.

The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”