The practice of democracy: A selection of civic engagement initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by the European Parliament Research Service: “Public powers are currently facing extraordinary challenges, from finding ways to revive economic growth without damaging the environment, to managing a global health crisis, combating inequality and securing peace. In the coming decades, public regulators, and with them academics, civil society actors and corporate powers, will confront another dilemma that is fast becoming a clear and present challenge. This is whether to protect the current structures of democratic governance,despite the widespread perception of their inefficiency,or adapt them to fast-changing scenarios (but, in doing so, take the risk of further weakening democracy).

The picture is blurred, with diverging trends. On the one hand, the classic interest-representation model is under strain. Low voter turnouts, rising populist (or anti-establishment) political movements and widespread discontent towards public institutions are stress-testing the foundations of democratic systems. Democracy, ever-louder voices argue, is a mere chimera, and citizens have little meaningful impact on the public decision-making process. Therefore, critics suggest, alternatives to the democratic model must be considered if countries are to navigate future challenges. However, the reality is more complex. Indeed, the decay of democratic values is unambiguously rejected by the birth of new grassroots movements, evidenced by record-speed civic mobilisation (especially among the young) and sustained by widespread street protest. Examined more closely, these events show that global demand for participation is alive and kicking.

The clash between these two opposing trends raises a number of questions that policy-makers and analysts must answer. First, will new, hybrid, forms of democratic participation replace classic representation systems? Second, amid transformative processes, how will power-roles be redistributed? A third set of questions looks at what is driving the transformation of democratic systems. As the venues of political discussion and interaction move from town halls and meeting rooms to online forums, it becomes critical to understand whether innovative democratic practices will be implemented almost exclusively through impersonal, ascetic, digital platforms; or, whether civic engagement will still be nurtured through in-person, local forums built to encourage debate.

This study begins by looking at the latest developments in the academic and institutional debates on democratic participation and civic engagement. Contributing to the crisis of traditional democratic models are political apathy and declining trust in political institutions, changes in methods of producing and sharing knowledge, and the pervasive nature of technology. How are public institutions reacting to these disruptive changes? The central part of this study examines a sample of initiatives trialled by public administrations (local, national and supranational) to engage citizens in policy-making. These initiatives are categorised by three criteria: first, the depth and complexity of cooperation between public structures and private actors; second, the design of procedures and structures of participation; and,third, the level of politicisation of the consultations, as well as the attractiveness of certain topics compared with others.

This analysis is intended to contribute to the on-going debate on the democratisation of the European Union (EU). The planned Conference on the Future of Europe, the recent reform of the European Citizens’ Initiative, and on-going debates on how to improve the transparency of EU decision-making are all designed to revive the civic spirit of the European public. These efforts notwithstanding, severe political, economic and societal challenges are jeopardising the very ideological foundations of the Union. The on-going coronavirus pandemic has placed the EU’s effectiveness under scrutiny once again. By appraising and applying methods tested by public sector institutions to engage citizens in policy-making, the EU could boost its chances of accomplishing its political mandate with success….(More)”

Digital diplomacy: States go online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Philipp Grüll at Euractiv: “When Germany takes over the European Council Presidency on 1 July, Berlin will have plenty to do. The draft programme seen by EURACTIV Germany focuses on the major challenges of our time: climate change, digitisation, and the coronavirus.

Berlin wants to establish ‘European Digital Diplomacy’ by creating a ‘Digital Diplomacy Network’ to exist alongside the ‘Technospheres USA and China’.

This should not only be about keeping European industries competitive. After all, the term “digital diplomacy” is not new.

Ilan Manor, a researcher at Oxford University and author of numerous papers on digital diplomacy, defines it as “the use of digital tools to achieve foreign policy goals.”

This definition is intentionally broad, Manor told EURACTIV Germany, because technology can be used in so many areas of international relations….

Manor divides the development of this digital public diplomacy into two phases.

In the first one, from 2008 to 2015, governments took the first cautious steps. They experimented and launched random and often directionless online activities. Foreign ministries and embassies set up social media accounts. Sweden opened a virtual embassy in the online video game “Second Life.”

It was only in the second phase, from 2015 to the present, that foreign ministries began to act more strategically. They used “Big Data” to record public opinion in other countries, and also to track down online propaganda against their own country.

As an example, Manor cites the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom, which is said to have deliberately disseminated anti-EU narratives prior to the Brexit referendum, packaged in funny and seemingly innocent Internet memes that spread rapidly….(More)”.

A Practical Guide for Establishing an Evidence Centre

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Alliance for Useful Evidence: “Since 2013, Nesta and the Alliance for Useful Evidence have supported the development of more than eight evidence centres. This report draws on insight from our own experience, published material and interviews with senior leaders from a range of evidence intermediaries.

The report identifies five common ingredients that contribute to successful evidence centres:

  1. Clear objectives: Good knowledge of the centre’s intended user group(s), clear outcomes to work towards and an evidence-informed theory of change.
  2. Robust organisational development: Commitment to create an independent and sustainable organisation with effective governance and the right mix of skills and experience, over a timescale that will be sufficient to make a difference.
  3. Engaged users: Understanding users’ evidence needs and working collaboratively with them to increase their capability, motivation and opportunity to use evidence in their decision-making.
  4. Rigorous curation and creation of evidence: A robust and transparent approach to selecting and generating high-quality evidence for the centre’s users.
  5. A focus on impact: Commitment to learn from the centre’s activities, including successes and failures, so that you can increase your effectiveness in achieving your objectives…(More)”.

The “Social” Side of Big Data: Teaching BD Analytics to Political Science Students

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Case report by Giampiero Giacomello and Oltion Preka: “In an increasingly technology-dependent world, it is not surprising that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates are in high demand. This state of affairs, however, has made the public overlook the case that not only computing and artificial intelligence are naturally interdisciplinary, but that a huge portion of generated data comes from human–computer interactions, thus they are social in character and nature. Hence, social science practitioners should be in demand too, but this does not seem the case. One of the reasons for such a situation is that political and social science departments worldwide tend to remain in their “comfort zone” and see their disciplines quite traditionally, but by doing so they cut themselves off from many positions today. The authors believed that these conditions should and could be changed and thus in a few years created a specifically tailored course for students in Political Science. This paper examines the experience of the last year of such a program, which, after several tweaks and adjustments, is now fully operational. The results and students’ appreciation are quite remarkable. Hence the authors considered the experience was worth sharing, so that colleagues in social and political science departments may feel encouraged to follow and replicate such an example….(More)”

Sector-Specific (Data-) Access Regimes of Competitors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jörg Hoffmann: “The expected economic and social benefits of data access and sharing are enormous. And yet, particularly in the B2B context, data sharing of privately held data between companies has not taken off at efficient scale. This already led to the adoption of sector specific data governance and access regimes. Two of these regimes are enshrined in the PSD2 that introduced an access to account and a data portability rule for specific account information for third party payment providers.

This paper analyses these sector-specific access and portability regimes and identifies regulatory shortcomings that should be addressed and can serve as further guidance for further data access regulation. It first develops regulatory guidelines that build around the multiple regulatory dimensions of data and the potential adverse effects that may be created by too broad data access regimes.

In this regard the paper assesses the role of factual data exclusivity for data driven innovation incentives for undertakings, the role of industrial policy driven market regulation within the principle of a free market economy, the impact of data sharing on consumer sovereignty and choice, and ultimately data induced-distortions of competition. It develops the findings by taking recourse to basic IP and information economics and the EU competition law case law pertaining refusal to supply cases, the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and to current competition policy considerations with regard to the envisioned preventive competition control regime tackling data rich ‘undertakings of paramount importance for competition across markets’ in Germany. This is then followed by an analysis of the PSD2 access and portability regimes in light of the regulatory principles….(More)”.

Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: “Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens’ Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

This “deliberative wave” has been building since the 1980s, gaining momentum since around 2010. This report has gathered close to 300 representative deliberative practices to explore trends in such processes, identify different models, and analyse the trade-offs among different design choices as well as the benefits and limits of public deliberation.

It includes Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes for Public Decision Making, based on comparative empirical evidence gathered by the OECD and in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics. Finally, the report explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives….(More)”.

EU Company Data: State of the Union 2020

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by OpenCorporates: “… on access to company data in the EU. It’s completely revised, with more detail on the impact that the lack of access to this critical dataset has – on business, on innovation, on democracy, and society.

The results are still not great however:

  • Average score is low
    The average score across the EU in terms of access to company data is just 40 out of 100. This is better than the average score 8 years ago, which was just 23 out of 100, but still very low nevertheless.
  • Some major economies score badly
    Some of the EU’s major economies continue to score very badly indeed, with Germany, for example, scoring just 15/100, Italy 10/100, and Spain 0/100.
  • EU policies undermined
    The report identifies 15 areas where the lack of open company data frustrates, impedes or otherwise has a negative impact on EU policy.
  • Inequalities widened
    The report also identifies how inequalities are further widened by poor access to this critical dataset, and how the recovery from COVID-19 will be hampered by it too.

On the plus side, the report also identifies the EU Open Data & PSI Directive passed last year as potentially game changing – but only if it is implemented fully, and there are significant doubts whether this will happen….(More)”

How Crowdsourcing Aided a Push to Preserve the Histories of Nazi Victims

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Curry at the New York Times: “With people around the globe sheltering at home amid the pandemic, an archive of records documenting Nazi atrocities asked for help indexing them. Thousands joined the effort….

As the virus prompted lockdowns across Europe, the director of the Arolsen Archives — the world’s largest devoted to the victims of Nazi persecution — joined millions of others working remotely from home and spending lots more time in front of her computer.

“We thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity,’” said the director, Floriane Azoulay.

Two months later, the archive’s “Every Name Counts” project has attracted thousands of online volunteers to work as amateur archivists, indexing names from the archive’s enormous collection of papers. To date, they have added over 120,000 names, birth dates and prisoner numbers in the database.

“There’s been much more interest than we expected,” Ms. Azoulay said. “The fact that people were locked at home and so many cultural offerings have moved online has played a big role.”

It’s a big job: The Arolsen Archives are the largest collection of their kind in the world, with more than 30 million original documents. They contain information on the wartime experiences of as many as 40 million people, including Jews executed in extermination camps and forced laborers conscripted from across Nazi-occupied Europe.

The documents, which take up 16 miles of shelving, include things like train manifests, delousing records, work detail assignments and execution records…(More)”.

Permanent joint committees in Belgium: involving citizens in parliamentary debate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elisa Minsart and Vincent Jacquet: “Amidst wide public disillusionment with the institutions of representative democracy, political scientists, campaigners and politicians have intensified efforts to find an effective mechanism to narrow the gap between citizens and those who govern them. One of the most popular remedies in recent years – and one frequently touted as a way to break the Brexit impasse encountered by the UK political class in 2016-19 – is that of citizens’ assemblies. These deliberative forums gather diversified samples of the population, recruited through a process of random selection. Citizens who participate meet experts, deliberate on a specific public issue and make a range of recommendations for policy-making. Citizens’ assemblies are flourishing in many representative democracies – not least in the UK, with the current Climate Assembly UK and Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland. They show that citizens are able to deliberate on complex political issues and to deliver original proposals. 

For several years now, some public leaders, scholars and politicians have sought to integrate these democratic innovations into more traditional political structures. Belgium recently made a step in this direction. Each of Belgium’s three regions has its own parliament, with full legislative powers: on 13 November 2019, a proposition was approved to modify how the Parliament of the Brussels Region operates. The reform mandates the establishment of joint deliberative committees, on which members of the public will serve alongside elected representatives. This will enable ordinary people to deliberate with MPs on preselected themes and to formulate recommendations. The details of the process are currently still being drafted and the first commission is expected to launch at the end of 2020. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, drafting and negotiations with other parties have not been interrupted thanks to an online platform and a videoconference facility.

This experience has been inspired by other initiatives organised in Belgium. In 2011, the G1000 initiative brought together more than 700 randomly selected citizens to debate on different topics. This grassroots experiment attracted lots of public attention. In its aftermath, the different parliaments of the country launched their own citizens’ assemblies, designed to tackle specific local issues. Some international experiences also inspired the Brussels Region, in particular the first Irish Constitutional Convention (2012–2014). This assembly was composed of both elected representatives and randomly selected citizens, and led directly to a referendum that approved the legalisation of same-sex marriage. However, the present joint committees go well beyond these initiatives. Whereas both of these predecessors were ad hoc initiatives designed to resolve particular problems, the Brussels committees will be permanent and hosted at the heart of the parliament. Both of these aspects make the new committees a major innovation and entirely different from the predecessors that helped inspire them…(More)”.

UK parliamentary select committees: crowdsourcing for evidence-based policy or grandstanding?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the The LSE GV314 Group: “In the United Kingdom, the influence of parliamentary select committees on policy depends substantially on the ‘seriousness’ with which they approach the task of gathering and evaluating a wide range of evidence and producing reports and recommendations based on it. However, select committees are often charged with being concerned with ‘political theatre’ and ‘grandstanding’ rather than producing evidence-based policy recommendations. This study, based on a survey of 919 ‘discretionary’ witnesses, including those submitting written and oral evidence, examines the case for arguing that there is political bias and grandstanding in the way select committees go about selecting witnesses, interrogating them and using their evidence to put reports together. While the research finds some evidence of such ‘grandstanding’ it does not appear to be strong enough to suggest that the role of select committees is compromised as a crowdsourcer of evidence….(More)”.