Crowdsourcing Expertise to Increase Congressional Capacity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Austin Seaborn at Beeck Center: “Members of Congress have close connections with their districts, and information arising from local organizations, such as professional groups, academia, industry as well as constituents with relevant expertise (like retirees, veterans or students) is highly valuable to them.  Today, congressional staff capacity is at a historic low, while at the same time, constituents in districts are often well equipped to address the underlying policy questions that Congress seeks to solve….

In meetings we have had with House and Senate staffers, they repeatedly express both the difficulty managing their substantial area-specific work loads and their interest in finding ways to substantively engage constituents to find good nuggets of information to help them in their roles as policymakers. At the same time, constituents are demanding more transparency and dialogue from their elected representatives. In many cases, our project brings these two together. It allows Members to tap the expertise in their districts while at the same time creating an avenue for constituents to contribute their knowledge and area expertise to the legislative process. It’s a win for constituents and a win for Member of Congress and their staffs.

It is important to note that the United States lags behind other democracies in experimenting with more inclusive methods during the policymaking process. In the United Kingdom, for example, the UK Parliament has experimented with a variety of new digital tools to engage with constituents. These methods range from Twitter hashtags, which are now quite common given the rise in social media use by governments and elected officials, to a variety of web forums on a variety of platforms. Since June of 2015, they have also been doing digital debates, where questions from the general public are crowdsourced and later integrated into a parliamentary debate by the Member of Parliament leading the debate. Estonia, South Africa, Taiwan, France also…notable examples.

One promising new development we hope to explore more thoroughly is the U.S. Library of Congress’s recently announced legislative data App Challenge. This competition is distinct from the many hackathons that have been held on behalf of Congress in the past, in that this challenge seeks new methods not only to innovate, but also to integrate and legislate. In his announcement, the Library’s Chief Information Officer, Bernard A. Barton, Jr., stated, “An informed citizenry is better able to participate in our democracy, and this is a very real opportunity to contribute to a better understanding of the work being done in Washington.  It may even provide insights for the people doing the work around the clock, both on the Hill, and in state and district offices.  Your innovation and integration may ultimately benefit the way our elected officials legislate for our future.” We believe these sorts of new methods will play a crucial role in the future of engaging citizens in their democracies….(More)”.

Global network of ‘hunters’ aim to take down terrorists on the internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Guardian: “Colonel Kurtz used to spend hours playing social games like Farmville. Now he hunts terrorists on the internet.

The pseudonymous 41-year-old, who runs his own construction company, is one of dozens of volunteer “hunters” to dedicate hours each day trying to identify and infiltrate terror groups online and block the spread of their propaganda.

“We’re trying to save lives and get this crap off the net to keep the next vulnerable kid from seeing propaganda and thinking it’s cool,” said Kurtz.

These hunters plug a gap in social media companies’ ability to keep terrorists off their networks by obsessively tracking and reporting Isis’s most prominent recruiters and propagandists across private messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp and public networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Some of them also provide valuable tip-offs of credible threats to law enforcement.

This type of hunting originated in 2014, when hacktivist collective Anonymous declared “war” on Islamic State with the #OpIsis campaign. The loosely affiliated army of digital activists set out to expose and report Isis supporters on social media, and hack or take down their websites.

Kurtz became a hunter following the November 2015 Paris attack. He had been watching the France-Germany friendly football match online when it was disrupted by loud explosions. That day seven attackers carried out mass shootings and suicide bombings that killed 129 people in France’s capital.

After writing an angry Facebook post about the attack, Kurtz was contacted by a friend and member of Anonymous asking if he’d like to help out with #OpIsis. “It took me a few days to figure things out and after a few weeks I was dropping accounts like flies,” he said.

Out of Anonymous’ #OpIsis there have emerged more considered, organized groups including Ghost Security Group, KDK and a “drama and ego-free” group that Kurtz formed in 2016 after getting tired of the Islamophobia and inaccuracy within the operation…(More).

Features of Parliamentary Websites in Selected Jurisdictions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)”.

Connecting societal issues, users and data. Scenario-based design of open data platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Erna Ruijer et al in Government Information Quarterly: “Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to take into account the variation of open data practices and specific contexts of usage. This study, therefore, argues that next to general requirements: we also need to collect context-specific user requirements for open data platforms. We take different societal issues as the starting point for open data platform design. To illustrate the value of this context-specific approach, we apply scenario-based design methodology in the Province of Groningen in The Netherlands. The results show that different scenarios result partly in similar but also partly in different user requirements, leading to a deeper and richer understanding of user requirements. We conclude that a context-specific approach thereby connecting data, users and societal issues can be used to guide government agencies and designers in efforts to develop open data platforms that actually meet the needs of citizens….(More)”.

Madrid as a democracy lab

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernardo Gutiérrez at OpenDemocracy: “…The launch of Decide Madrid, the city participation platform running on the Consul free software, signaled a real revolution. On the one hand, it paved the way for democracy from the bottom up, through direct and binding mechanisms. Unlike other historical participatory budgets, the 100 million Euros devoted to Decide Madrid participatory budgets in 2017 are allocated according to proposals coming from below. The proposals that get the most votes, whenever technically feasible, are approved. The platform also carries a section for “citizen proposals”. …

The Decide Madrid platform was not initially well received by the traditional neighbourhood associations, used to face-to-face participation and to mediating between citizens and government. In order to tackle this, a number of face-to-face deliberation spaces are being set up, such as the Local Forums (physical participation spaces in the districts), and also projects such as If you feel like a cat (participation for children and teenagers), or processes such as G1000, which aims at promoting collective deliberation and fostering proposals from below on the basis of a representative sample of the population, so that the participants’ diversity and plurality is guaranteed.

Most projects are being carried out with the support of the new Laboratories of Citizen Innovation of the prestigious Medialab-Prado. The Participa LAB(Collective Intelligence for Democracy), the DataLab (open data) and the InciLab (Citizen Innovation Lab) are joint public/common initiatives, acting as a bridge between local government and citizens. The Participa LAB, which is the one working more closely on participation, is collaborating with Decide Madridin a number of projects (Codat Madrid hackathons, If you feel like a cat, community lines, gamification, G1000, narrative groups…) and coordinates the Collective Intelligence for Democracy international call. InciLab has launched, among many other initiatives, the Madrid Listens project, to connect City Hall officials with citizens on concrete projects, blending disintermediation and the citizen lab philosophy.

More than 300.000 users strong, Decide Madrid is consolidating itself as the hegemonic space for participation in the city. It activates a variety of processes, debates, proposals, and projects. Its free software means that any city can adapt Consul to its needs, without any substantial investment, and set up a platform. From Barcelona to A Coruña, from Rome to Paris and Buenos Aires, dozens of institutions around the world have replicated the initial Decide Madrid core, thus setting up what Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, calls a “liquid federation of cities”. Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, praising the cooperative network of participation cities says: “It is very interesting that in Barcelona we have been able to carry out our first experience of digital participation, Decidim Barcelona, adapting Madrid’s base code. Once we have had a first proposal, we have shared it with many municipalities throughout Catalonia”.

Distributed democracy

The brain as a metaphor. A map of Hamburg (Germany) as a symbol of the networked, decentralized city. Neurons and neighbourhoods connected by flows, inevitably synchronized. Both images are to be found in Emergency, Steven Johnson’s classic book on collective intelligence processes. The city as a brain, as a whole made of decentralized nodes. The city as an open network, where any neighbourhood-node can connect with any other. Caio Vassão’s concept of a distributed city rounds the edges of the city with no centre, “networked, open, fluid, flexible, adaptable, reconfigurable”. A city where the neighbourhoods in the suburbs dialogue and relate to each other without the mediation of a historical center.

Left: Diagram of the human brain. Image source: Mittermeier. Right: Map of Hamburg, circa 1850. Image source: Princeton Architectural Press.

Madrid has kick-started a forceful decentralization policy. Distributed democracy in Madrid can be seen in how budgets are allocated, how city districts have multiplied their resources and partly manage cultural festivals (like the Summers in the City) and cultural projects (Madrid District).

At the same time, the launching of the Local Forums is a clear move to decentralize power and participation in the city. Through projects such as Experiment District (travelling citizen laboratories), Imagine Madrid (rethinking 10 territories) or the M.A.R.E.S project, Spain’s capital city is redrawing its neighbourhood fabric, its economic relations, and citizen involvement in decision making. The successful Medialab-Prado’s Experiment District project, which has already visited Villaverde, Moratalaz and Fuencarral, is in full expansion. It is about to even launch a global call, as dozens of cities around the world want to replicate it. Medialab-Prado, one of the city innovation centres, defines Experiment District as a set of “citizen labs for experimenting and collaborative learning in which anyone can participate”. Citizen (neighbourhood) labs based on the prototyping culture, an open and collaborative way of developing projects. Citizen (neighbourhood) labs for learning and teaching, where the result is not a perfect product, but a process that can be improved in real time through the collaboration of citizens from the Madrid neighbourhoods….(More)”

Are Future Bureaucrats More Prosocial?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Markus S. Tepe and Pieter Vanhuysse: “…explores the associations between self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behavior. We study three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We use laboratory experiments with monetary rewards to measure altruism, fairness, strategic fairness, and cooperativeness, and a post-experimental survey on subjects’ PSM. Higher levels of PSM are not associated with studying public administration but are positively associated with altruism and negatively with strategic fairness. The experimental data reveals robust subject-pool effects. After controlling for PSM, public administration students behave more altruistically and display less merely strategic fairness than business students. And they behave more cooperatively than business and law students. These behavioral findings about future bureaucrats corroborate cumulative earlier survey evidence about the higher prosocial tendencies of public sector employees. They point to the danger of crowding out such tendencies through overly extrinsic management tools….(More)”

The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is the Participants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eitan D. Hersh in the New York Times: “…For years, political scientists have studied how people vote, petition, donate, protest, align with parties and take in the news, and have asked what motivates these actions. The typical answers are civic duty and self-interest.

But civic duty and self-interest do not capture the ways that middle- and upper-class Americans are engaging in politics. Now it is the Facebooker who argues with friends of friends he does not know; the news consumer who spends hours watching cable; the repeat online petitioner who demands actions like impeaching the president; the news sharer willing to spread misinformation and rumor because it feels good; the data junkie who frantically toggles between horse races in suburban Georgia and horse races in Britain and France and horse races in sports (even literal horse races).

What is really motivating this behavior is hobbyism — the regular use of free time to engage in politics as a leisure activity. Political hobbyism is everywhere.

There are several reasons. For one, technology allows those interested in politics to gain specialized knowledge and engage in pleasing activities, like reinforcing their views with like-minded friends on Facebook. For another, our era of relative security (nearly a half-century without a conscripted military) has diminished the solemnity that accompanied politics in the past. Even in the serious moments since the 2016 election, political engagement for many people is characterized by forwarding the latest clip that embarrasses the other side, like videos of John McCain asking incomprehensible questions or Elizabeth Warren “destroying” Betsy DeVos.

Then there are the well-intentioned policy innovations over the years that were meant to make politics more open but in doing so exposed politics to hobbyists: participatory primaries, ballot initiatives, open-data policies, even campaign contribution limits. The contribution rules that are now in place favor the independent vanity projects of wealthy egomaniacs instead of allowing parties to raise money and build durable local support.

The result of this is political engagement that takes the form of partisan fandom, the seeking of cheap thrills, and amateurs trying their hand at a game — the billionaire funding “super PACs” all the way down to the everyday armchair quarterback who professes that the path to political victory is through ideological purity. (In the face of a diverse and moderate country, the demand for ideological purity itself can be a symptom of hobbyism: If politics is a sport and the stakes are no higher, why not demand ideological purity if it feels good?)….

What, exactly, is wrong with political hobbyism? We live in a democracy, after all. Aren’t we supposed to participate? Political hobbyism might not be so bad if it complemented mundane but important forms of participation. The problem is that hobbyism is replacing other forms of participation, like local organizing, supporting party organizations, neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion, even voting in midterm elections — the 2014 midterms had the lowest level of voter participation in over 70 years.

The Democratic Party, the party that embraces “engagement,” is in atrophy in state legislatures across the country. Perhaps this is because state-level political participation needs to be motivated by civic duty; it is not entertaining enough to pique the interest of hobbyists. The party of Hollywood celebrities also struggles to energize its supporters to vote. Maybe it is because when politics is something one does for fun rather than out of a profound moral obligation, the citizen who does not find it fun has no reason to engage. The important parts of politics for the average citizen simply may not be enjoyable….

An unqualified embrace of engagement, without leaders channeling activists toward clear goals, yields the spinning of wheels of hobbyism.

Democrats should know that an unending string of activities intended for instant gratification does not amount to much in political power. What they should ask is whether their emotions and energy are contributing to a behind-the-scenes effort to build local support across the country or whether they are merely a hollow, self-gratifying manifestation of the new political hobbyism….(More)”

The solution to US politics’ Facebook problem is Facebook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Parag Khanna in Quartz: “In just one short decade, Facebook has evolved from a fast-growing platform for sharing classmates’ memories and pet photos to being blamed for Donald Trump’s election victory, promoting hate speech, and accelerating ISIS recruitment. Clearly, Facebook has outgrown its original mission.

It should come as no surprise then that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has in the past few months issued a long manifesto explaining the company’s broader aim to foster global connectivity, given a commencement speech at Harvard focused on the need for people to feel a meaningful “sense of purpose,” as well as more recently changed the company’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

In truth, Facebook has been doing this all along. In just a three year period between 2011-2014, the average number of international “friends” Facebook members have (whether from rich or poor countries) doubled and in many cases tripled. There is no denying that without Facebook, people would have much less exposure to people they would never meet, and therefore opportunities to gain wider perspectives (irrespective of whether they confirm or contradict one’s own). Then there are charities and NGOs from UNICEF to Human Rights Watch that raise millions of dollars on Facebook and other online platforms such as Avaaz and Change.org.

Facebook has just crossed two billion monthly users, meaning more people express their views on it each month than will vote in all elections in the world this year. That makes Facebook the largest player in wide array of social media tools that are the epicenter–and the lightening rod–for our conversation about technology and politics. Ironically, though, while so many of these innovations come out of the US, the American approach to using digital technology for better governance is at best pathetic…. Sloppy analysis, a cynical Kommentariat and an un-innovative government have led America down the path of ignoring most of the positive ways digital governance can unfold. Fortunately, there are plenty of lessons from around the world for those who care to look and learn.

Citizen engagement is an obvious start. But this should be more than just live-streamed town halls and Q&As in the run-up to elections. European governments such as the UK use Facebook pages to continuously gather policy proposals on public spending priorities. In Estonia, electronic voting is the norm. In the world’s oldest direct democracy, Switzerland, citizen petitions and initiatives are being digitized for even more transparent and inclusive deliberation. In Australia, the Flux movement is allowing all citizens to cast digital ballots on specific policy issues and submit them straight to parliament. Meanwhile, America has the Koch Brothers and the NRA…..

Even governments that are less respected in the West because their regimes do not resemble our own do a better job of harnessing social media. Sheikh Mohammed, ruler of Dubai, uses Facebook to crowdsource suggestions for infrastructure projects and other ideas from a population that is a whopping 90 percent foreign.

Singapore may be the most sophisticated government in this domain. Though the incumbent People’s Action Party (PAP) wins every parliamentary election hands-down, more important is the fact that surveys the public ad nauseam on issues of savings and healthcare, transit routes, immigration policy and just about everything else. Singapore is not Switzerland, but it might be the world’s most responsive government.

This is how governments that appear illegitimate according to a narrow reading of Western political theory boast far higher public satisfaction than most all Western governments today. If you don’t understand this, you probably spend too much time in a filter bubble….

The US should aspire to be a place where democracy and data reinforce rather than contradict each other….(More)

The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Leah Bassel: “…explores listening as a social and political practice, in contrast to the more common focus on voice and speaking.  The author draws on cases from Canada, France and the United Kingdom, exploring: minority women and debates over culture and religion; riots and young men in France and England; citizen journalism and the creative use of different media; and solidarity between migrant justice and indigenous activists. Analysis across these diverse settings considers whether and how a politics of listening, which demands that the roles of speakers and listeners change, can be undertaken in adversarial and tense political moments. The Politics of Listening argues that such a practice has the potential to create new ways of being and acting together, as political equals who are heard on their own terms….(More)”