Paper by Christian Opitz: “The current research on deliberative-participatory democratic innovations conducted by state administration agencies exhibits empirical eclecticism and is dominated by a deliberative paradigm. However, this paradigm tends to conflate normative prescription with analytical description. In contrast, this article proposes a comprehensive re-conceptualization of such innovations, drawing from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. It outlines the specific problem these innovations address (function), how they operate in tackling this problem (functioning) and the problems they inevitably raise (dysfunctions). In addition, my re-conceptualization retains the possibility to critically compare these (and other) experiments regarding their capability to address emerging challenges within the modern democratic political system…(More)”.
The Open Data Maturity Ranking is shoddy – it badly needs to be re-thought
Article by Olesya Grabova: “Digitalising government is essential for Europe’s future innovation and economic growth and one of the keys to achieving this is open data – information that public entities gather, create, or fund, and it’s accessible to all to freely use.
This includes everything from public budget details to transport schedules. Open data’s benefits are vast — it fuels research, boosts innovation, and can even save lives in wartime through the creation of chatbots with information about bomb shelter locations. It’s estimated that its economic value will reach a total of EUR 194 billion for EU countries and the UK by 2030.
This is why correctly measuring European countries’ progress in open data is so important. And that’s why the European Commission developed the Open Data Maturity (ODM) ranking, which annually measures open data quality, policies, online portals, and impact across 35 European countries.
Alas, however, it doesn’t work as well as it should and this needs to be addressed.
A closer look at the report’s overall approach reveals the ranking hardly reflects countries’ real progress when it comes to open data. This flawed system, rather than guiding countries towards genuine improvement, risks misrepresenting their actual progress and misleads citizens about their country’s advancements, which further stalls opportunities for innovation.
Take Slovakia. It’s apparently the biggest climber, leaping from 29th to 10th place in just over a year. One would expect that the country has made significant progress in making public sector information available and stimulating its reuse – one of the OMD assessment’s key elements.
A deeper examination reveals that this isn’t the case. Looking at the ODM’s methodology highlights where it falls short… and how it can be fixed…(More)”.
What can improve democracy?
Report by the Pew Research Center: “…surveys have long found that people in many countries are dissatisfied with their democracy and want major changes to their political systems – and this year is no exception. But high and growing rates of discontent certainly raise the question: What do people think could fix things?
We set out to answer this by asking more than 30,000 respondents in 24 countries an open-ended question: “What do you think would help improve the way democracy in your country is working?” While the second- and third-most mentioned priorities vary greatly, across most countries surveyed, there is one clear top answer: Democracy can be improved with better or different politicians.
People want politicians who are more responsive to their needs and who are more competent and honest, among other factors. People also focus on questions of descriptive representation – the importance of having politicians with certain characteristics such as a specific race, religion or gender.
Respondents also think citizens can improve their own democracy. Across most of the 24 countries surveyed, issues of public participation and of different behavior from the people themselves are a top-five priority.
Other topics that come up regularly include:
- Economic reform, especially reforms that will enhance job creation.
- Government reform, including implementing term limits, adjusting the balance of power between institutions and other factors.
We explore these topics and the others we coded in the following chapters:
- Politicians, changing leadership and political parties (Chapter 1)
- Government reform, special interests and the media (Chapter 2)
- Economic and policy changes (Chapter 3)
- Citizen behavior and individual rights and equality (Chapter 4)
- Electoral reform and direct democracy (Chapter 5)
- Rule of law, safety and the judicial system (Chapter 6)…(More)”.
We Need To Rewild The Internet
Article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon: “In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.
So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.
Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.
It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered…(More)”.
On the Manipulation of Information by Governments
Paper by Ariel Karlinsky and Moses Shayo: “Governmental information manipulation has been hard to measure and study systematically. We hand-collect data from official and unofficial sources in 134 countries to estimate misreporting of Covid mortality during 2020-21. We find that between 45%–55% of governments misreported the number of deaths. The lion’s share of misreporting cannot be attributed to a country’s capacity to accurately diagnose and report deaths. Contrary to some theoretical expectations, there is little evidence of governments exaggerating the severity of the pandemic. Misreporting is higher where governments face few social and institutional constraints, in countries holding elections, and in countries with a communist legacy…(More)”
Democracy and Artificial Intelligence: old problems, new solutions?
Discussion between Nardine Alnemr and Rob Weymouth: “…I see three big perspectives relevant to AI and democracy. You have the most conservative, mirroring the 80s and the 90s, still talking about the digital public sphere as if it’s distant from our lives. As if it’s something novel and inaccessible, which is not quite accurate anymore.
Then there’s the more optimistic and cautionary side of the spectrum. People who are excited about the technologies, but they’re not quite sure. They’re intrigued to see the potential and I think they’re optimistic because they overlook how these technologies connect to a broader context. How a lot of these technologies are driven by surveying and surveillance of the data and the communication that we produce. Exploitation of workers who do the filtering and cleaning work. The companies that profit out of this and make engineered election campaigns. So they’re cautious because of that, but still optimistic, because at the same time, they try to isolate it from that bigger context.
And finally, the most radical is something like Cesar Hidalgo’s proposal of augmented democracy…(More)”.
Global Contract-level Public Procurement Dataset
Paper by Mihály Fazekas et al: “One-third of total government spending across the globe goes to public procurement, amounting to about 10 trillion dollars a year. Despite its vast size and crucial importance for economic and political developments, there is a lack of globally comparable data on contract awards and tenders run. To fill this gap, this article introduces the Global Public Procurement Dataset (GPPD). Using web scraping methods, we collected official public procurement data on over 72 million contracts from 42 countries between 2006 and 2021 (time period covered varies by country due to data availability constraints). To overcome the inconsistency of data publishing formats in each country, we standardized the published information to fit a common data standard. For each country, key information is collected on the buyer(s) and supplier(s), geolocation information, product classification, price information, and details of the contracting process such as contract award date or the procedure type followed. GPPD is a contract-level dataset where specific filters are calculated allowing to reduce the dataset to the successfully awarded contracts if needed. We also add several corruption risk indicators and a composite corruption risk index for each contract which allows for an objective assessment of risks and comparison across time, organizations, or countries. The data can be reused to answer research questions dealing with public procurement spending efficiency among others. Using unique organizational identification numbers or organization names allows connecting the data to company registries to study broader topics such as ownership networks…(More)”.
The End of the Policy Analyst? Testing the Capability of Artificial Intelligence to Generate Plausible, Persuasive, and Useful Policy Analysis
Article by Mehrdad Safaei and Justin Longo: “Policy advising in government centers on the analysis of public problems and the developing of recommendations for dealing with them. In carrying out this work, policy analysts consult a variety of sources and work to synthesize that body of evidence into useful decision support documents commonly called briefing notes. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have led to the continuing development of tools that can undertake a similar task. Given a brief prompt, a large language model (LLM) can synthesize information in content databases. This article documents the findings from an experiment that tested whether contemporary NLP technology is capable of producing public policy relevant briefing notes that expert evaluators judge to be useful. The research involved two stages. First, briefing notes were created using three models: NLP generated; human generated; and NLP generated/human edited. Next, two panels of retired senior public servants (with only one panel informed of the use of NLP in the experiment) were asked to judge the briefing notes using a heuristic evaluation rubric. The findings indicate that contemporary NLP tools were not able to, on their own, generate useful policy briefings. However, the feedback from the expert evaluators indicates that automatically generated briefing notes might serve as a useful supplement to the work of human policy analysts. And the speed with which the capabilities of NLP tools are developing, supplemented with access to a larger corpus of previously prepared policy briefings and other policy-relevant material, suggests that the quality of automatically generated briefings may improve significantly in the coming years. The article concludes with reflections on what such improvements might mean for the future practice of policy analysis…(More)”.
The CFPB wants to rein in data brokers
Article by Gaby Del Valle: “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to propose new regulations that would require data brokers to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In a speech at the White House earlier this month, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said the agency is looking into policies to “ensure greater accountability” for companies that buy and sell consumer data, in keeping with an executive order President Joe Biden issued in late February.
Chopra said the agency is considering proposals that would define data brokers that sell certain types of data as “consumer reporting agencies,” thereby requiring those companies to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The statute bans sharing certain kinds of data (e.g., your credit report) with entities unless they serve a specific purpose outlined in the law (e.g., if the report is used for employment purposes or to extend a line of credit to someone).
The CFBP views the buying and selling of consumer data as a national security issue, not just a matter of privacy. Chopra mentioned three massive data breaches — the 2015 Anthem leak, the 2017 Equifax hack, and the 2018 Marriott breach — as examples of foreign adversaries illicitly obtaining Americans’ personal data. “When Americans’ health information, financial information, and even their travel whereabouts can be assembled into detailed dossiers, it’s no surprise that this raises risks when it comes to safety and security,” Chopra said. But the focus on high-profile hacks obscures a more pervasive, totally legal phenomenon: data brokers’ ability to sell detailed personal information to anyone who’s willing to pay for it…(More)”.
Strategies, missions and the challenge of whole of government action
Paper by Geoff Mulgan: “Every government is, in reality, a flotilla of many departments, agencies, tiers rather than a single thing. But all aspire to greater coherence. ‘Whole of government’ approaches – that mobilise and align many ministries and agencies around a common challenge – have a long history: during major wars, and around attempts to digitize societies, to cut energy use, to reduce poverty and to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. These have been described using different terms – national plans, priorities, strategies and missions – but the issues are similar.
This paper, linked to a European Commission programme on ‘whole of government innovation’ (launching on 16 April in Brussels) looks at the lessons of history and options for the future. Its primary focus is on innovation, but the issues apply more widely. The paper outlines the tools governments can use to achieve cross-cutting goals, from strategic roles to matrix models, cross-cutting budgets, teams, targets and processes, to options for linking law, regulation and procurement. It looks at partnerships and other structures for organising collaboration with business, universities and civil society; and at the role of public engagement…(More)”.