Smarter Select Committees


Theo Bass at Nesta: “This report outlines how digital tools and methods can help select committees restore public trust in democracy, reinvigorate public engagement in Parliament and enhance the work of committees themselves.

Since their establishment in 1979, select committees have provided one of our most important democratic functions. At their best, committees gather available evidence, data and insight; tap into public experiences and concerns; provide a space for thoughtful deliberation; and help parliament make better decisions. However, the 40th anniversary of select committees presents an important opportunity to re-examine this vital parliamentary system to ensure they are fit for the 21st century.

Since 2012 select committees have committed to public engagement as a ‘core task’ of their work, but their approach has not been systematic and they still struggle to reach beyond the usual suspects, or find ways to gather relevant knowledge quickly and effectively. With public trust in democracy deteriorating, the imperative to innovate, improve legitimacy and find new ways to involve people in national politics is stronger than ever. This is where digital innovation can help.

If used effectively, digital tools and methods offer select committees the opportunity to be more transparent and accessible to a wider range of people, improving relevance and impact. Like any good public engagement, this needs careful design, without which digital participation risks being distorting and unhelpful, amplifying the loudest or least informed voices.

To achieve success, stronger ambition and commitment by senior staff and MPs, as well as experimentation and learning through trial and improvement will be essential. We recommend that the UK Parliament commits to running at least five pilots for digital participation, which we outline in more detail in the final section of this report….(More)”.

Future Studies and Counterfactual Analysis


Book by Theodore J. Gordon and Mariana Todorova: “In this volume, the authors contribute to futures research by placing the counterfactual question in the future tense. They explore the possible outcomes of future, and consider how future decisions are turning points that may produce different global outcomes. This book focuses on a dozen or so intractable issues that span politics, religion, and technology, each addressed in individual chapters. Until now, most scenarios written by futurists have been built on cause and effect narratives or depended on numerical models derived from historical relationships. In contrast, many of the scenarios written for this book are point descriptions of future discontinuities, a form allows more thought-provoking presentations. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that counterfactual thinking and point scenarios of discontinuities are new, groundbreaking tools for futurists….(More)”.

Government Communications in a Digital Age


Book by Kim Murphy: “Just like political parties, governments must adapt to the demands of the digital sphere as their legitimacy is dependent on their ability to communicate decisions to citizens. However, despite abundant research into how the Internet is changing political communications, little is known about how governments use digital technologies to communicate with citizens. There is also little knowledge of how different political systems shape the use of technology in this respect. Therefore, from a comparative perspective this study examines how government organisations in Germany and Great Britain are using websites and social media to interact with citizens and the media on a daily basis. Its empirical approach involves a content analysis of government websites and social media pages and a social network analysis of Twitter networks. Its findings show that government ministries predominantly use websites and social media for one-way communication and that social media is supporting the personalisation of government communications….(More)”.

Which Countries Have More Open Governments? Assessing Structural Determinants of Openness


Paper by Sabina Schnell and Suyeon Jo: “An increasing number of countries are adopting open government reforms, driven, in part, by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort dedicated to advancing such initiatives. Yet, there is still wide variation in openness across countries. We investigate the political, administrative, and civic factors that explain this variation, using countries’ fulfillment of OGP eligibility criteria as a proxy for minimum standards of openness. We find that countries with strong constraints on the executive and high levels of citizen education have governments that are more open. A dense network of civil society organizations is associated with more budget transparency and higher civil liberties, but not with access to information or asset disclosure laws. The results suggest that if the value of openness is to be translated in practice, it is not enough to have capable bureaucracies—countries also need informed citizens and strong oversight of executive agencies….(More)”.

Philanthropy’s Role


Jennifer Harris in Democracy. A Journal of Ideas: “…Today’s new ideas are just beginnings. Hence the need for philanthropic investment. One challenge is to get academics to work differently. In Hayek and Friedman’s day, creating beachheads at places like the University of Chicago and George Mason was necessary in part because the academy was fairly hostile to their ideas. Today’s situation is more one of distraction and benign neglect than outright hostility; the question is whether the most promising academics can reject pressures of over-specialization in favor of asking bigger questions, and can come to see themselves as part of a common project spanning relevant disciplines. Against this task, the role for philanthropy is less straightforward than financing a critical mass of endowed chairs at a couple of well-chosen universities.

Developing new ideas is only one front in this movement. If developing ideas is difficult, moving them in the world is more so, partly because it means contending with the power structures underpinning neoliberalism. Historians like Angus Burgin and Quinn Slobodian explain how neoliberalism’s rise was ultimately a marriage between libertarian intellectuals, big business, and white evangelicals. The amalgam that resulted was generous enough for each faction to take what suited their purposes and largely ignore the rest.

Upsetting this coalition will involve creating immediate stakes for what can often feel like abstract ideas. This is where social movement and grassroots organizing groups come in. Yet these groups are the first to admit, returning to Michael Shuman, that “Too little is being invested today in answering a fundamental question: What exactly are we organizing for? Many of our pat ‘answers’ are obsolete…. One unanswered question looming large, for example, is how to provide decent work to everyone without destroying our ecological base. Can anyone say, with confidence, what our economic program is?”

It’s not difficult to make out what these groups are against—consider the array of campaigns targeting the predatory behaviors of Wall Street or specific corporations. To the extent that campaigns do have affirmative aims, they tend to be for better minimums—the Fight for $15, for example, or paid sick days. To be sure, this is critical work and should continue. But these fights do not add up to, nor derive from, any coherent answer to neoliberalism.

Such is partly the nature of campaigning; outrage mobilizes. But at least part of the blame also falls on philanthropy—the foundations that tend to invest most heavily in economic and social justice work tend to support specific campaigns. There is too little focus on building power, and too little focus on ideas.

Arguably the lack of focus on ideas also partly stems from the fact that it has traditionally not been seen as the competency of these groups to be the idea generators. But that seems increasingly less true: The current push for reparations probably would not be mainstream if not for the Movement for Black Lives, just as teachers strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and elsewhere are breathing new life into the labor movement.

There is much to learn from the wisdom of angry crowds in America today, it seems. And philanthropy is well situated to help bring about a new set of relationships linking organizers and activists and academics. Through thoughtful funding of post-graduate career paths, it might even be possible to generate a new mold of organizer, who is some blend of the two. Take Ady Barkan, called the “most powerful activist in America.” Barkan studied social movements in college and law school, and went on to found Fed Up, a campaign premised on three insights: one, the Federal Reserve wields far more power over the economic well-being of the country than does any other single institution, including Congress; two, partly for that reason, monetary policy should be a topic of political discourse; three, the rules of the economy have sufficiently changed that it is possible to allow for much more expansionary monetary policy than most economists have advocated, without nearly the same risk of inflation. Affirmative, structural campaigns of this sort—ones that target key institutions of power and rewrite the rules over how the economy is managed—are possible.

But they are not easy. It is safe to assume they would be easier with less uniform opposition from the business community. There are rumblings of a new willingness to depart from the highly partisan, staunchly conservative activism business has adopted over the past four decades. The ultimate test of whether these rumblings amount to anything will likely center on business itself—specifically, on whether business is willing to dispense with one of neoliberalism’s most insidious ideas: shareholder primacy. There is an emerging policy agenda importantly grounded in the notion that “Corporations are creatures of public permission,” as economist Lenore Palladino has put it. And “The privileges granted to large corporations are just that—privileges—not rights, and they are granted by the government so that corporations can accomplish public purposes that otherwise would be hard to meet.”

Not least, any worthy successor to neoliberalism must involve a moral dimension. The most important periods of social and political struggle have always fought not just over who should have power, but over which ideas about morality should dominate. In the late twentieth century, as market logic pervaded more and more spheres of human life and became fused to moral arguments about freedom, markets assumed a moral force of their own. As this happened, other ideas about morality not tethered to markets receded. A course-correction may be brewing, though. “We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules,” one prominent observer wrote recently. “We made the market its own priest and confessor.” Another put it this way: “The first thing we must recognize, is that economic justice is a moral issue. And economics can’t be separated from moral questions. It was never intended that way.”

The first quote belongs to conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, and the second to Rev. William Barber II, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign—lending weight to the notion that some of the best arguments against market fundamentalism today are moral ones, and they are found on both the right and the left.

All of this adds up to a pretty different picture of philanthropy. We need foundations willing to try something different than issue-specific programs. We need to invest in institutions and individuals—academics, think tanks, movement actors, business leaders, moral and religious figures—willing to prioritize ideas over policy, and willing to see themselves as part of a common project….(More)”

Political Corruption in a World in Transition


Book edited by Jonathan Mendilow and Éric Phélippeau: “This book argues that the mainstream definitions of corruption, and the key expectations they embed concerning the relationship between corruption, democracy, and the process of democratization, require reexamination. Even critics who did not consider stable institutions and legal clarity of veteran democracies as a cure-all, assumed that the process of widening the influence on government decision making and implementation allows non-elites to defend their interests, define the acceptable sources and uses of wealth, and demand government accountability. This had proved correct, especially insofar as ‘petty corruption’ is involved. But the assumption that corruption necessarily involves the evasion of democratic principles and a ‘market approach’ in which the corrupt seek to maximize profit does not exhaust the possible incentives for corruption, the types of behaviors involved (for obvious reasons, the tendency in the literature is to focus on bribery), or the range of situations that ‘permit’ corruption in democracies. In the effort to identify some of the problems that require recognition, and to offer a more exhaustive alternative, the chapters in this book focus on corruption in democratic settings (including NGOs and the United Nations which were largely so far ignored), while focusing mainly on behaviors other than bribery….(More)”.

Hyper-active Governance How Governments Manage the Politics of Expertise


Book by Matthew Wood: “Hyper-active governance is a new way of thinking about governing that puts debates over expertise at the heart. Contemporary governing requires delegation to experts, but also increases demands for political accountability. In this context, politicians and experts work together under political stress to adopt different governing relationships that appear more ‘hands-off’ or ‘hands-on’. These approaches often serve to displace profound social and economic crises. Only a genuinely collaborative approach to governing, with an inclusive approach to expertise, can create democratically legitimate and effective governance in our accelerating world. Using detailed case studies and global datasets in various policy areas including medicines, flooding, water resources, central banking and electoral administration, the book develops a new typology of modes of governing. Drawing from innovative social theory, it breathes new life into debates about expert forms of governance and how to achieve real paradigm shifts in how we govern our increasingly hyper-active world…(More)”.

Bringing Truth to the Internet


Article by Karen Kornbluh and Ellen P. Goodman: “The first volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report notes that “sweeping” and “systemic” social media disinformation was a key element of Russian interference in the 2016 election. No sooner were Mueller’s findings public than Twitter suspended a host of bots who had been promoting a “Russiagate hoax.”

Since at least 2016, conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon have flourished online and bled into mainstream debate. Earlier this year, a British member of Parliament called social media companies “accessories to radicalization” for their role in hosting and amplifying radical hate groups after the New Zealand mosque shooter cited and attempted to fuel more of these groups. In Myanmar, anti-Rohingya forces used Facebook to spread rumors that spurred ethnic cleansing, according to a UN special rapporteur. These platforms are vulnerable to those who aim to prey on intolerance, peer pressure, and social disaffection. Our democracies are being compromised. They work only if the information ecosystem has integrity—if it privileges truth and channels difference into nonviolent discourse. But the ecosystem is increasingly polluted.

Around the world, a growing sense of urgency about the need to address online radicalization is leading countries to embrace ever more draconian solutions: After the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, the government shut down access to Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms. And a number of countries are considering adopting laws requiring social media companies to remove unlawful hate speech or face hefty penalties. According to Freedom House, “In the past year, at least 17 countries approved or proposed laws that would restrict online media in the name of fighting ‘fake news’ and online manipulation.”

The flaw with these censorious remedies is this: They focus on the content that the user sees—hate speech, violent videos, conspiracy theories—and not on the structural characteristics of social media design that create vulnerabilities. Content moderation requirements that cannot scale are not only doomed to be ineffective exercises in whack-a-mole, but they also create free expression concerns, by turning either governments or platforms into arbiters of acceptable speech. In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, content moderation has become justification for shutting down dissident speech.

When countries pressure platforms to root out vaguely defined harmful content and disregard the design vulnerabilities that promote that content’s amplification, they are treating a symptom and ignoring the disease. The question isn’t “How do we moderate?” Instead, it is “How do we promote design change that optimizes for citizen control, transparency, and privacy online?”—exactly the values that the early Internet promised to embody….(More)”.

From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State


Fleur Johns at Modern Law Review: “All states have pursued what James C. Scott characterised as modernist projects of legibility and simplification: maps, censuses, national economic plans and related legislative programs. Many, including Scott, have pointed out blindspots embedded in these tools. As such criticism persists, however, the synoptic style of law and development has changed. Governments, NGOs and international agencies now aspire to draw upon immense repositories of digital data. Modes of analysis too have changed. No longer is legibility a precondition for action. Law‐ and policy‐making are being informed by business development methods that prefer prototypes over plans. States and international institutions continue to plan, but also seek insight from the release of minimally viable policy mock‐ups. Familiar critiques of law and development work, and arguments for its reform, have limited purchase on these practices, Scott’s included. Effective critical intervention in this field today requires careful attention to be paid to these emergent patterns of practice…(More)”.

How not to conduct a consultation – and why asking the public is not always such a great idea


Agnes Batory & Sara Svensson at Policy and Politics: “Involving people in policy-making is generally a good thing. Policy-makers themselves often pay at least lip-service to the importance of giving citizens a say. In the academic literature, participatory governance has been, with some exaggeration, almost universally hailed as a panacea to all ills in Western democracies. In particular, it is advocated as a way to remedy the alienation of voters from politicians who seem to be oblivious to the concerns of the common man and woman, with an ensuing decline in public trust in government. Representation by political parties is ridden with problems, so the argument goes, and in any case it is overly focused on the act of voting in elections – a one-off event once every few years which limits citizens’ ability to control the policy agenda. On the other hand, various forms of public participation are expected to educate citizens, help develop a civic culture, and boost the legitimacy of decision-making. Consequently, practices to ensure that citizens can provide direct input into policy-making are to be welcomed on both pragmatic and normative grounds.  

I do not disagree with these generally positive expectations. However, the main objective of my recent article in Policy and Politics, co-authored with Sara Svensson, is to inject a dose of healthy scepticism into the debate or, more precisely, to show that there are circumstances in which public consultations will achieve anything but greater legitimacy and better policy-outcomes. We do this partly by discussing the more questionable assumptions in the participatory governance literature, and partly by examining a recent, glaring example of the misuse, and abuse, of popular input….(More)”.