How Covid-19 Is Accelerating the Rise of Digital Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Rosie Beacon: “Covid-19 has created an unprecedented challenge for parliaments and legislatures. Social distancing and restrictions on movement have forced parliaments to consider new methods of scrutiny, debate, and voting. The immediate challenge was simply to replicate existing procedures remotely, but the crisis has presented a unique window of opportunity to innovate.

As policymakers slowly transition back to “normal”, they should not easily dismiss the potential of this new relationship between democracy and technology. Parliamentarians should use what they’ve learned and the expertise of the democracy tech and deliberative democracy community to build greater trust in public institutions and open up traditional processes to wider deliberation, bringing people closer to the source of democratic power.

This note sets out some of the most interesting examples of crisis-led parliamentary innovation from around the world and combines it with some of the lessons we already know from democracy and deliberative tech to chart a way forward.

There are five core principles political leaders should embrace from this great experiment in digital parliamentary democracy:

  1. Discover and adopt: The world’s parliaments and legislatures have been through the same challenge. This is an opportunity to learn and improve democratic engagement in the long-term.
  2. Experiment with multiple tools: There is no one holistic approach to applying digital tools in any democracy. Some will work, others will fail – technology does not promise infallibility.
  3. Embrace openness: Where things can be open, experiment with using this to encourage open dialogue and diversify ideas in the democratic and representative process.
  4. Don’t start from scratch: Learn how the deliberative democracy community is already using technology to help remake representative systems and better connect to communities.
  5. Use multi-disciplinary approaches: Create diverse teams, with diverse skill sets. Build flexible tools that meet today’s needs of democracies, citizens and representatives.

Approaches From Around the World

The approaches globally to Covid-19 continuity have been varied depending on the geographical, political and social context, but they generally follow one of these scenarios:

  1. Replicating everything using digital tools – Welsh Assembly, Crown dependencies (Jersey, Isle of Man),Brazil
    • Using technology in every way possible to continue the current parliamentary agenda online.
  2. Moving priority processes online, deprioritising the rest – France National Assembly,New Zealand, Canada
    • No physical presence in parliaments and prioritising the most important elements of the current parliamentary agenda, usually Covid-19-related legislation, to adapt for online continuation.
  3. Shifting what you can online while maintaining a minimal physical parliament – Denmark, Germany, UK
    • Hybrid parliaments appear to be a popular choice for larger parliaments. This generally allows for the parliamentary agenda to continue with amendments to how certain procedures are conducted.
  4. Reducing need for physical attendance and moving nothing online – Ireland, Sweden
    • Houses can continue to sit in quorum (an agreed proportion of MPs representative of overall party representation), but certain parts of legislative agenda have been suspended for the time being….(More)”.

How Congress can improve productivity by looking to the rest of the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck and Dane Gambrell at the Hill: “…While an important first step in helping to resume operations, Congress needs to follow the lead of those many legislatures around the world who have changed their laws and rules and are using technology to continue to legislate, conduct oversight and even innovate. 

Though efforts to restart by adopting proxy voting are a step in the right direction, they do not go far enough to create what Georgetown University’s Lorelei Kelly calls the “modern and safe digital infrastructure for the world’s most powerful national legislature.” 

Congress has all but shut down since March. While the Senate formally “re-opened” on May 4, the chamber is operating under restrictive new guidelines, with hearings largely closed to the public and lawmakers advised to bring only a skeleton crew to run their offices. Considering that the average age of a senator is 63 and the average age of a Member of the House is 58, this caution comes as no surprise.

Yet when we take into account that parliaments around the world from New Zealand to the Maldives are holding committee meetings, running plenary sessions, voting and even engaging the public in the lawmaking process online, we should be asking Congress to do more faster. 

Instead, bitter partisan wrangling — with Republicans accusing Democrats of taking advantage of social distancing to launch a power grab and Democrats accusing Republicans of failing to exercise oversight — is delaying the adoption of long available and easy to use technologies. More than a left-right issue, moving online is a top-down issue with leadership of both parties using the crisis to consolidate power.

Working online

The Parliament of the United Kingdom, for example, is one of dozens of legislatures turning to online video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Web Meetings and Google Hangouts to do plenary or committee meetings. After 800 years, lawmakers in the House of Commons convened the first-ever “virtual Parliament” at the end of April. In this hybrid approach, some MPs were present in the legislative chamber while most joined remotely using Zoom…(More)”.

An Opportunity to Build Legitimacy and Trust in Public Institutions in the Time of Covid-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stuti Khemani at the WorldBank: “Legitimacy in the time of COVID-19 can be understood as the ability of leaders to win compliance with new public health orders because people share a widespread belief that everyone is complying. This perspective, building on the logic of game theory, which can help explain strategic interactions among large numbers of people in a society or polity, yields a powerful insight: that governments in developing countries, as the first line of defense against a life-threatening disease, have received a windfall of legitimacy.

On the one hand, this legitimacy windfall can be wasted, or worse, used to intensify divisive politics, grab power, and install government at the commanding heights of the economy and society, even after the pandemic recedes. On the other hand, for reform leaders and international development partners that are motivated to improve governance for economic development, the crisis presents opportunities to build trust in public institutions. In this task, international organizations have a comparative advantage precisely because they are not part of domestic political games. But this dynamic may require changing how donors typically approach corruption in developing countries (in the context of financial assistance to countries with institutional weaknesses that predate the crisis); it may also necessitate change in how reform leaders in countries use the advantage of external partners to exert pressure for reform. The availability and strategic communication of credible, nonideological, and nonpartisan knowledge could enable societies to change a vicious cycle of high levels of corruption/low levels of trust to a virtuous one of high levels of trust and low levels of corruption….(More)”.

Trust and the Covid-19 Pandemic

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2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Spring Update: “… a stunning rise in the public’s trust in government and business. Since January, trust in government has risen nine points and trust in business has risen six points, underscoring the fact that now more than ever, U.S. business must take the lead. This is particularly important because while trust in government has risen sharply in a few short months, the government in the U.S. is still distrusted overall, with approval of only 48%. Overall, business trust has surged to 56% over the same period.

This significant shift in sentiment marks a once-in-a-century moment for business to step forward. This is especially important given the fact that historically our research shows that considerable increases in trust scores are often be followed by losses in trust.

This opportunity for business is particularly important because half of respondents maintain that business needs to take a lead in providing economic relief and support, and 60 percent say that CEOs should take the lead on pandemic response as opposed to waiting for the government to impose it. That said, only 27% say CEOs are doing an outstanding job meeting the demands placed on them by the pandemic.

For corporate leaders, this is a moment of reckoning—and a time for radical transparency. It is imperative for corporate leaders to be open, direct and frequent about the measures they’re taking to balance public health and the economy and protect employee and customer safety. Our survey shows that CEOs have an amazing opportunity to lead their own organizations on this front right now, with a 10 point increase among U.S. respondents since March to tell the truth about the pandemic.

And to understand just how high the stakes are for business leaders to get things right, 54% of U.S. respondents are very concerned about job loss due to the pandemic and not being able to find a new job for a very long time. This occurs at a time when only 37% of U.S. respondents believe business is doing well or very well at protecting their employees’ financial wellbeing and safeguarding their jobs.

Our data also shows that only 41% of Americans think business is doing “well or very well” at ensuring the products and services that people need most are readily available and easily accessible. But the data also shows there is more opportunity for business to offer ingenuity—in the form of new market entrants and strategic pivots. Now is a time for clients to sharpen their strategic planning, in line with the ways Covid-19 is changing their audiences.

Our survey also uncovers a sense of underlying optimism that business leaders must tap into in order to positively transition out of the current situation. As horrible as the pandemic is, 64% of U.S. respondents believe this will lead to valuable innovations and changes for the better in how we live, work and treat each other as people…(More)”

The Big Failure of Small Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mariana Mazzucato and Giulio Quaggiotto at Project Syndicate: “Decades of privatization, outsourcing, and budget cuts in the name of “efficiency” have significantly hampered many governments’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, successful responses by other governments have shown that investments in core public-sector capabilities make all the difference in times of emergency. The countries that have handled the crisis well are those where the state maintains a productive relationship with value creators in society, by investing in critical capacities and designing private-sector contracts to serve the public interest.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan, and South Africa, governments are investing billions – and, in some cases, trillions – of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak, or poorly managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.

Unfortunately, for the last half-century, the prevailing political message in many countries has been that governments cannot – and therefore should not – actually govern. Politicians, business leaders, and pundits have long relied on a management creed that focuses obsessively on static measures of efficiency to justify spending cuts, privatization, and outsourcing.

As a result, governments now have fewer options for responding to the crisis, which may be why some are now desperately clinging to the unrealistic hope of technological panaceas such as artificial intelligence or contact-tracing apps. With less investment in public capacity has come a loss of institutional memory (as the UK’s government has discovered) and increased dependence on private consulting firms, which have raked in billions. Not surprisingly, morale among public-sector employees has plunged in recent years.

Consider two core government responsibilities during the COVID-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84% of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts.

Outsourcing by itself is not the problem. But the outsourcing of critical state capacities clearly is, especially when the resulting public-private “partnerships” are not designed to serve the public interest. Ironically, some governments have outsourced so eagerly that they have undermined their own ability to structure outsourcing contracts. After a 12-year effort to spur the private sector to develop low-cost ventilators, the US government is now learning that outsourcing is not a reliable way to ensure emergency access to medical equipment….(More)”.

Considering the Source: Varieties of COVID-19 Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Congressional Research Service: “In common parlance, the terms propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation are often used interchangeably, often with connotations of deliberate untruths of nefarious origin. In a national security context, however, these terms refer to categories of information that are created and disseminated with different intent and serve different strategic purposes. This primer examines these categories to create a framework for understanding the national security implications of information related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic….(More)”.

How Statistics Can Help — Going Beyond COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Walter J. Radermacher at Data & Policy: “It is rightly pointed out that in the midst of a crisis of enormous dimensions we needed high quality statistics with utmost urgency, but that instead we are in danger of drowning in an ocean of data and information. The pandemic is accompanied and exacerbated by an infodemic. At this moment, and in this confusion and search for solutions, it seems appropriate to take advice from previous initiatives and draw lessons for the current situation. More than 20 years ago in the United Kingdom, the report “Statistics — A Matter of Trust” laid the foundations for overcoming the previously spreading crisis of confidence through a solidly structured statistical system. This report does not stand alone in international comparison. Rather, it is one of a series of global, European and national measures and agreements which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have strengthened official statistics as the backbone of policy in democratic societies, with the UN Fundamental Statistical Principles and the EU Statistics Code of Practice being prominent representatives. So, if we want to deal with our current difficulties, we should address precisely those points that have emerged as determining factors for the quality of statistics, with the following three questions: What (statistical products, quality profile)? How (methods)? Who (institutions)? The aim must be to ensure that statistical information is suitable for facilitating the resolution of conflicts by eliminating the need to argue about the facts and only about the conclusions to be drawn from them.

In the past, this task would have led relatively quickly to a situation where the need for information would have been directed to official statistics as the preferred provider; this has changed recently for many reasons. On the one hand, there is the danger that the much-cited data revolution and learning algorithms (so-called AI) are presented as an alternative to official statistics (which are perceived as too slow, too inflexible and too expensive), instead of emphasizing possible commonalities and cross-fertilization possibilities. On the other hand, after decades of austerity policies, official statistics are in a similarly defensive situation to that of the public health system in many respects and in many countries: There is a lack of financial reserves, personnel and know-how for the new and innovative work now so urgently needed.

It is therefore required, as in the 1990s, to ask the fundamental question again, namely, do we (still and again) really deserve official statistics as the backbone of democratic decision-making, and if so, what should their tasks be, how should they be financed and anchored in the political system?…(More)”.

How to run the world remotely

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jen Kirby at Vox: “The green benches in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons were mostly empty, just Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a few members of Parliament, sitting spread out.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, wearing black robes, still commanded the room. But when it was time for a member of Parliament to ask a question, Hoyle glanced upward at a television screen mounted on the wood-paneled walls of the chamber.

On that screen appeared a member of Parliament — maybe with headphones, maybe just a tad too close to the camera, maybe framed with carefully curated bookshelf — ready to speak.

This is the so-called “Zoom” Parliament, which the UK first convened on April 22, turning the centuries-old democratic process into something that can be done, at least partially, from home.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended normalcy, and that includes the day-to-day functions of government. The social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders required to manage the virus’s spread has forced some governments to abruptly adopt new technologies and ways of working that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago.

From Brazil to Canada to the European Union, legislatures and parliaments have adopted some form of virtual government, whether for hearings and other official business, or even for voting. Several US states have also shifted to doing legislative work remotely, from New Jersey to Kentucky. And with the coronavirus making travel risky, diplomacy has also gone online, with everyone from the United Nations to the leaders of the G-7 meeting via computer screen.

Not every country or legislature has followed suit, most notably the US Congress, although advocates and some lawmakers are pushing to change this now. Even the US Supreme Court, long resistant to change, began hearing oral arguments this week via conference call, and livestreamed the audio with just a few, er, glitches.

This rapid shift to remote governance has largely done what it’s supposed to do: keep parliaments working during a crisis.In the UK, there have been a few technical difficulties, but it’s mostly succeeding.

“I think it does really well,” Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP and shadow minister for digital, science, and technology, who advocated for this move, told me. “Obviously, sometimes the technology doesn’t work or the audio is not very good or the broadband goes down.

“But, by and large,” she said, “we have MPs across the country putting questions to government and making democracy visible again.”

Governments may be Zooming or Google Hanging right now out of necessity, but once they get used to doing things this way (and get the mute button figured out), some elements of remote governance could end up outlasting this crisis. It won’t be a replacement for the real thing, and it probably shouldn’t be. But legislatures could certainly adopt at least some of these tools more permanently to help make democracy more accessible and transparent.

The holding-government-officials-accountable type of transparency, that is. Not the politician-accidentally-appearing-at-a-virtual-city-council-meeting, dusting-their-bookshelves-in-their-undies kind….

On Wednesday, Brazil’s Senate voted remotely again, approving an emergency transfer of resources to states to fight the coronavirus. It underscores a bizarre split in Brazil: Its Congress is using technology to try to govern aggressively during the pandemic. Its president, when asked last week about the country’s rising coronavirus death toll, replied, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”….

Beth Simone Noveck, director of New York University’s Governance Lab, told me that Brazil, along with some other countries, is ahead of the curve on this because it’s considered remote voting before.

But legislatures don’t necessarily need fancy apps to make this work. “Other places are doing voting in a very simple way — you’re on a Zoom, they turn on the camera and you put up your hand and you say ‘aye’ or ‘nay,’” Noveck said.

Brazil isn’t the only Latin American country that has quickly adapted to the constraints of the pandemic. On Tuesday, Argentina’s legislature held its first remote session. The Chamber of Deputies was transformed, with panels installed around the chamber to broadcast the faces of the 220 members of Congress, all dialing in from home….(More)”.

Testing Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brigham Daniels, Mark Buntaine and Tanner Bangerter: “In modern democracies, governmental transparency is thought to have great value. When it comes to addressing administrative corruption and mismanagement, many would agree with Justice Brandeis’s observation that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Beyond this, many credit transparency with enabling meaningful citizen participation.

But even though transparency appears highly correlated with successful governance in developed democracies, assumptions about administrative transparency have remained empirically untested. Testing effects of transparency would prove particularly helpful in developing democracies where transparency norms have not taken hold or only have done so slowly. In these contexts, does administrative transparency really create the sorts of benefits attributed to it? Transparency might grease the gears of developed democracies, but what good is grease when many of the gears seem to be broken or missing entirely?

This Article presents empirical results from a first-of-its-kind field study that tested two major promises of administrative transparency in a developing democracy: that transparency increases public participation in government affairs and that it increases government accountability. To test these hypotheses, we used two randomized controlled trials.

Surprisingly, we found transparency had no significant effect in almost any of our quantitative measurements, although our qualitative results suggested that when transparency interventions exposed corruption, some limited oversight could result. Our findings are particularly significant for developing democracies and show, at least in this context, that Justice Brandeis may have oversold the cleansing effects of transparency. A few rays of transparency shining light on government action do not disinfect the system and cure government corruption and mismanagement. Once corruption and mismanagement are identified, it takes effective government institutions and action from civil society to successfully act as a disinfectant….(More)”.

Social sciences and social imagination

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Essay by Geoff Mulgan: “Crises – whether wars or pandemics – can sometimes, though not always, fuel social imagination.  New arrangements have to be created at breakneck speed and old norms have to be discarded.  The deeper the crisis the more likely it is that people ask not for a return to normal but for a jump to something different and better.

So it is now.  Across the world countries are beginning to think about how life after COVID-19 might be different: could we use the crisis to solve the problems of carbon, low status for care-workers, or welfare states ill-suited to new forms of precariousness?  As this debate gathers speed, it’s opening up questions about the role of the social sciences. They’re playing a vital role in helping countries to manage the crisis, and to plan for recovery.  But how much are they there to understand the past and present – and how much should they help us to shape the future?

A century ago the answers were perhaps more obvious than today.  HG Wells early in the last century described sociology as ‘the description of the Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies’.  The founders of UCL in the mid-19th century and of LSE at the end of the 19th century, saw them as vehicles to change the world not just to interpret it.  It was taken for granted that social science should help map out possible futures – new rights, new forms of social policy, new ways of running economies.

Unfortunately, these traditions have largely atrophied.  Within academia you are far more likely to make a successful career analysing past patterns, or critiquing the present, than offering designs for the future.  That is partly the result of very healthy trends – in particular, more attention being paid to evidence and data.  But it’s left a gap since, by definition, there isn’t any hard evidence about a future that hasn’t yet happened.  There are a few small pockets of more speculative, future-oriented work in universities.  But they’re seen as quite marginal, and a fair proportion of this work is inward looking – feeding into academic journals and very small audiences – rather than feeding into political programmes and public imagination as happened in the past.  Meanwhile one of the less attractive legacies of several decades of post-structuralism and post-modernism is that many academics believe they have much more of a duty to critique than to propose or create.

Outside the academy the traditions of social imagination have also atrophied.  Political parties have largely closed down the research departments that once helped them think.  Thinktanks have become ever more locked into news cycles rather than long range thinking.

In the late 20th century the progressive movements of the left lost confidence in a forward march of history, and the green movements that have partly replaced them have proven more effective at persuading people of the likelihood of future ecological disaster than promoting positive alternatives (though the green visions of future arrangements for food, circular economies are a partial exception to the picture I’m describing here).  As a result much of the role of future imagination has been left to fiction.

One symptom is that many fewer people today can articulate a plausible and desirable better society than was the case 50 or 100 years ago.  Majorities in countries like the UK now expect their children to be worse off than they are….(More)”.