Digital tools can be a useful bolster to democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rana Foroohar at the Financial Times: “…A report by a Swedish research group called V-Dem found Taiwan was subject to more disinformation than nearly any other country, much of it coming from mainland China. Yet the popularity of pro-independence politicians is growing there, something Ms Tang views as a circular phenomenon.

When politicians enable more direct participation, the public begins to have more trust in government. Rather than social media creating “a false sense of us versus them,” she notes, decentralised technologies have “enabled a sense of shared reality” in Taiwan.

The same seems to be true in a number of other countries, including Israel, where Green party leader and former Occupy activist Stav Shaffir crowdsourced technology expertise to develop a bespoke data analysis app that allowed her to make previously opaque Treasury data transparent. She’s now heading an OECD transparency group to teach other politicians how to do the same. Part of the power of decentralised technologies is that they allow, at scale, the sort of public input on a wide range of complex issues that would have been impossible in the analogue era.

Consider “quadratic voting”, a concept that has been popularised by economist Glen Weyl, co-author of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. Mr Weyl is the founder of the RadicalxChange movement, which aimsto empower a more participatory democracy. Unlike a binary “yes” or “no” vote for or against one thing, quadratic voting allows a large group of people to use a digital platform to express the strength of their desire on a variety of issues.

For example, when he headed the appropriations committee in the Colorado House of Representatives, Chris Hansen used quadratic voting to help his party quickly sort through how much of their $40m budget should be allocated to more than 100 proposals….(More)”.

The Future of Minds and Machines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Aleksandra Berditchevskaia and Peter Baek: “When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the dominant media narratives often end up taking one of two opposing stances: AI is the saviour or the villain. Whether it is presented as the technology responsible for killer robots and mass job displacement or the one curing all disease and halting the climate crisis, it seems clear that AI will be a defining feature of our future society. However, these visions leave little room for nuance and informed public debate. They also help propel the typical trajectory followed by emerging technologies; with inevitable regularity we observe the ascent of new technologies to the peak of inflated expectations they will not be able to fulfil, before dooming them to a period languishing in the trough of disillusionment.[1]

There is an alternative vision for the future of AI development. By starting with people first, we can introduce new technologies into our lives in a more deliberate and less disruptive way. Clearly defining the problems we want to address and focusing on solutions that result in the most collective benefit can lead us towards a better relationship between machine and human intelligence. By considering AI in the context of large-scale participatory projects across areas such as citizen science, crowdsourcing and participatory digital democracy, we can both amplify what it is possible to achieve through collective effort and shape the future trajectory of machine intelligence. We call this 21st-century collective intelligence (CI).

In The Future of Minds and Machines we introduce an emerging framework for thinking about how groups of people interface with AI and map out the different ways that AI can add value to collective human intelligence and vice versa. The framework has, in large part, been developed through analysis of inspiring projects and organisations that are testing out opportunities for combining AI & CI in areas ranging from farming to monitoring human rights violations. Bringing together these two fields is not easy. The design tensions identified through our research highlight the challenges of navigating this opportunity and selecting the criteria that public sector decision-makers should consider in order to make the most of solving problems with both minds and machines….(More)”.

Novel forms of governance with high levels of civic self-reliance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Hiska Ubels: “Enduring depopulation and ageing have affected the liveability of many of the smaller villages in the more peripheral rural municipalities of the Netherlands. Combined with a general climate of austerity and structural public budget cuts, this has led to the search of both communities and local governments for solutions in which citizens take and obtain more responsibilities and higher levels of local autonomy in dealing with local liveability challenges.

This PhD-thesis explores how novel forms of governance with high levels of civic self-reliance can be understood from the perspectives of the involved residents, local governments and the supposed beneficiaries. It also discusses the dynamics, potentials and limitations that come to the fore. To achieve this, firstly, it focusses on the development of role shifts of responsibilities and decision-making power between local governments and citizens in experimental governance initiatives over time and the main factors that enhance and obstruct higher levels of civic autonomy. Then it investigates the influence of government involvement on a civic initiatives’ organisation structure and governance process, and by doing so on the key conditions of its civic self-steering capacity. In addition, it examines how novel governance forms with citizens in the lead are experienced by the community members to whose community liveability they are supposed to contribute. Lastly, it explores the reasons why citizens do not engage in such initiatives….(More)”.

The Rise and Fall of Good-Governance Promotion

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Alina Mungiu-Pippidi at the Journal of Democracy: “With the 2003 adoption of the UN Convention Against Corruption, good-governance norms have achieved—on the formal level at least—a degree of recognition that can fairly be called universal. This reflects a centuries-long struggle to establish the moral principle of “ethical universalism,” which brings together the ideas of equity, reciprocity, and impartiality. The West’s success in promoting this norm has been extraordinary, yet there are also significant risks. Despite expectations that international concern and increased regulation would lead to less corruption, current trends suggest otherwise. Exchanges between countries perceived as corrupt and countries perceived as noncorrupt seem to lead to an increase in corruption in the noncorrupt states rather than its decrease in the corrupt ones. Direct good-governance interventions have had poor results. And anticorruption has helped populist politicians, who use anti-elite rhetoric similar to that of anticorruption campaigners….(More)”.

Digital democracy: Is the future of civic engagement online?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “Digital innovation is radically transforming democratic decision-making. Public administrations are experimenting with mobile applications(apps) to provide citizens with real-time information, using online platforms to crowdsource ideas, and testing algorithms to engage communities in day today administration. The key question is what technology breakthrough means for governance systems created long before digital disruption. On the one hand, policy-makers are hoping that technology can be used to legitimise the public sector, re-engage citizens in politics and combat civic apathy. Scholars, on the other hand, point out that, if the digitalisation of democracy is left unquestioned, the danger is that the building blocks of democracy itself will be eroded.

This briefing examines three key global trends that are driving the on-going digitalisation of democratic decision-making. First are demographic patterns. These highlight growing global inequalities. Ten years from now, in the West the differentials of power among social groups will be on the rise, whereas in Eastern countries democratic freedoms will be at risk of further decline.

Second, a more urbanised global population will make cities ideal settings for innovative approaches to democratic decision-making. Current instances of digital democracy being used at local level include blockchain technology for voting and online crowdsourcing platforms.

Third, technological advancements will cut the costs of civic mobilisation and pose new challenges for democratic systems. Going forward, democratic decision-makers will be required to bridge digital literacy gaps, secure public structures from hacking, and to protect citizens’ privacy….(More)”.

Reconsidering Policy: Complexity, Governance and the State

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Book by Kate Crowley, Jenny Stewart, Adrian Kay and Brian Head: “For nation-states, the contexts for developing and implementing policy have become more complex and demanding. Yet policy studies have not fully responded to the challenges and opportunities represented by these developments. Governance literature has drawn attention to a globalising and network-based policy world, but politics and the role of the state have been de-emphasised.

This book addresses this imbalance by reconsidering traditional policy-analytic concepts, and re-developing and extending new ones, in a melded approach defined as systemic institutionalism. This links policy with governance and the state and suggests how real-world issues might be substantively addressed….(More)”.

Transparent Lobbying and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Šárka Laboutková, Vít Šimral and Petr Vymětal: “This book deals with the current, as yet unsolved, problem of transparency of lobbying. In the current theories and prevalent models that deal with lobbying activities, there is no reflection of the degree of transparency of lobbying, mainly due to the unclear distinction between corruption, lobbying in general, and transparent lobbying. This book provides a perspective on transparency in lobbying in a comprehensive and structured manner. It delivers an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and creates a methodology for assessing the transparency of lobbying, its role in the democratization process and a methodology for evaluating the main consequences of transparency. The new approach is applied to assess lobbying regulations in the countries of Central Eastern Europe and shows a method for how lobbying in other regions of the world may also be assessed….(More)”.

Astroturfing Is Bad But It's Not the Whole Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck at NextGov: “In November 2019, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton boasted that draft regulations requiring proxy advisors to run their recommendations past the companies they are evaluating before giving that advice to their clients received dozens of letters of support from ordinary Americans. But the letters he cited turned out to be fakes, sent by corporate advocacy groups and signed with the names of people who never saw the comments or who do not exist at all.

When interest groups manufacture the appearance that comments come from the “ordinary public,” it’s known as astroturfing. The practice is the subject of today’s House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing, entitled “Fake It till They Make It: How Bad Actors Use Astroturfing to Manipulate Regulators, Disenfranchise Consumers, and Subvert the Rulemaking Process.” 

Of course, commissioners who cherry-pick from among the public comments looking for the information to prove themselves right should be called out and it is tempting to use the occasion to embarrass those who do, especially when they are from the other party. But focusing on astroturfing distracts attention away from the more salient and urgent problem: the failure to obtain the best possible evidence by creating effective public participation opportunities in federal rulemaking. 

Thousands of federal regulations are enacted every year that touch every aspect of our lives, and under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, the public has a right to participate.

Participation in rulemaking advances both the legitimacy and the quality of regulations by enabling agencies—and the congressional committees that oversee them—to obtain information from a wider audience of stakeholders, interest groups, businesses, nonprofits, academics and interested individuals. Participation also provides a check on the rulemaking process, helping to ensure public scrutiny.

But the shift over the last two decades to a digital process, where people submit comments via regulations.gov has made commenting easier yet also inadvertently opened the floodgates to voluminous, duplicative and, yes, even “fake” comments, making it harder for agencies to extract the information needed to inform the rulemaking process.

Although many agencies receive only a handful of comments, some receive voluminous responses, thanks to this ease of digital commenting. In 2017, when the Federal Communications Commission sought to repeal an earlier Obama-era rule requiring internet service providers to observe net neutrality, the agency received 22 million comments in response. 

There is a remedy. Tools have evolved to make quick work of large data stores….(More)”. See also https://congress.crowd.law/

Nudge and the European Union

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Alberto Alemanno: “Europe has largely been absent from the US-dominated debate surrounding the introduction of nudge-type interventions in policy-making. Yet the European Union and some of its Member States are exploring the possibility of informing their policy action with behavioural insights. While a great deal of academic attention is currently been paid to the philosophical, ethical and other abstract implications of behavioural-informed regulation, such as those concerning autonomy, dignity and moral development, this chapter charts and systematizes the incipient European Nudge discourse.

Besides a few isolated initiatives displaying some behavioural considerations (e.g. consumer rights, revised tobacco products directive, sporadic behavioural remedies in competition law), the EU – similarly to its own Member States – has not yet shown a general commitment to systematically integrate behavioural insights into policy-making. Given the potential of this innovative regulatory approach to attain effective, low-cost and choice-preserving policies, such a stance seems surprising, especially when measured against growing citizen mistrust towards EU policy action. At a time in which some EU countries are calling for a repatriation of powers and the European Commission promises to redefine – in the framework of its Better Regulation agenda – the relationships between the Union and its citizens, nudging might provide a promising way forward. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, this promise has not only been shared by the 27 remaining Member State but also represents one of their major priorities . Yet with promises come challenges too.

The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 sets the scene by discussing the growing appeal of nudging among policymakers within and across Europe. Section 3 introduces the notion of behavioural policymaking and contrasts it with that of nudging. Section 4 describes the early and rather timid attempts at integrating behavioural insights into EU policymaking and identifies some domestic experiences. Section 5 discusses the institutional and methodological efforts undertaken by the EU and some of its member states to embrace behavioural policymaking. In turn, section 6 discusses the major difficulties of integrating behavioural insights into EU policymaking and offers some concluding remarks….(More)”

Invited But Not Selected: The Perceptions of a Mini-Public by Randomly Invited – but not Selected – Citizens

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Paper by Sophie Devillers, Julien Vrydagh, Didier Caluwaerts & Min Reuchamps: “Random sampling offers an equal chance to all citizens to be randomly invited to a deliberative mini-public. However, a large number of randomly invited citizens usually refuses to participate, which is why larger sample has to be drawn to obtain enough positive responses to compose the mini-public. Then, a second random sampling is operated among the people who accepted to participate, usually along quotas reflecting the population at large. This paper seeks to investigate those people who were randomly invited but finally not selected to participate the citizen panel “Make your Brussels Mobility”. On the first stage, 8000 residents of Brussels were randomly invited. Among them, 377 accepted to participate. On the second stage, 40 citizens were randomly selected to compose the panel. Our paper builds on a survey sent to the 336 citizens who were finally not selected to participate and studies their perceptions of the legitimacy of the citizen panel….(More)”.