Despite Its Problems, Network Technology Can Help Renew Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Daniel Araya: “The impact of digital technologies on contemporary economic and social development has been nothing short of revolutionary. The rise of the internet has transformed the way we share content, buy and sell goods, and manage our institutions. But while the hope of the internet has been its capacity to expand human connection and bring people together, the reality has often been something else entirely.

When social media networks first emerged about a decade ago, they were hailed as “technologies of liberation” with the capacity to spread democracy. While these social networks have undeniably democratized access to information, they have also helped to stimulate social and political fragmentation, eroding the discursive fibres that hold democracies together.

Prior to the internet, news and media were the domain of professional journalists, overseen by powerful experts, and shaped by gatekeepers. However, in the age of the internet, platforms circumvent the need for gatekeepers altogether. Bypassing the centralized distribution channels that have served as a foundation to mass industrial societies, social networks have begun reshaping the way democratic societies build consensus. Given the importance of discourse to democratic self-government, concern is growing that democracy is failing…(More)”.

Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sophia Psarra, Uta Staiger, and Claudia Sternberg: “As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.

Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?

This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history…(More)”

Democratic Policy Development using Collective Dialogues and AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrew Konya, Lisa Schirch, Colin Irwin, Aviv Ovadya: “We design and test an efficient democratic process for developing policies that reflect informed public will. The process combines AI-enabled collective dialogues that make deliberation democratically viable at scale with bridging-based ranking for automated consensus discovery. A GPT4-powered pipeline translates points of consensus into representative policy clauses from which an initial policy is assembled. The initial policy is iteratively refined with the input of experts and the public before a final vote and evaluation. We test the process three times with the US public, developing policy guidelines for AI assistants related to medical advice, vaccine information, and wars & conflicts. We show the process can be run in two weeks with 1500+ participants for around $10,000, and that it generates policy guidelines with strong public support across demographic divides. We measure 75-81% support for the policy guidelines overall, and no less than 70-75% support across demographic splits spanning age, gender, religion, race, education, and political party. Overall, this work demonstrates an end-to-end proof of concept for a process we believe can help AI labs develop common-ground policies, governing bodies break political gridlock, and diplomats accelerate peace deals…(More)”.

Can Large Language Models Capture Public Opinion about Global Warming? An Empirical Assessment of Algorithmic Fidelity and Bias

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by S. Lee et all: “Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in social science research by emulating human perceptions and behaviors, a concept referred to as algorithmic fidelity. This study assesses the algorithmic fidelity and bias of LLMs by utilizing two nationally representative climate change surveys. The LLMs were conditioned on demographics and/or psychological covariates to simulate survey responses. The findings indicate that LLMs can effectively capture presidential voting behaviors but encounter challenges in accurately representing global warming perspectives when relevant covariates are not included. GPT-4 exhibits improved performance when conditioned on both demographics and covariates. However, disparities emerge in LLM estimations of the views of certain groups, with LLMs tending to underestimate worry about global warming among Black Americans. While highlighting the potential of LLMs to aid social science research, these results underscore the importance of meticulous conditioning, model selection, survey question format, and bias assessment when employing LLMs for survey simulation. Further investigation into prompt engineering and algorithm auditing is essential to harness the power of LLMs while addressing their inherent limitations…(More)”.

Unintended Consequences of Data-driven public participation: How Low-Traffic Neighborhood planning became polarized

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alison Powell: “This paper examines how data-driven consultation contributes to dynamics of political polarization, using the case of ‘Low-Traffic Neighborhoods’ in London, UK. It explores how data-driven consultation can facilitate participation, including ‘agonistic data practices” (Crooks and Currie, 2022) that challenge the dominant interpretations of digital data. The paper adds empirical detail to previous studies of agonistic data practices, concluding that agonistic data practices require certain normative conditions to be met, otherwise dissenting data practices can contribute to dynamics of polarization. The results of this paper draw on empirical insights from the political context of the UK to explain how ostensibly democratic processes including data-driven consultation establish some kinds of knowledge as more legitimate than others. Apparently ‘objective’ knowledge, or calculable data, is attributed greater legitimacy than strong feelings or affective narratives. This can displace affective responses to policy decisions into insular social media spaces where polarizing dynamics are at play. Affective polarization, where political difference is solidified through appeals to feeling, creates political distance and the dehumanization of ‘others’. This can help to amplify conspiracy theories that pose risks to democracy and to the overall legitimacy of media environments. These tendencies are exacerbated when processes of consultation prescribe narrow or specific contributions, valorize quantifiable or objective data and create limited room for dissent…(More)”

The Tragedy of AI Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Simon Chesterman: “Despite hundreds of guides, frameworks, and principles intended to make AI “ethical” or “responsible”, ever more powerful applications continue to be released ever more quickly. Safety and security teams are being downsized or sidelined to bring AI products to market. And a significant portion of AI developers apparently believe there is a real risk that their work poses an existential threat to humanity.

This contradiction between statements and action can be attributed to three factors that undermine the prospects for meaningful governance of AI. The first is the shift of power from public to private hands, not only in deployment of AI products but in fundamental research. The second is the wariness of most states about regulating the sector too aggressively, for fear that it might drive innovation elsewhere. The third is the dysfunction of global processes to manage collective action problems, epitomized by the climate crisis and now frustrating efforts to govern a technology that does not respect borders. The tragedy of AI governance is that those with the greatest leverage to regulate AI have the least interest in doing so, while those with the greatest interest have the least leverage.

Resolving these challenges either requires rethinking the incentive structures — or waiting for a crisis that brings the need for regulation and coordination into sharper focus…(More)”

Enhancing the European Administrative Space (ComPAct)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “Efficient national public administrations are critical to transform EU and national policies into reality, to implement reforms to the benefit of people and business alike, and to channel investments towards the achievement of the green and digital transition, and greater competitiveness. At the same time, national public administrations are also under an increasing pressure to deal with polycrisis and with many competing priorities. 

For the first time, with the ComPAct, the Commission is proposing a strategic set of actions not only to support the public administrations in the Member States to become more resilient, innovative and skilled, but also to strengthen the administrative cooperation between them, thereby allowing to close existing gaps in policies and services at European level.

With the ComPAct, the Commission aims to enhance the European Administrative Space by promoting a common set of overarching principles underpinning the quality of public administration and reinforcing its support for the administrative modernisation of the Member States. The ComPAct will help Member States address the EU Skills Agenda and the actions under the European Year of Skills, deliver on the targets of the Digital Decade to have 100% of key public services accessible online by 2030, and shape the conditions for the economies and societies to deliver on the ambitious 2030 climate and energy targets. The ComPAct will also help EU enlargement countries on their path to building better public administrations…(More)”.

Learning Like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marion Fourcade and Jeff Gordon: “What does it mean to sense, see, and act like a state in the digital age? We examine the changing phenomenology, governance, and capacity of the state in the era of big data and machine learning. Our argument is threefold. First, what we call the dataist state may be less accountable than its predecessor, despite its promise of enhanced transparency and accessibility. Second, a rapid expansion of the data collection mandate is fueling a transformation in political rationality, in which data affordances increasingly drive policy strategies. Third, the turn to dataist statecraft facilitates a corporate reconstruction of the state. On the one hand, digital firms attempt to access and capitalize on data “minted” by the state. On the other hand, firms compete with the state in an effort to reinvent traditional public functions. Finally, we explore what it would mean for this dataist state to “see like a citizen” instead…(More)”.

Shifting policy systems – a framework for what to do and how to do it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by UK Policy Lab: “Systems change is hard work, and it takes time. The reality is that no single system map or tool is enough to get you from point A to point B, from system now to system next. Over the last year, we have explored the latest in systems change theory and applied it to policymaking. In this four part blog series, we share our reflections on the wealth of knowledge we’ve gained working on intractable issues surrounding how support is delivered for people experiencing multiple disadvantage. Along the way, we realised that we need to make new tools to support policy teams to do this deep work in the future, and to see afresh the limitations of existing mental models for change and transformation.

Policy Lab has previously written about systems mapping as a useful process for understanding the interconnected nature of factors and actors that make up policy ecosystems. Here, we share our latest experimentation on how we can generate practical ideas for long-lasting and systemic change.

This blog includes:

  • An overview of what we did on our latest project – including the policy context, systems change frameworks we experimented with, and the bespoke project framework we created;
  • Our reflections on how we carried out the project;
  • A matrix which provides a practical guide for you to use this approach in your own work…(More)”.

Artificial intelligence in government: Concepts, standards, and a unified framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Vincent J. Straub, Deborah Morgan, Jonathan Bright, Helen Margetts: “Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially in generative language modelling, hold the promise of transforming government. Given the advanced capabilities of new AI systems, it is critical that these are embedded using standard operational procedures, clear epistemic criteria, and behave in alignment with the normative expectations of society. Scholars in multiple domains have subsequently begun to conceptualize the different forms that AI applications may take, highlighting both their potential benefits and pitfalls. However, the literature remains fragmented, with researchers in social science disciplines like public administration and political science, and the fast-moving fields of AI, ML, and robotics, all developing concepts in relative isolation. Although there are calls to formalize the emerging study of AI in government, a balanced account that captures the full depth of theoretical perspectives needed to understand the consequences of embedding AI into a public sector context is lacking. Here, we unify efforts across social and technical disciplines by first conducting an integrative literature review to identify and cluster 69 key terms that frequently co-occur in the multidisciplinary study of AI. We then build on the results of this bibliometric analysis to propose three new multifaceted concepts for understanding and analysing AI-based systems for government (AI-GOV) in a more unified way: (1) operational fitness, (2) epistemic alignment, and (3) normative divergence. Finally, we put these concepts to work by using them as dimensions in a conceptual typology of AI-GOV and connecting each with emerging AI technical measurement standards to encourage operationalization, foster cross-disciplinary dialogue, and stimulate debate among those aiming to rethink government with AI…(More)”.