ILO Working paper 87: “Human-centered social security administrations keep the human dimension in control of decision-making. This is made possible through the insight to be gained from digital data-driven innovation in policy and governance and managerial reforms. Moreover, there are risks associated with collecting and analysing people’s digital data analysed and using it to further automate business processes. Human centricity is examined in this paper, through a human + machine approach, starting with social policy through to service delivery. Machines using AI and related technologies are designed to aug¬ment rather than replace human decision-making capability. This augmentation approach is essential in matters where discretion, compassion, reasoning, judgement, and empathy are essential for equity, fair¬ness, and fiscal responsibility within social security administration. This working paper presents a series of vignette style case studies (13) as examples of digitisation and/or digitalisation in the context of human centricity in social security administration…(More)”.
The Emerging Field of Political Innovation
Article by Johanna Mair, Josefa Kindt & Sébastien Mena: “In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a wave of antiracist protests inspired by the US Black Lives Matter movement, the young German nonprofit JoinPolitics prepared its first group of motivated citizens to enter politics. The organization follows a typical social-venture model through which it scouts, selects, and supports political talents with innovative ideas to strengthen democracy across different regions and levels of government. The handpicked cohort undergoes a curated six-month program that includes funding and training in a variety of skills, such as how to run a campaign, as well as access to an extensive network of politicians, entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, and foundations.
In the program, participants can pursue their ideas, such as drafting legislation to empower stateless people, establishing a lobby group to represent the interests of an underrepresented community, or consulting government agencies to recruit staff from minoritized groups. The solutions they develop address a host of sociopolitical problems that have made German democracy vulnerable to deterioration, including increasing polarization, right-wing populism, social injustice and inequality, and stagnant processes and structures. JoinPolitics is explicitly pro-democratic, but nonpartisan. It supports talents that belong to a spectrum of political parties, as well as those with no party affiliation, but it does not engage with non- and anti-democratic parties.
Caroline Weimann founded JoinPolitics in 2019 after working at a German foundation to address societal challenges. Her transition from grant maker to social entrepreneur was sparked by the realization that “the big questions of our time, be they social inequalities, climate change,” she says, “will have to be solved on a political level.”
For Weimann, as well as others, social innovation must enter politics to unlock its full potential. JoinPolitics departs from conventional social-innovation practice, which recognizes the role of policy in creating a favorable environment for the sector but does not prioritize changes in the political system. Traditionally, the practice of social innovation has stopped at the gates of political systems. Instead, JoinPolitics promotes innovation to fix or reconfigure elements in the political system, effectively liberating social innovation from the dominant narrative that has divorced it from the political realm. The focus of the nonprofit and its political talents is on finding solutions to mounting threats against democratic principles of justice, equality, representation, and civic participation in Germany….(More)”
Handbook on Adaptive Governance
Book edited by Sirkku Juhola: “The interconnectedness of global society is increasingly visible through crises such as the current global health pandemic, emerging climate change impacts and increasing erosion of biodiversity. This timely Handbook navigates the challenges of adaptive governance in these complex contexts, stressing the necessarily compounded nature of bio-physical and social systems to ensure more desirable governance outcomes…(More)”.
Government Audits
Paper by Martina Cuneo, Jetson Leder-Luis & Silvia Vannutelli: “Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government’s ability to observe it and enforce punishments, making auditing most effective in middling state-capacity environments. Consistent with this theory, we survey all the existing credibly causal studies and show that government audits seem to have positive effects mostly in middle-state-capacity environments like Brazil. We present new empirical evidence from American city governments, a high-capacity and low-impropriety environment. Using a previously unexplored threshold in federal audit rules and a dynamic regression discontinuity framework, we estimate the effects of these audits on American city finance and find no marginal effect of audits…(More)”.
How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
Article by Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier:”…But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.
ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees.Automatically generated comments aren’t a new problem. For some time, we have struggled with bots, machines that automatically post content. Five years ago, at least a million automatically drafted comments were believed to have been submitted to the Federal Communications Commission regarding proposed regulations on net neutrality. In 2019, a Harvard undergraduate, as a test, used a text-generation program to submit 1,001 comments in response to a government request for public input on a Medicaid issue. Back then, submitting comments was just a game of overwhelming numbers…(More)”
The Epistemology of Democracy
Book edited by Hana Samaržija and Quassim Cassam: “This is the first edited scholarly collection devoted solely to the epistemology of democracy. Its fifteen chapters, published here for the first time and written by an international team of leading researchers, will interest scholars and advanced students working in democratic theory, the harrowing crisis of democracy, political philosophy, social epistemology, and political epistemology.
The volume is structured into three parts, each offering five chapters. The first part, Democratic Pessimism, covers the crisis of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, public epistemic vices, misinformation and disinformation, civic ignorance, and the lacking quantitative case for democratic decision-making. The second part, Democratic Optimism, discusses the role of hope and positive emotions in rebuilding democracy, proposes solutions to myside bias, and criticizes dominant epistocratic approaches to forming political administrations. The third and final part, Democratic Realism, assesses whether we genuinely require emotional empathy to understand the perspectives of our political adversaries, discusses the democratic tension between mutual respect for others and a quest for social justice, and evaluates manifold top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy making..(More)“.
Embracing Innovation in Government: Global trends 2023
Report by the OECD: “Governments worldwide have faced unprecedented challenges in the last few years, and the global mood remains far from optimistic. The world had little time to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic before the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation dealt the global economy a series of shocks. The culminative effect of these catastrophes has been the destruction of lives and livelihoods, and growing humanitarian, economic and governance crises. Millions of people have been displaced, energy and food markets have been severely disrupted, inflation continues to surge, and many countries are on the brink of recession. Governments must cope with and respond to these emerging threats while already grappling with issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. The challenges they face in ensuring positive outcomes for their people seem to be increasing dramatically.
Yet, despite compounding challenges, governments have been able to adapt and innovate to transform their societies and economies, and more specifically to the focus of this work, to transform themselves and how they design policies, deliver services and manage the business of government. If anything, recent and ongoing crises have catalysed public sector innovation and reinstated the critical role of the state. While the overall tone may be pessimistic, public sector innovation has provided bright spots and room for hope.
The search for these bright spots and entry points for change is the driving force behind this report, and the research that underpins it. As part of the MENA-OECD Governance Programme, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have collaborated since 2016 to explore how governments are working to understand, test and embed new ways of doing things. These efforts have culminated in 12 reports on Global Trends in government innovation, including this one, as well as a deep-dive effort on achieving Cross-Border Government Innovation to tackle global challenges.
To take the pulse of public sector innovation this year, OPSI and the MBRCGI have identified and analysed 1 084 innovative initiatives from 94 countries around the world (download CSV)…(More)”
The Underestimated Impact of School Participatory Budgeting
Blog by the Participation Factory: “Participatory budgets (PBs) are in use in countless communities around the world, giving residents the chance to decide how to allocate parts of the public budget. They are usually open for the entire community to take part – but there can be real advantages to starting with a smaller-scale school participatory budget.
Not only do they empower pupils to get involved in local government; but they can also play a crucial role in the students’ civic education. Unlike other educational tools like mock elections, the children actually get to see how the work they put in leads to concrete results. They demonstrate the power of political engagement to children at an early age, leaving them well-placed to become active, engaged citizens in later life….
The basic setup of a school PB should allow children to get a grasp of a whole range of what we call participatory skills – including project development, public speaking, voting, running a campaign, and engaging in deliberative democratic discussions. Younger children can start out just voting for their favourite projects – but as they get older, they can begin to get more involved in the entire process, gradually building their confidence, project management skills, and their understanding of how participation works.
Participatory budgeting improves the children’s participatory skills. We have learned from our experience in Czech and Slovak schools that every year, more children feel comfortable enough to propose a project and run a campaign. They realise that there are techniques and methods to the process that they can easily learn and use, making the whole process less intimidating. They realise that debating and taking initiative doesn’t hurt, but rather leads to real results…(More)”.
Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity
Book edited by Dimitrios Karmis and Jocelyn Maclure: “James Tully is one of the world’s most influential political philosophers at work today. Over the past thirty years – first with Strange Multiplicity (1995), and more fully with Public Philosophy in a New Key (2008) and On Global Citizenship (2014) – Tully has developed a distinctive approach to the study of political philosophy, democracy, and active citizenship for a deeply diverse world and a de-imperializing age.
Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity explores, elucidates, and questions Tully’s innovative approach, methods, and concepts, providing both a critical assessment of Tully’s public philosophy and an exemplification of the dialogues of reciprocal elucidation that are central to Tully’s approach. Since the role of public philosophy is to address public affairs, the contributors consider public philosophy in the context of pressing issues and recent civic struggles such as: crises of democracy and citizenship in the Western world; global citizenship; civil disobedience and non-violence; Indigenous self-determination; nationalism and federalism in multinational states; protest movements in Turkey and Quebec; supranational belonging in the European Union; struggles over equity in academia; and environmental decontamination, decolonization, and cultural restoration in Akwesasne….(More)”
ChatGPT reminds us why good questions matter
Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Anil Ananthaswamy: “Over 100 million people used ChatGPT in January alone, according to one estimate, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. By producing resumes, essays, jokes and even poetry in response to prompts, the software brings into focus not just language models’ arresting power, but the importance of framing our questions correctly.
To that end, a few years ago I initiated the 100 Questions Initiative, which seeks to catalyse a cultural shift in the way we leverage data and develop scientific insights. The project aims not only to generate new questions, but also reimagine the process of asking them…
As a species and a society, we tend to look for answers. Answers appear to provide a sense of clarity and certainty, and can help guide our actions and policy decisions. Yet any answer represents a provisional end-stage of a process that begins with questions – and often can generate more questions. Einstein drew attention to the critical importance of how questions are framed, which can often determine (or at least play a significant role in determining) the answers we ultimately reach. Frame a question differently and one might reach a different answer. Yet as a society we undervalue the act of questioning – who formulates questions, how they do so, the impact they have on what we investigate, and on the decisions we make. Nor do we pay sufficient attention to whether the answers are in fact addressing the questions initially posed…(More)”.