Citizens’ Assemblies Could Be Democracy’s Best Hope

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hugh Pope: “…According to the OECD, nearly 600 citizens’ assemblies had taken place globally by 2021, almost all in the preceding decade. The number has expanded exponentially since then. In addition to high-profile assemblies that take on major issues, like the one in Paris, they include small citizens’ juries making local planning decisions, experiments that mix elected politicians with citizens chosen by lot, and permanent chambers in city or community governance whose members are randomly selected, usually on an annual basis from the relevant population.

Sortition, also known as democracy by lot, has been used to randomly select citizens’ assemblies in the Philippines, Malawi and Mexico. Citizens’ assemblies were used in the U.S. in 2021 to debate the climate crisis in Washington state and to determine the fate of a fairground in Petaluma, California. Indeed, whereas few people had heard of a citizens’ assembly a few years ago, a late 2020 Pew Research poll found that in the U.S., Germany, France and Britain, three-quarters or more of respondents thought it either somewhat or very important for their countries to convene them.

Though a global phenomenon, the trend is finding the most traction in Europe. Citizens’ assemblies in Germany are “booming,” with over 60 in the past year alone, according to a German radio documentary. A headline in Britain’s Guardian newspaper wondered if they are “the Future of Democracy.” The Dutch newspaper Trouw suggested they may be “the way we can win back trust in politics.” And in France, an editorial in Le Monde called for a greater embrace of “this new way of exercising power and drawing on collective intelligence.”…(More)”.

Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Samuel Issacharoff: “The end of the 20th century marked a triumphant moment for liberal democracies, which sold their vision of governance on the basis of their strong markets, economic redistribution to their citizens, and a robust constitutional order. But today democracies young and old, fragile and resilient alike are under threat—not from military conflict, nor from autocracies beyond their borders, but primarily from within. New tactics employed by would-be autocrats, whether in Hungary, India, Brazil, or the United States, exploit cracks that have emerged in democratic institutions since the 2008 financial crisis. Why have democracies weakened, how has populism emerged in its place, and what are its implications for the long-term future of democratic governance around the world? Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty examines these questions in three parts. The first addresses the recent ascendancy of populism around the world, arguing that populism has emerged as democracies have grown less able to deliver on their promises and the economic, social, and cultural narratives underpinning democracy unraveled amidst economic dislocation, migration, and demographic change. The second explores how populists govern when they take power and the intralegal ways that populists wield democratic institutions against democratic governance. The third and final part offers suggestions to better insulate democracies against the populist tide, including the application of ordinary tools of criminal and administrative law; improving state capacity, checks on the executive and citizen participation; and exploring novel electoral frameworks…(More)”.

Rethinking democracy for the age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Keynote speech by Bruce Schneier: “There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being hacked too effectively.

At the same time, the cost of these hacked systems has never been greater, across all human history. We have become too powerful as a species. And our systems cannot keep up with fast-changing disruptive technologies.

We need to create new systems of governance that align incentives and are resilient against hacking … at every scale. From the individual all the way up to the whole of society.

 For this, I need you to drop your 20th century either/or thinking. This is not about capitalism versus communism. It’s not about democracy versus autocracy. It’s not even about humans versus AI. It’s something new, something we don’t have a name for yet. And it’s “blue sky” thinking, not even remotely considering what’s feasible today.

Throughout this talk, I want you to think of both democracy and capitalism as information systems. Socio-technical information systems. Protocols for making group decisions. Ones where different players have different incentives. These systems are vulnerable to hacking and need to be secured against those hacks.

We security technologists have a lot of expertise in both secure system design and hacking. That’s why we have something to add to this discussion…(More)”

Data Privacy and Algorithmic Inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Zhuang Liu, Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong: “This paper develops a foundation for a consumer’s preference for data privacy by linking it to the desire to hide behavioral vulnerabilities. Data sharing with digital platforms enhances the matching efficiency for standard consumption goods, but also exposes individuals with self-control issues to temptation goods. This creates a new form of inequality in the digital era—algorithmic inequality. Although data privacy regulations provide consumers with the option to opt out of data sharing, these regulations cannot fully protect vulnerable consumers because of data-sharing externalities. The coordination problem among consumers may also lead to multiple equilibria with drastically different levels of data sharing by consumers. Our quantitative analysis further illustrates that although data is non-rival and beneficial to social welfare, it can also exacerbate algorithmic inequality…(More)”.

Judging Nudging: Understanding the Welfare Effects of Nudges Versus Taxes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John A. List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy & Gregory K. Sun: “While behavioral non-price interventions (“nudges”) have grown from academic curiosity to a bona fide policy tool, their relative economic efficiency remains under-researched. We develop a unified framework to estimate welfare effects of both nudges and taxes. We showcase our approach by creating a database of more than 300 carefully hand-coded point estimates of non-price and price interventions in the markets for cigarettes, influenza vaccinations, and household energy. While nudges are effective in changing behavior in all three markets, they are not necessarily the most efficient policy. We find that nudges are more efficient in the market for cigarettes, while taxes are more efficient in the energy market. For influenza vaccinations, optimal subsidies likely outperform nudges. Importantly, two key factors govern the difference in results across markets: i) an elasticity-weighted standard deviation of the behavioral bias, and ii) the magnitude of the average externality. Nudges dominate taxes whenever i) exceeds ii). Combining nudges and taxes does not always provide quantitatively significant improvements to implementing one policy tool alone…(More)”.

Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “In the face of what has increasingly been referred to as an ongoing “permacrisis”, governments must cope with and respond to emerging threats while already grappling with longstanding issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. Despite compounding challenges, governments have been able to adapt and innovate to transform their societies and economies, and to transform themselves and how they design and deliver policies and services. Indeed, recent crises have served to catalyse innovation, and innovation has emerged as a much-needed driver of stability that can generate public value in difficult times.

In this context, understanding new approaches and spreading successful ideas has never been more important. In seeking to do our part to promote this, OPSI and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have worked in partnership for nearly seven years to surface leading edge public sector innovation trends and to tell the stories of innovators around the world who are working to challenge existing norms and embed new ways of doing things.

Today, we are excited to jointly launch our report Global Trends in Government Innovation 2023, the preliminary report of which was launched at the World Government Summit (WGS), which brings together over 4 000 participants from more than 190 countries to discuss innovative ways to solve the challenges facing humanity…(More)”.

Civic Information Handbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Handbook by Adrienne Goldstein: “Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.

This handbook aims to:

  1. Educate civic information providers about coordinated deceptive campaigns

…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.

  1. Serve as a resource on how to flood the zone with trustworthy civic information

…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.

This handbook will function as a media literacy tool, giving readers the skills and opportunity to consider who is behind networked information campaigns and how they spread their messages…(More)”.

Let’s Randomize America! 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalton Conley: “…As our society has become less random, it has become more unequal. Many people know that inequality has been rising steadily over time, but a less-remarked-on development is that there’s been a parallel geographic shift, with high- and low-income people moving into separate, ever more distinct communities…As a sociologist, I study inequality and what can be done about it. It is, to say the least, a difficult problem to solve…I’ve come to believe that lotteries could help to crack this nut and make our society fairer and more equal. We can’t randomly assign where people live, of course. And we can’t integrate neighborhoods by fiat, either. We learned that lesson in the nineteen-seventies, when counties tried busing schoolchildren across town. Those programs aimed to create more racially and economically integrated schools; they resulted in the withdrawal of affluent students from urban public-school systems, and set off a political backlash that can still be felt today…

As a political tool, lotteries have come and gone throughout history. Sortition—the selection of political officials by lot—was first practiced in Athens in the sixth century B.C.E., and later reappeared in Renaissance city-states such as Florence, Venice, and Lombardy, and in Switzerland and elsewhere. In recent years, citizens’ councils—randomly chosen groups of individuals who meet to hammer out a particular issue, such as climate policy—have been tried in Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, and the U.K. Some political theorists, such as Hélène Landemore, Jane Mansbridge, and the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck, have argued that randomly selected decision-makers who don’t have to campaign are less likely to be corrupt or self-interested than those who must run for office; people chosen at random are also unlikely to be typically privileged, power-hungry politicians. The wisdom of the crowd improves when the crowd is more diverse…(More)”.

Evidence Gap Maps as Critical Information Communication Devices for Evidence-based Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Esteban Villa-Turek et al: “The public policy cycle requires increasingly the use of evidence by policy makers. Evidence Gap Maps (EGMs) are a relatively new methodology that helps identify, process, and visualize the vast amounts of studies representing a rich source of evidence for better policy making. This document performs a methodological review of EGMs and presents the development of a working integrated system that automates several critical steps of EGM creation by means of applied computational and statistical methods. Above all, the proposed system encompasses all major steps of EGM creation in one place, namely inclusion criteria determination, processing of information, analysis, and user-friendly communication of synthesized relevant evidence. This tool represents a critical milestone in the efforts of implementing cutting-edge computational methods in usable systems. The contribution of the document is two-fold. First, it presents the critical importance of EGMs in the public policy cycle; second, it justifies and explains the development of a usable tool that encompasses the methodological phases of creation of EGMs, while automating most time-consuming stages of the process. The overarching goal is the better and faster information communication to relevant actors like policy makers, thus promoting well-being through better and more efficient interventions based on more evidence-driven policy making…(More)”.

Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Guadalupe Bedoya, Jishnu Das & Amy Dolinger: “We report results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities in three Kenyan counties were classified into 273 markets, and the markets were then randomly allocated to treatment and control groups. Government inspectors visited health facilities and, depending on the results of their inspection, recommended closure or a timeline for improvements. The intervention increased compliance with patient safety measures in both public and private facilities (more so in the latter) and reallocated patients from private to public facilities without increasing out-of-pocket payments or decreasing facility use. In treated markets, improvements were equally marked throughout the quality distribution, consistent with a simple model of vertical differentiation in oligopolies. Our paper thus establishes the use of experimental techniques to study regulatory reforms and, in doing so, shows that minimum standards can improve quality across the board without adversely affecting utilization…(More)”.