The World Needs Many More Public Servants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ngaire Woods: “The private sector alone cannot make the massive investments required to achieve a carbon-neutral future and hold societies together through the twenty-first century’s economic, political, and climate-related crises. To enable governments to do so, policymakers must avoid austerity measures and recruit high-quality personnel….Policymakers around the world will need to address a confluence of economic, political, and climate-related shocks in 2023. While governments cannot solve these crises alone, deft political leadership will be crucial to holding societies together and enabling communities and businesses to step up and do their part. What the world desperately needs is public servants and politicians who are willing and able to innovate…

In an ideal world, the magnitude of humanity’s current challenges would attract some of the most creative and highly motivated citizens to public service. In many countries, however, public-sector pay has sunk to levels that make it increasingly difficult to attract top talent. In the United Kingdom, as the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf notes, while overall real private-sector pay has increased by 5.5% since 2010, public-sector wages have fallen by 5.9%, with much of that decline happening in the last two years. The result is a personnel deficit at every level. Recent data from the National Health Service in England show a huge nurse shortfall. Other data show that teacher recruitments are well below target.

Too often, the public sector falls into a vicious cycle of cost-cutting and resignations. Nurses in the UK are overworked and many will likely succumb to exhaustion soon, leaving their remaining colleagues even more overburdened and demoralized. Another austerity wave will make it even harder to retain quality workers…(More)”.

A Comparative Study of Citizen Crowdsourcing Platforms and the Use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Effective Participatory Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carina Antonia Hallin: ‘The use of crowdsourcing platforms to harness citizen insights for policymaking has gained increasing importance in regional and national policy planning. Participatory democracy using crowdsourcing platforms includes various initiatives, such as generating ideas for new law reforms (Aitamurto and Landemore 2015], economic development, and solving challenges related to how to create inclusive social actions and interventions for better, healthier, and more prosperous local communities (Bentley and Pugalis, 2014). Such case observations, coupled with the increasing prevalence of internet-based communication, point to the real benefits of implementing participatory democracies on a mass scale in which citizens are invited to contribute their ideas, opinions, and deliberations (Salganik and Levy 2015). By adopting collective intelligence platforms, public authorities can harness local knowledge from citizens to find the right ‘policy mix’ and collaborate with citizens and relevant actors in the policymaking processes. This comparative study aims to validate the adoption of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence/natural language processing (NLP) on crowdsourcing platforms for effective participatory democracy and policymaking in local governments. The study compares 15 citizen crowdsourcing platforms, including Natural language Processing (NLP), for policymaking across Europe and the United States. The study offers a framework for working with citizen crowdsourcing platforms and exploring the usefulness of NLP on the platforms for effective participatory democracy…(More)”.

The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mordecai Kurz: “Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change?

Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences.

Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class…(More)”.

The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Reid Blackman: “…One should always worry when a person or an organization places one value above all. The moral fabric of our world is complex. It’s nuanced. Sensitivity to moral nuance is difficult, but unwavering support of one principle to rule them all is morally dangerous.

The way Signal wields the word “surveillance” reflects its coarsegrained understanding of morality. To the company, surveillance covers everything from a server holding encrypted data that no one looks at to a law enforcement agent reading data after obtaining a warrant to East Germany randomly tapping citizens’ phones. One cannot think carefully about the value of privacy — including its relative importance to other values in particular contexts — with such a broad brush.

What’s more, the company’s proposition that if anyone has access to data, then many unauthorized people probably will have access to that data is false. This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors. There are some people who have access to the nuclear launch codes, but “Mission Impossible” movies aside, we’re not particularly worried about a slippery slope leading to lots of unauthorized people having access to those codes.

I am drawing attention to Signal, but there’s a bigger issue here: Small groups of technologists are developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons, with those ideologies baked into the technologies. To use those technologies is to use a tool that comes with an ethical or political bent.

Signal is pushing against businesses like Meta that turn users of their social media platforms into the product by selling user data. But Signal embeds within itself a rather extreme conception of privacy, and scaling its technology is scaling its ideology. Signal’s users may not be the product, but they ‌‌are the witting or unwitting advocates of the moral views of the 40 or so people who operate Signal.

There’s something somewhat sneaky in all this (though I don’t think the owners of Signal intend to be sneaky). Usually advocates know that they’re advocates. They engage in some level of deliberation and reach the conclusion that a set of beliefs is for them…(More)”.

Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in Voting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joseph Campbell, Alessandra Casella, Lucas de Lara, Victoria R. Mooers & Dilip Ravindran: “Under Liquid Democracy (LD), decisions are taken by referendum, but voters are allowed to delegate their votes to other voters. Theory shows that in common interest problems where experts are correctly identified, the outcome can be superior to simple majority voting. However, even when experts are correctly identified, delegation must be used sparely because it reduces the variety of independent information sources. We report the results of two experiments, each studying two treatments: in one treatment, participants have the option of delegating to better informed individuals; in the second, participants can choose to abstain. The first experiment follows a tightly controlled design planned for the lab; the second is a perceptual task run online where information about signals’ precision is ambiguous. The two designs are very different, but the experiments reach the same result: in both, delegation rates are unexpectedly high and higher than abstention rates, and LD underperforms relative to both universal voting and abstention…(More)”.

The Protection and Promotion of Civic Space

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “The past decade has seen increasing international recognition of civic space as a cornerstone of functioning democracies, alongside efforts to promote and protect it. Countries that foster civic space are better placed to reap the many benefits of higher levels of citizen engagement, strengthened transparency and accountability, and empowered citizens and civil society. In the longer term, a vibrant civic space can help to improve government effectiveness and responsiveness, contribute to more citizen-centred policies, and boost social cohesion. This first OECD comparative report on civic space offers a baseline of data from 33 OECD Members and 19 non-Members and a nuanced overview of the different dimensions of civic space, with a focus on civic freedoms, media freedoms, civic space in the digital age, and the enabling environment for civil society. It provides an exhaustive review of legal frameworks, policies, strategies, and institutional arrangements, in addition to implementation gaps, trends and good practices. The analysis is complemented by a review of international standards and guidance, in addition to data and analysis from civil society and other stakeholders…(More)”.

What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Peter Levine: “People who want to improve the world must ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Although the specific issues and challenges people face are enormously diverse, they often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think productively about contentious matters), and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.

In What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America’s leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens’ question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his goal is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively wrestle with these problems so that they don’t destabilize movements.

A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? turns from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. And it offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world…(More)”.

Public sector innovation has a “first mile” problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Catarina Tully, and Giulio Quaggiotto: “Even if progress has been uneven, the palette of innovation approaches adopted by the public sector has considerably expanded in the last few years: from new sources of data to behavioural science, from foresight to user-centred design, from digital transformation to system thinking. And yet, the frustration of many innovation champions within the government is palpable. We are all familiar with innovation graveyards and, in our learning journeys, probably contributed to them in spite of all best intentions:

  • Dashboards that look very “smart” and are carefully tended to by few specialists but never used by their intended target audience: decision-makers.
  • Prototypes or experiments that were developed by an innovation unit and meant to be handed over to a line ministry or city department but never were.
  • Beautifully crafted scenarios and horizon scanning reports that last the length of a press conference or a ribbon-cutting event and are quickly put on the shelves after that.

The list could go on and on.

Innovation theatre is a well known malaise (paraphrasing Sean McDonald: “the use of [technology] interventions that make people feel as if a government—and, more often, a specific group of political leaders—is solving a problem, without it doing anything to actually solve that problem.”)

In the current climate, the pressure to “scale” quick-fixes in the face of multiple crises (as opposed to the hard work of addressing root causes, building trust, and structural transformations) is only increasing the appetite for performative theatre. Eventually, public intrapreneurs learn to use the theatre to their advantage: let the photo op with the technology gadget or the “futuristic” scenario take the centre stage so as to create goodwill with the powers that be, while you work quietly in the backstage to do the “right” thing…(More)”.

All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro: “Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to encourage citizen reporting of electoral irregularities. We also cross-randomized whether candidates were informed about the campaign in a subset of municipalities. Total reports, and evidence-backed ones, experienced a large increase. Across a wide array of measures, electoral irregularities decreased. Finally, the reporting campaign reduced the vote share of candidates dependent on irregularities. This light-touch intervention is more cost-effective than monitoring efforts traditionally used by policymakers…(More)”.

When do “Nudges” Increase Welfare?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hunt Allcott, Daniel Cohen, William Morrison & Dmitry Taubinsky: “Policymakers are increasingly interested in non-standard policy instruments (NPIs), or “nudges,” such as simplified information disclosure and warning labels. We characterize the welfare effects of NPIs using public finance sufficient statistic approaches, allowing for endogenous prices, market power, and optimal or suboptimal taxes. While many empirical evaluations have focused on whether NPIs increase ostensibly beneficial behaviors on average, we show that this can be a poor guide to welfare. Welfare also depends on whether the NPI reduces the variance of distortions from heterogenous biases and externalities, and the average effect becomes irrelevant with zero pass-through or optimal taxes. We apply our framework to randomized experiments evaluating automotive fuel economy labels and sugary drink health labels. In both experiments, the labels increase ostensibly beneficial behaviors but also may decrease welfare in our model, because they increase the variance of distortions…(More)”.