Paper by Lisa van Dijk and Jonas Lefevere: “Academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in deliberative minipublics and whether these can address widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary politics. While optimism seems to prevail, there is also talk that the use of minipublics may backfire. When the government disregards a minipublic’s recommendations, this could lead to more dissatisfaction than not asking for its advice in the first place. Using an online survey experiment in Belgium (n = 3,102), we find that, compared to a representative decision-making process, a minipublic tends to bring about higher political support when its recommendations are fully adopted by the government, whereas it generates lower political support when its recommendations are not adopted. This study presents novel insights into whether and when the use of minipublics may alleviate or aggravate political dissatisfaction among the public at large….(More)”
Dynamic capabilities of the public sector: Towards a new synthesis
Paper by Rainer Kattel: “The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important public sector capacities and capabilities are in terms of reacting to crises, and re-configuring existing policies and implementation practices. Prior to the pandemic, policy makers were increasingly turning their attention to challenge-driven innovation policies in order to tackle climate emergencies and other ‘wicked’ societal challenges. Such a ‘normative turn’ also assumes the existence of what can be called dynamic capabilities in the public sector. This paper offers a new synthesis of how to conceptualise dynamic capabilities in the public sector. The paper synthesises existing state capacity, public sector innovation capacity and dynamic capabilities literature. Using three brief case studies (the UK’s Government Digital Service, the city of Barcelona and Sweden’s Vinnova), the paper discusses the origins and constitutive elements (sense-making, connecting, shaping) of dynamic capabilities. The paper also discusses how dynamic capabilities could be assessed…(More)”.
DIGintegrity
A government‘s toolkit to disrupt corruption through data-based technologies.
Blog by Camilo Cetina: “The Lava Jato corruption scandal exposed a number of Brazilian government officers in 2016, including the then president of the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives, and further investigations have implicated other organisations in a way that reveals a worrying phenomenon worldwide: corruption is mutating into complex forms of organized crime.
For corruption networks to thrive and predate public funds, they need to capture government officers. Furthermore, the progressive digitalization of economies and telecommunications increases the potential of corruption networks to operate transnationally, which makes it easier to identify new cooperation mechanisms (for example, mobilizing illicit cash through a church) and accumulate huge profits thanks to transnational operations. This simultaneously increases their ability to reorganize and hide among huge amounts of data underlying the digital platforms used to mobilize money around the world.
However, at the same time, data-based technologies can significantly contribute as a response to the challenges revealed by recent corruption cases such as Lava Jato, Odebrecht, the Panama Papers or the Pandora Papers. The new report DIGIntegrity, the executive summary of which was recently published by CAF — Development Bank of Latin America, highlights how anti-corruption policies can become more effective when they target specific datasets which then are reused through digital platforms to prevent, detect and investigate corruption networks.
The report explains how the growing digitalization accompanied by the globalization of the economy is having a twofold effect on governments’ integrity agendas. On the one hand, globalization and technology provide unprecedented opportunities for corruption to grow, thus facilitating the concealment of illicit flows of money, and hindering jurisdictional capacities for detection and punishment. But, on the other hand, systemic improvements in governance and collective action are being achieved thanks to new technologies that help provide automated services and make public management processes more visible through open data and increasingly public records. There are “integrity dividends” derived from the growing digitization of governments and the increasingly intensive use of data intelligence to prevent corruption….(More).”
Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?
Report by Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem): “This Democracy Report documents several signs that autocratization is changing nature. With five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an increase in coups unprecedented over the past two decades. These coups contributed to driving the uptick in the number of closed autocracies. They also seem to signal a shift toward emboldened actors, given the previous decline in coups during the 21st century.
Polarization and government misinformation are also increasing. These trends are interconnected. Polarized publics are more likely to demonize political opponents and distrust information from diverse sources, and mobilization shifts as a result. The increase in misinformation and polarization further signals what may prove to be a changing nature of autocratization in the world today. We discuss this shift in detail in the third part of the report: “Autocratization Changing Nature?”.
Another sign of emboldened political leaders is the increasing number of countries where critical, formal aspects of democracy are eroding. The autonomy of institutions such as Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are now attacked and undermined in many autocratzing countries alongside the judiciary and the legislature. This year’s Democracy Report documents such changes.
The Democracy Report 2022 is published along with version 12 of the V-Dem dataset. The dataset is produced by the worldwide V-Dem collaboration and is based on assessments by over 3,700 experts from more than 180 countries, resulting in over 30 million data points. The Democracy Report 2022 is authored by a team at the V-Dem Institute, and we alone are accountable for its contents.
The Democracy Report 2022 analyzes the evidence from three perspectives. The first part examines the state of the world in 2021 based on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and the Regimes of the World (RoW) Index. The second part of the report focuses on countries that are in a process of changing. The third part presents data on coups, polarization, and disinformation, all of which signal that the fundamental dynamics of the current wave of autocratization may be changing.
In summary: The worldwide wave of autocratization is deepening, engulfing more countries, and seems to be changing nature…(More)”.
Evidence is a policymaker’s biggest weapon
Report by Jacquelyn Zhang: “Fundamentally, public policy is supposed to address serious social problems. However, poorly designed policies exist. Often this happens when a well-intentioned policy generates unexpected and unintended consequences, and sometimes, these consequences leave policymakers farther away from their goal than when they started.
Consider just a few examples.
The first is the impact of an immigration law that was used in the United States ostensibly to control the flow of undocumented immigrants into the country. The controversial bill imposes extreme restrictions on undocumented immigrants in the state of Alabama and limits every aspect of immigrants’ lives.
By employing a synthetic control methodology, the bill proved to have a substantial and negative unintended effect – an increase in violent crimes. This could be linked back to the bill because while violent crime increased, property crime did not.
This may be because the passage of one of the country’s strictest anti-immigration laws signalled to the community that the system had more tolerance for discrimination against undocumented immigrants in Alabama, fuelling distrust and eventually violent conflict.
This is not a freak event either. Policymakers know that enacting laws doesn’t just change the wording of legislation. It shapes social norms, prescribes attitudes, and affects community behaviour. Of course, this is also why good policy-making can be so productive…(More)”.
Transparency in a “Post-Fact” World
Paper by Sabina Schnell: “What role can government transparency play in a democratic polity in a post-fact and a post-truth world? If the problem is not that citizens lack information about what the government does, but that they filter existing information through pre-existing ideological biases and world views, can government transparency still contribute to better informed citizens and more accountable government? To answer these questions, the article first reviews the critiques of transparency that are particularly salient in a post-fact world: that it reduces trust in government and increases polarization in deliberation. It then discusses three possible solutions: less transparency, tailored transparency, and reasoned transparency. Drawing on deliberative democracy theory, the article concludes that to reclaim the value of transparency, public administration scholars and practitioners need to move from a narrow interpretation of transparency as access to information to a broader, more holistic one, that considers more explicitly the communicative aspects of transparency and its normative foundations….(More)”.
Beyond Benchmarking: Why Countries should Ignore International Rankings
Essay by Robyn Klingler-Vidra and Yu-Ching Kuo: “In Ranking the World, Alexander Cooley and Jack Snyder explore the rise of benchmarking and rankings of countries. They indicate more than 95 such rankings by the time their book was published in 2016. Today, with the success of country rankings such as the Economic Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Rankings, that number has grown two-fold, as more than 200 rankings systems compare countries for their democratic quality, investor friendliness, economic competitiveness, and more.
But, international benchmarking methods are problematic; they reflect politics, suffer from incomplete coverage, sample size and bias challenges, and institutional bias. Why, then, do countries increasingly rely on them to inform their policymaking? We employ Taiwan, and entrepreneurship rankings, as a lens to explore the accuracy of benchmarking methodologies, and the offer a new way forward. One that is informed by local evidence rather than global rankings, and as such, is better positioned to solve the ecosystem’s pressing challenges…(More)”.
Policy Building Blocks, And How We Talk About The Law
Article by Cathy Gellis: “One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, because policy involves an application of law to technology, and we can’t apply it well when we don’t understand how the law works. (It’s also hard to do well when we don’t understand how the technology works, either, but this post is about the law part so we’ll leave the issues with understanding technology aside for now.)
Even among lawyers, who should have some expertise in understanding the law, people can find themselves at different points along the learning curve in terms of understanding the intricacies and basic mechanics of our legal system. As explained before, law is often so complex that, even as practitioners, lawyers tend to become very specialized and may lose touch with some basic concepts if they do not often encounter them in the course of their careers.
Meanwhile it shouldn’t just be lawyers who understand law anyway. Certainly policymakers, charged with making the law, should have a solid understanding what they are working with. But regular people should too. After all, the point of a democracy is that the people get to decide what their laws should be (or at least be able to charge their representatives to make good ones on their behalf). And people can’t make good choices when they don’t understand how the choices they make fit into the system they are being made for.
Remember that none of these choices are being made in a vacuum; we do not find ourselves today with a completely blank canvas. Instead, we’ve all inherited a legal system that has chugged along for two centuries. We can, of course, choose to change any of it should we so require, but such an exercise would be best served by having a solid grasp on just what it is that we would be changing. Only with that insight can we be sure that any changes we might make would be needed, appropriate, and not themselves likely to cause even more problems than whatever we were trying to fix…(More)”.
What counts’ as accountability, and who decides?
Working Paper by Jonathan Fox: “Accountability is often treated as a magic bullet, an all-purpose solution to a very wide range of problems—from corrupt politicians or the quality of public service provision to persistent injustice and impunity. The concept has become shorthand to refer to diverse efforts to address problems with the exercise of power. In practice, the accountability idea is malleable, ambiguous — and contested.
This working paper unpacks diverse understandings of accountability ideas, using the ‘keywords’ approach. This tradition takes everyday big ideas whose meanings are often taken for granted and makes their subtexts explicit. The proposition here is that ambiguous or contested language can either constrain or enable possible strategies for promoting accountability. After all, different potential coalition partners may use the same term with different meanings—or may use different terms to communicate the same idea. Indeed, the concept’s fundamental ambiguity is a major reason why it can be difficult to communicate ideas about accountability across disciplines, cultures, and languages. The goal here is to inform efforts to find common ground between diverse potential constituencies for accountable governance.
This analysis is informed by dialogue with advocates and reformers from many countries and sectors, many of whom share their ideas in blogposts on the Accountability Keywords website (see also #AccountabilityKeyword on social media). Both the working paper and blogposts reflect on accountability-related words and sayings that resonate with popular cultures, to get a better handle on what sticks.
The format of the working paper is nonlinear, designed so that readers can go right to the keywords that spark their interest:
- The introduction maps the landscape of accountability keywords.
- Section 2 addresses what counts as accountability?
- Section 3 identifies big concepts that overlap with accountability but are not synonyms- such as good governance, democracy, responsiveness and responsibility.
- Section 4 shows the relevance of accountability adjectives by spelling out different ways in which the idea is understood.
- Section 5 unpacks widely used, emblematic keywords in the field.
- Section 6 considers more specialized keywords, focusing on examples that serve as shorthand for big ideas within specific communities of practice.
- Section 7 brings together a range of widely-used accountability sayings, from the ancient to the recently-invented—illustrating the enduring and diverse nature of accountability claims.
- Section 8 makes a series of propositions for discussion…(More)”.
Open Data for Social Impact Framework
Framework by Microsoft: “The global pandemic has shown us the important role of data in understanding, assessing, and taking action to solve the challenges created by COVID-19. However, nearly all organizations, large and small, still struggle to make data relevant to their work. Despite the value data provides, many organizations fail to harness its power to improve outcomes.
Part of this struggle stems from the “data divide” – the gap that exists between countries and organizations that have effective access to data to help them innovate and solve problems and those that do not. To close this divide, Microsoft launched the Open Data Campaign in 2020 to help realize the promise of more open data and data collaborations that drive innovation.
One of the key lessons we’ve learned from the Campaign and the work we’ve been doing with our partners, the Open Data Institute and The GovLab, is that the ability to access and use data to improve outcomes involves much more than technological tools and the data itself. It is also important to be able to leverage and share the experiences and practices that promote effective data collaboration and decision-making. This is especially true when it comes to working with governments, multi-lateral organizations, nonprofits, research institutions, and others who seek to open and reuse data to address important social issues, particularly those faced by developing countries.
Put another way, just having access to data and technology does not magically create value and improve outcomes. Making the most of open data and data collaboration requires thinking about how an organization’s leadership can commit to making data useful towards its mission, defining the questions it wants to answer with data, identifying the skills its team needs to use data, and determining how best to develop and establish trust among collaborators and communities served to derive more insight and benefit from data.
The Open Data for Social Impact Framework is a tool leaders can use to put data to work to solve the challenges most important to them. Recognizing that not all data can be made publicly accessible, we see the tremendous benefits that can come from advancing more open data, whether that takes shape as trusted data collaborations or truly open and public data. We use the phrase ‘social impact’ to mean a positive change towards addressing a societal problem, such as reducing carbon emissions, closing the broadband gap, building skills for jobs, and advancing accessibility and inclusion.
We believe in the limitless opportunities that opening, sharing, and collaborating around data can create to draw out new insights, make better decisions, and improve efficiencies when tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges….(More)”.