Shared Measures: Collective Performance Data Use in Collaborations


Paper by Alexander Kroll: “Traditionally, performance metrics and data have been used to hold organizations accountable. But public service provision is not merely hierarchical anymore. Increasingly, we see partnerships among government agencies, private or nonprofit organizations, and civil society groups. Such collaborations may also use goals, measures, and data to manage group efforts, however, the application of performance practices here will likely follow a different logic. This Element introduces the concepts of “shared measures” and “collective data use” to add collaborative, relational elements to existing performance management theory. It draws on a case study of collaboratives in North Carolina that were established to develop community responses to the opioid epidemic. To explain the use of shared performance measures and data within these collaboratives, this Element studies the role of factors such as group composition, participatory structures, social relationships, distributed leadership, group culture, and value congruence…(More)”.

We may have overdone it on citizens’ assemblies


Article by David Farrell: “Ireland has citizens’ assemblies aplenty. A few weeks ago the Cabinet gave the green light for two new citizens’ assemblies on biodiversity and a Dublin mayor. This immediately prompted a debate in the Oireachtas over why the Dublin mayor citizens’ assembly is being prioritised over one on drugs use that was promised in the Programme for Government, along with citizens’ assemblies on rural youth and the future of education. Almost every day there are groups calling for still more citizens’ assemblies: the recent list includes such topics as a united Ireland, the funding of our armed forces, and a new forest strategy.

This all comes hot on the heels of three previous assemblies since 2012, the most recent of which, the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, completed its work last year and, after some delay, its well-considered report is about to be considered by a special Oireachtas committee, chaired by Ivana Bacik.

It’s no wonder that Ireland is seen as a leading light in the world of citizens’ assemblies: they have made important contributions on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But these high-profile successes disguise the fact that many, many other recommendations from previous assemblies have been ignored, rejected, or left to gather dust: that’s a lot of time and effort (not least by citizens’ assembly members) and public funding wasted for rather little return…(More)”.

Still Muted: The Limited Participatory Democracy of Zoom Public Meetings


Paper by Katherine Levine Einstein: “Recent research has demonstrated that participants in public meetings are unrepresentative of their broader communities. Some suggest that reducing barriers to meeting attendance can improve participation, while others believe doing so will produce minimal changes. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted public meetings online, potentially reducing the time costs associated with participating. We match participants at online public meetings with administrative data to learn whether: (1) online participants are representative of their broader communities and (2) representativeness improves relative to in-person meetings. We find that participants in online forums are quite similar to those in in-person ones. They are similarly unrepresentative of residents in their broader communities and similarly overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing. These results suggest important limitations to public meeting reform. Future research should continue to unpack whether reforms might prove more effective at redressing inequalities in an improved economic and public health context…(More)”.

Open Data Governance and Its Actors: Theory and Practice


Book by Maxat Kassen: “This book combines theoretical and practical knowledge about key actors and driving forces that help to initiate and advance open data governance. Using Finland and Sweden as case studies, it sheds light on the roles of key actors in the open data movement, enabling researchers to understand the key operational elements of data-driven governance. It also examines the most salient manifestations of related networking activities, the motivations of stakeholders, and the political and socioeconomic readiness of the public, private and civic sectors to advance such policies. The book will appeal to e-government experts, policymakers and political scientists, as well as academics and students of public administration, public policy, and open data governance…(More)”.

Data Federalism


Article by Bridget A. Fahey: “Private markets for individual data have received significant and sustained attention in recent years. But data markets are not for the private sector alone. In the public sector, the federal government, states, and cities gather data no less intimate and on a scale no less profound. And our governments have realized what corporations have: It is often easier to obtain data about their constituents from one another than to collect it directly. As in the private sector, these exchanges have multiplied the data available to every level of government for a wide range of purposes, complicated data governance, and created a new source of power, leverage, and currency between governments.

This Article provides an account of this vast and rapidly expanding intergovernmental marketplace in individual data. In areas ranging from policing and national security to immigration and public benefits to election management and public health, our governments exchange data both by engaging in individual transactions and by establishing “data pools” to aggregate the information they each have and diffuse access across governments. Understanding the breadth of this distinctly modern practice of data federalism has descriptive, doctrinal, and normative implications.

In contrast to conventional cooperative federalism programs, Congress has largely declined to structure and regulate intergovernmental data exchange. And in Congress’s absence, our governments have developed unorthodox cross-governmental administrative institutions to manage data flows and oversee data pools, and these sprawling, unwieldy institutions are as important as the usual cooperative initiatives to which federalism scholarship typically attends.

Data exchanges can also go wrong, and courts are not prepared to navigate the ways that data is both at risk of being commandeered and ripe for use as coercive leverage. I argue that these constitutional doctrines can and should be adapted to police the exchange of data. I finally place data federalism in normative frame and argue that data is a form of governmental power so unlike the paradigmatic ones our federalism is believed to distribute that it has the potential to unsettle federalism in both function and theory…(More)”.

Direct democracy and equality: a global perspective


Paper by Anna Krämling et al: “Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality….(More)”.

OECD Report on Public Communication: The Global Context and the Way Forward


OECD Report: “…The first OECD Report on Public Communication: The Global Context and the Way Forward examines the public communication structures, mandates and practices of centres of governments and ministries of health from 46 countries, based on the 2020 Understanding Public Communication surveys. It analyses how this important government function contributes to better policies and services, greater citizen trust, and, ultimately, stronger democracies in an increasingly complex information environment. It looks at the role public communication can play in responding to the challenges posed by the spread of mis- and disinformation and in building more resilient media and information ecosystems. It also makes the case for a more strategic use of communication by governments, both to pursue policy objectives and promote more open governments, by providing an extensive mapping of trends, gaps and lessons learned. Finally, it highlights pioneering efforts to move towards the professionalisation of the government communication function and identifies areas for further research to support this transition….(More)”.

An EU Strategy on Standardisation


Press Release: “Today, the Commission is presenting a new Standardisation Strategy outlining our approach to standards within the Single Market as well as globally. The Strategy is accompanied by a proposal for an amendment to the Regulation on standardisation, a report on its implementation, and the 2022 annual Union work programme for European standardisation. This new Strategy aims to strengthen the EU’s global competitiveness, to enable a resilient, green and digital economy and to enshrine democratic values in technology applications.

Standards are the silent foundation of the EU Single Market and global competitiveness. They help manufacturers ensure the interoperability of products and services, reduce costs, improve safety and foster innovation. Standards are an invisible but fundamental part of our daily life: from Wi-Fi frequencies, to connected toys or ski bindings, just to mention a few. Standards give confidence that a product or a service is fit for purpose, is safe and will not harm people or the environment. Compliance with harmonised standards guarantees that products are in line with EU law.

The fast pace of innovation, our green and digital ambitions and the implications of technological standards for our EU democratic values require an increasingly strategic approach to standardisation. The EU’s ambitions towards a climate neutral, resilient and circular economy cannot be delivered without European standards. Having a strong global footprint in standardisation activities and leading the work in key international fora and institutions will be essential for the EU to remain a global standard-setter. By setting global standards, the EU exports its values while providing EU companies with an important first-mover advantage.

Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, Margrethe Vestager, said: “Ensuring that data is protected in artificial intelligence or ensuring that mobile devices are secure from hacking, rely on standards and must be in line with EU democratic values. In the same way, we need standards for the roll-out of important investment projects, like hydrogen or batteries, and to valorise innovation investment by providing EU companies with an important first-mover advantage.”…(More)”.

Sample Truths


Christopher Beha at Harpers’ Magazine: “…How did we ever come to believe that surveys of this kind could tell us something significant about ourselves?

One version of the story begins in the middle of the seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years’ War left the Holy Roman Empire a patchwork of sovereign territories with uncertain borders, contentious relationships, and varied legal conventions. The resulting “weakness and need for self-definition,” the French researcher Alain Desrosières writes, created a demand among local rulers for “systematic cataloging.” This generally took the form of descriptive reports. Over time the proper methods and parameters of these reports became codified, and thus was born the discipline of Statistik: the systematic study of the attributes of a state.

As Germany was being consolidated in the nineteenth century, “certain officials proposed using the formal, detailed framework of descriptive statistics to present comparisons between the states” by way of tables in which “the countries appeared in rows, and different (literary) elements of the description appeared in columns.” In this way, a single feature, such as population or climate, could be easily removed from its context. Statistics went from being a method for creating a holistic description of one place to what Desrosières calls a “cognitive space of equivalence.” Once this change occurred, it was only a matter of time before the descriptions themselves were put into the language of equivalence, which is to say, numbers.

The development of statistical reasoning was central to the “project of legibility,” as the anthropologist James C. Scott calls it, ushered in by the rise of nation-states. Strong centralized governments, Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, required that local communities be made “legible,” their features abstracted to enable management by distant authorities. In some cases, such “state simplifications” occurred at the level of observation. Cadastral maps, for example, ignored local land-use customs, focusing instead on the points relevant to the state: How big was each plot, and who was responsible for paying taxes on it?

But legibility inevitably requires simplifying the underlying facts, often through coercion. The paradigmatic example here is postrevolutionary France. For administrative purposes, the country was divided into dozens of “departments” of roughly equal size whose boundaries were drawn to break up culturally cohesive regions such as Normandy and Provence. Local dialects were effectively banned, and use of the new, highly rational metric system was required. (As many commentators have noted, this work was a kind of domestic trial run for colonialism.)

One thing these centralized states did not need to make legible was their citizens’ opinions—on the state itself, or anything else for that matter. This was just as true of democratic regimes as authoritarian ones. What eventually helped bring about opinion polling was the rise of consumer capitalism, which created the need for market research.

But expanding the opinion poll beyond questions like “Pepsi or Coke?” required working out a few kinks. As the historian Theodore M. Porter notes, pollsters quickly learned that “logically equivalent forms of the same question produce quite different distributions of responses.” This fact might have led them to doubt the whole undertaking. Instead, they “enforced a strict discipline on employees and respondents,” instructing pollsters to “recite each question with exactly the same wording and in a specified order.” Subjects were then made “to choose one of a small number of packaged statements as the best expression of their opinions.”

This approach has become so familiar that it may be worth noting how odd it is to record people’s opinions on complex matters by asking them to choose among prefabricated options. Yet the method has its advantages. What it sacrifices in accuracy it makes up in pseudoscientific precision and quantifiability. Above all, the results are legible: the easiest way to be sure you understand what a person is telling you is to put your own words in his mouth.

Scott notes a kind of Heisenberg principle to state simplifications: “They frequently have the power to transform the facts they take note of.” This is another advantage to multiple-choice polling. If people are given a narrow range of opinions, they may well think that those are the only options available, and in choosing one, they may well accept it as wholly their own. Even those of us who reject the stricture of these options for ourselves are apt to believe that they fairly represent the opinions of others. One doesn’t have to be a postmodern relativist to suspect that what’s going on here is as much the construction of a reality as the depiction of one….(More)”.

Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence


Book by Rolf K. Baltzersen: “In the era of digital communication, collective problem solving is increasingly important. Large groups can now resolve issues together in completely different ways, which has transformed the arts, sciences, business, education, technology, and medicine. Collective intelligence is something we share with animals and is different from machine learning and artificial intelligence. To design and utilize human collective intelligence, we must understand how its problem-solving mechanisms work. From democracy in ancient Athens, through the invention of the printing press, to COVID-19, this book analyzes how humans developed the ability to find solutions together. This wide-ranging, thought-provoking book is a game-changer for those working strategically with collective problem solving within organizations and using a variety of innovative methods. It sheds light on how humans work effectively alongside machines to confront challenges that are more urgent than what humanity has faced before…(More)”.