politics & elections

The Role of Scholarly Communication in a Democratic Society

Curated on September 5, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introdution to Special Issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication by Yasmeen Shorish: “The pillars of a democratic society (equity, a free press, fair elections, engaged citizens, and the equal application of laws) are directly impacted by the availability, accessibility, and accuracy of information. Additionally, engaged, critically thinking individuals require an understanding of how knowledge is produced and shared, who has the power to make that information available, and how they—as information consumers and producers—are involved in those processes. Proposed and adopted government policies and actions that limit transparency and engagement, the increasing commodification of learning, the framing of education as a measure of return on investment (ROI) in real dollars, and the rapid transition of the research landscape to an increasingly monopolized walled garden have been in motion for some time but come into sharp focus through the lens of scholarly communication.

Scholarly communication is a broad domain that covers how information and knowledge are created and shared, what levels of access to that information are available, and how economic factors influence information communication. This system affects both the production and consumption of information and knowledge.

As such, the question of democratic or equitable processes is internal (Is the scholarly communication domain democratic and equitable?) and external (How does scholarly communication affect a democratic society?). The scholarly communication and research landscapes have never been level playing fields for all interested parties. Funding constraints, prejudices, and politics have all been factors in the amplification and suppression of people’s perspectives. In this special issue, I wanted to investigate how librarians and other information professionals are interrogating those practices and situating their scholarly communication work within the frame of an equitable and democratic society. What are the challenges and the opportunities? Where are we making progress? Where is there disenfranchisement? …(More)”.

Following Fenno: Learning from Senate Candidates in the Age of Social Media and Party Polarization

Curated on September 2, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David C.W. Parker at The Forum: “Nearly 40 years ago, Richard Fenno published Home Style, a seminal volume explaining how members of Congress think about and engage in the process of representation. To accomplish his task, he observed members of Congress as they crafted and communicated their representational styles to the folks back home in their districts. The book, and Fenno’s ensuing research agenda, served as a clarion call to move beyond sophisticated quantitative analyses of roll call voting and elite interviews in Washington, D.C. to comprehend congressional representation. Instead, Fenno argued, political scientists are better served by going home with members of Congress where “their perceptions of their constituencies are shaped, sharpened, or altered” (Fenno 1978, p. xiii). These perceptions of constituencies fundamentally shape what members of Congress do at home and in Washington. If members of Congress are single-minded seekers of reelection, as we often assume, then political scientists must begin with the constituent relationship essential to winning reelection. Go home, Fenno says, to understand Congress.

There are many ways constituency relationships can be understood and uncovered; the preferred method for Fenno is participant observation, which he variously terms as “soaking and poking” or “just hanging around.” Although it sounds easy enough to sit and watch, good participant observation requires many considerations (as Fenno details in a thorough appendix to Home Style). In this appendix, and in another series of essays, Fenno grapples forthrightly with the tough choices researchers must consider when watching and learning from politicians.

In this essay, I respond to Fenno’s thought-provoking methodological treatise in Home Style and the ensuing collection of musings he published as Watching Politicians: Essays on Participant Observation. I do so for three reasons: First, I wish to reinforce Fenno’s call to action. As the study of political science has matured, it has moved away from engaging with politicians in the field across the various sub-fields, favoring statistical analyses. “Everyone cites Fenno, but no one does Fenno,” I recently opined, echoing another scholar commenting on Fenno’s work (Fenno 2013, p. 2; Parker 2015, p. 246). Unfortunately, that sentiment is supported by data (Grimmer 2013, pp. 13–19; Curry 2017). Although quantitative and formal analyses have led to important insights into the study of political behavior and institutions, politics is as important to our discipline as science. And in politics, the motives and concerns of people are important to witness, not just because they add complexity and richness to our stories, but because they aid in theory generation.¹ Fenno’s study was exploratory, but is full of key theoretical insights relevant to explaining how members of Congress understand their constituencies and the ensuing political choices they make.

Second, to “do” participant observation requires understanding the choices the methodology imposes. This necessitates that those who practice this method of discovery document and share their experiences (Lin 2000). The more the prospective participant observer can understand the size of the choice set she faces and the potential consequences at each decision point in advance, the better her odds of avoiding unanticipated consequences with both immediate and long-term research ramifications. I hope that adding my cumulative experiences to this ongoing methodological conversation will assist in minimizing both unexpected and undesirable consequences for those who follow into the field. Fenno is open about his own choices, and the difficult decisions he faced as a participant observer. Encouraging scholars to engage in participant observation is only half the battle. The other half is to encourage interested scholars to think about those same choices and methodological considerations, while acknowledging that context precludes a one-size fits all approach. Fenno’s choices may not be your choices – and that might be just fine depending upon your circumstances. Fenno would wholeheartedly agree.

Finally, Congress and American politics have changed considerably from when Fenno embarked on his research in Home Style. At the end of his introduction, Fenno writes that “this book is about the early to mid-1970s only. These years were characterized by the steady decline of strong national party attachments and strong local party organizations. … Had these conditions been different, House members might have behaved differently in their constituencies” (xv). Developments since Fenno put down his pen include political parties polarizing to an almost unprecedented degree, partisan attachments strengthening among voters, and technology emerging to change fundamentally how politicians engage with constituents. In light of this evolution of political culture in Washington and at home, it is worth considering the consequences for the participant-observation research approach. Many have asked me if it is still possible to do such work in the current political environment, and if so, what are the challenges facing political scientists going into the field? This essay provides some answers.

I proceed as follows: First, I briefly discuss my own foray into the world of participant observation, which occurred during the 2012 Senate race in Montana. Second, I consider two important methodological considerations raised by Fenno: access and participation as an observer. Third, I relate these two issues to a final consideration: the development of social media and the consequences of this for the participant observation enterprise. Finally, I show the perils of social science divorced from context, as demonstrated by the recent Stanford-Dartmouth mailer scandal. I conclude with not just a plea for us to pick up where Fenno has left off, but by suggesting that more thinking like a participant observer would benefit the discipline as whole by reminding us of our ethical obligations as researchers to each other, and to the political community that we study…(More)”.

Long Term Info-structure

Curated on September 1, 2018October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Long Now Foundation Seminar by Juan Benet: “We live in a spectacular time,”…”We’re a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as a whole. We are also faced with accumulating dangers — the capabilities to end the whole humanity experiment are growing and are ever more accessible. In light of the promethean fire that is computing, we must prevent bad outcomes and lock in good ones to build robust foundations for our knowledge, and a safe future. There is much we can do in the short-term to secure the long-term.”

“I come from the front lines of computing platform design to share a number of new super-powers at our disposal, some old challenges that are now soluble, and some new open problems. In this next decade, we’ll need to leverage peer-to-peer networks, crypto-economics, blockchains, Open Source, Open Services, decentralization, incentive-structure engineering, and so much more to ensure short-term safety and the long-term flourishing of humanity.”

Juan Benet is the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)—a new protocol which uses content-addressing to make the web faster, safer, and more open—and the creator of Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-incentivized storage market….(More + Video)”

How to Prevent Winner-Takes-All Democracy

Curated on August 28, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaushik Basu at Project Syndicate: “Democracy is in crisis. Fake news – and fake allegations of fake news – now plagues civil discourse, and political parties have proved increasingly willing to use xenophobia and other malign strategies to win elections. At the same time, revisionist powers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been stepping up their efforts to interfere in elections across the West. Rarely has the United States witnessed such brazen attacks on its political system; and rarely has the world seen such lows during peacetime….

How can all of this be happening in democracies, and what can be done about it?

On the first question, one hypothesis is that new digital technologies are changing the structural incentives for corporations, political parties, and other major institutions. Consider the case of corporations. The wealth of proprietary data on consumer preferences and behavior is producing such massive returns to scale that a few giants are monopolizing markets. In other words, markets are increasingly geared toward a winner-take-all game: multiple corporations can compete, but to the victor go the spoils.1

Electoral democracy is drifting in the same direction. The benefits of winning an election have become so large that political parties will stoop to new lows to clinch a victory. And, as with corporations, they can do so with the help of data on electoral preferences and behavior, and with new strategies to target key constituencies.

This poses a dilemma for well-meaning democratic parties and politicians. If a “bad” party is willing to foment hate and racism to bolster its chances of winning, what is a “good” party to do? If it sticks to its principles, it could end up ceding victory to the “bad” party, which will do even more harm once it is in office. A “good” party may thus try to forestall that outcome by taking a step down the moral ladder, precipitating a race to the bottom. This is the problem with any winner-takes-all game. When second place confers no benefits, the cost of showing unilateral restraint can grow intolerably high.

But this problem is not as hopeless as it appears. In light of today’s crisis of democracy, we would do well to revisit Václav Havel’s seminal 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” First published as samizdat that was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, the essay makes a simple but compelling argument. Dictatorships and other seemingly omnipotent forms of authoritarianism may look like large, top-down structures, but in the final analysis, they are merely the outcome of ordinary individuals’ beliefs and choices. Havel did not have the tools of modern economic theory to demonstrate his argument formally. In my new book The Republic of Beliefs, I show that the essence of his argument can be given formal structure using elementary game theory. This, in turn, shows that ordinary individuals have moral options that may be unavailable to the big institutional players….(More)”.

As democracy goes digital, those offline are being pushed out of politics

Curated on August 16, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Renata Avila at the Web Foundation: “Free and fair elections require an informed, active body of citizens debating the electoral issues of the day and scrutinising the positions of candidates. Participation at each and every stage of an electoral campaign — not just on the day of the vote — is necessary for a healthy democracy.

Those online have access to an increasingly sophisticated set of tools to do just this: to learn about candidates, to participate in political discussions, to shape debate and raise issues that matter to them. Or even, run for office themselves.

What does this mean for those citizens who don’t have access to the internet? Do online debates capture their needs, concerns and interests? Are the priorities of those not connected represented on the political stage?

The Mexican election: a story of digital inequality

María de Jesús “Marichuy” Patricio Martinez was selected as an independent candidate in Mexico’s recent July 1 elections general election — the first indigenous woman to run for president. But digital barriers doomed her candidacy.

Independent presidential candidates in Mexico are required to collect 866,000 signatures using a mandatory mobile app that only runs on relatively new smartphones. This means that to collect the required endorsements, a candidate and their supporters all need a modern smartphone — which typically costs around three times the minimum monthly salary — plus electricity and mobile data. These are resources many people in indigenous communities simply don’t have. While the electoral authorities exempted some municipalities from this process, it did not cover the mostly poor and indigenous areas that Marichuy wanted to represent. She was unable to gather the signatures needed….(More)”.

The Government-Citizen Disconnect

Curated on August 6, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Suzanne Mettler: “Americans’ relationship to the federal government is paradoxical. Polls show that public opinion regarding the government has plummeted to all-time lows, with only one in five saying they trust the government or believe that it operates in their interest. Yet, at the same time, more Americans than ever benefit from some form of government social provision. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this growing gulf between people’s perceptions of government and the actual role it plays in their lives the “government-citizen disconnect.” In The Government-Citizen Disconnect, she explores the rise of this phenomenon and its implications for policymaking and politics.

Drawing from original survey data which probed Americans’ experiences of 21 federal social policies — such as food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, and the home mortgage interest deduction — Mettler shows that 96 percent of adults have received benefits from at least one of them, and that the average person has utilized five. Overall usage rates transcend social, economic, and political divisions, and most Americans report positive experiences of their policy experiences. However, the fact that they have benefited from these policies bears little positive effect on people’s attitudes towards government. Mettler finds that shared identities and group affiliations are more powerful and consistent influences. In particular, those who oppose welfare tend to extrapolate their unfavorable views of it to government in general. Deep antipathy toward the government has emerged as a conservative movement waged a war on social welfare policies for over forty years, even as economic inequality and benefit use increased.

Mettler finds that patterns of political participation exacerbate the government-citizen disconnect, as those holding positive views of federal programs and supporting expanded benefits have lower rates of involvement than those holding more hostile views of the government. As a result, the loudest political voice belongs to those who have benefited from policies but who give government little credit for their economic well-being, seeing their success more as a matter of their own deservingness. This contributes to the election of politicians who advocate cutting federal social programs. According to Mettler, the government-citizen disconnect frays the bonds of representative government and democracy.

The Government-Citizen Disconnect illuminates a paradox that increasingly shapes American politics. Mettler’s examination of hostility toward government at a time when most Americans will at some point rely on the social benefits it provides helps us better understand the roots of today’s fractious political climate….(More)”

The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice

Curated on August 5, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Elizabeth F. Cohen: “Waiting periods and deadlines are so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet they form a critical part of any democratic architecture. When a precise moment or amount of time is given political importance, we ought to understand why this is so. The Political Value of Time explores the idea of time within democratic theory and practice. Elizabeth F. Cohen demonstrates how political procedures use quantities of time to confer and deny citizenship rights. Using specific dates and deadlines, states carve boundaries around a citizenry. As time is assigned a form of political value it comes to be used to transact over rights. Cohen concludes with a normative analysis of the ways in which the devaluation of some people’s political time constitutes a widely overlooked form of injustice. This book shows readers how and why they need to think about time if they want to understand politics….(More)“.

What’s Wrong with Public Policy Education

Curated on August 2, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Francis Fukuyama at the American Interest: “Most programs train students to become capable policy analysts, but with no understanding of how to implement those policies in the real world…Public policy education is ripe for an overhaul…

Public policy education in most American universities today reflects a broader problem in the social sciences, which is the dominance of economics. Most programs center on teaching students a battery of quantitative methods that are useful in policy analysis: applied econometrics, cost-benefit analysis, decision analysis, and, most recently, use of randomized experiments for program evaluation. Many schools build their curricula around these methods rather than the substantive areas of policy such as health, education, defense, criminal justice, or foreign policy. Students come out of these programs qualified to be policy analysts: They know how to gather data, analyze it rigorously, and evaluate the effectiveness of different public policy interventions. Historically, this approach started with the Rand Graduate School in the 1970s (which has subsequently undergone a major re-thinking of its approach).

There is no question that these skills are valuable and should be part of a public policy education. The world has undergone a revolution in recent decades in terms of the role of evidence-based policy analysis, where policymakers can rely not just on anecdotes and seat-of-the-pants assessments, but statistically valid inferences that intervention X is likely to result in outcome Y, or that the millions of dollars spent on policy Z has actually had no measurable impact. Evidence-based policymaking is particularly necessary in the age of Donald Trump, amid the broad denigration of inconvenient facts that do not suit politicians’ prior preferences.

But being skilled in policy analysis is woefully inadequate to bring about policy change in the real world. Policy analysis will tell you what the optimal policy should be, but it does not tell you how to achieve that outcome.

The world is littered with optimal policies that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted. Take for example a carbon tax, which a wide range of economists and policy analysts will tell you is the most efficient way to abate carbon emissions, reduce fossil fuel dependence, and achieve a host of other desired objectives. A carbon tax has been a nonstarter for years due to the protestations of a range of interest groups, from oil and chemical companies to truckers and cabbies and ordinary drivers who do not want to pay more for the gas they use to commute to work, or as inputs to their industrial processes. Implementing a carbon tax would require a complex strategy bringing together a coalition of groups that are willing to support it, figuring out how to neutralize the die-hard opponents, and convincing those on the fence that the policy would be a good, or at least a tolerable, thing. How to organize such a coalition, how to communicate a winning message, and how to manage the politics on a state and federal level would all be part of a necessary implementation strategy.

It is entirely possible that an analysis of the implementation strategy, rather than analysis of the underlying policy, will tell you that the goal is unachievable absent an external shock, which might then mean changing the scope of the policy, rethinking its objectives, or even deciding that you are pursuing the wrong objective.

Public policy education that sought to produce change-makers rather than policy analysts would therefore have to be different. It would continue to teach policy analysis, but the latter would be a small component embedded in a broader set of skills.

The first set of skills would involve problem definition. A change-maker needs to query stakeholders about what they see as the policy problem, understand the local history, culture, and political system, and define a problem that is sufficiently narrow in scope that it can plausibly be solved.

At times reformers start with a favored solution without defining the right problem. A student I know spent a summer working at an NGO in India advocating use of electric cars in the interest of carbon abatement. It turns out, however, that India’s reliance on coal for marginal electricity generation means that more carbon would be put in the air if the country were to switch to electric vehicles, not less, so the group was actually contributing to the problem they were trying to solve….

The second set of skills concerns solutions development. This is where traditional policy analysis comes in: It is important to generate data, come up with a theory of change, and posit plausible options by which reformers can solve the problem they have set for themselves. This is where some ideas from product design, like rapid prototyping and testing, may be relevant.

The third and perhaps most important set of skills has to do with implementation. This begins necessarily with stakeholder analysis: that is, mapping of actors who are concerned with the particular policy problem, either as supporters of a solution, or opponents who want to maintain the status quo. From an analysis of the power and interests of the different stakeholders, one can begin to build coalitions of proponents, and think about strategies for expanding the coalition and neutralizing those who are opposed. A reformer needs to think about where resources can be obtained, and, very critically, how to communicate one’s goals to the stakeholder audiences involved. Finally comes testing and evaluation—not in the expectation that there will be a continuous and rapid iterative process by which solutions are tried, evaluated, and modified. Randomized experiments have become the gold standard for program evaluation in recent years, but their cost and length of time to completion are often the enemies of rapid iteration and experimentation….(More) (see also http://canvas.govlabacademy.org/).

Our misguided love affair with techno-politics

Curated on August 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “What might happen if technology, which smothers us with its bounty as consumers, made the same inroads into politics? Might data-driven recommendations suggest “policies we may like” just as Amazon recommends books? Would we swipe right to pick candidates in elections or answers in referendums? Could businesses expand into every cranny of political and social life, replete with ® and ™ at each turn? What would this mean for political discourse and individual freedom?

This dystopian yet all-too-imaginable world has been conjured up by Giuseppe Porcaro in his novel “Disco Sour”. The story takes place in the near future, after a terrible war and breakdown of nations, when the (fictional) illegitimate son of Roman Polanski creates an app called Plebiscitum that works like Tinder for politics.

Mr Porcaro—who comes armed with a doctorate in political geography—uses the plot to consider questions of politics in the networked age. The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked him to reply to five questions in around 100 words each. An excerpt from the book appears thereafter.

* * *

The Economist: In your novel, an entrepreneur attempts to replace elections with an app that asks people to vote on individual policies. Is that science fiction or prediction? And were you influenced by Italy’s Five Star Movement?

Giuseppe Porcaro: The idea of imagining a Tinder-style app replacing elections came up because I see connections between the evolution of dating habits and 21st-century politics. A new sort of “tinderpolitics” kicking in when instant gratification substitutes substantial participation. Think about tweet trolling, for example.

Italy’s Five Star Movement was certainly another inspiration as it is has been a pioneer in using an online platform to successfully create a sort of new political mass movement. Another one was an Australian political party called Flux. They aim to replace the world’s elected legislatures with a new system known as issue-based direct democracy.

The Economist: Is it too cynical to suggest that a more direct relationship between citizens and policymaking would lead to a more reactionary political landscape? Or does the ideal of liberal democracy depend on an ideal citizenry that simply doesn’t exist?

Mr Porcaro: It would be cynical to put the blame on citizens for getting too close to influence decision-making. That would go against the very essence of the “liberal democracy ideal”. However, I am critical towards the pervasive idea that technology can provide quick fixes to bridge the gap between citizens and the government. By applying computational thinking to democracy, an extreme individualisation and instant participation, we forget democracy is not simply the result of an election or the mathematical sum of individual votes. Citizens risk entering a vicious circle where reactionary politics are easier to go through.

The Economist: Modern representative democracy was in some ways a response to the industrial revolution. If AI and automation radically alter the world we live in, will we have to update the way democracy works too—and if so, how?

Mr Porcaro: Democracy has already morphed several times. 19th century’s liberal democracy was shaken by universal suffrage, and adapted to the Fordist mode of production with the mass party. May 1968 challenged that model. Today, the massive availability of data and the increasing power of decision-making algorithms will change both political institutions.

The policy “production” process might be utterly redesigned. Data collected by devices we use on a daily basis (such as vehicles, domestic appliances and wearable sensors) will provide evidence about the drivers of personal voting choices, or the accountability of government decisions. …(More)