politics & elections

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on October 31, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ruth Kinna et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Show, Don’t Tell

Curated on October 29, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas Kohnstamm on Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism for Microsoft Stories: “From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper.

Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” achieved breakout success as an interactive data visualization. It asked readers 25 questions such as “How would you address a group of two or more people?” or “How do you pronounce ‘aunt’?” and then heat-mapped their responses to the most similar regional dialect in the U.S. The interactivity and colorful visuals transmuted survey data into a fun, insightful tour through the contours of contemporary AmericanEnglish.

Visualization no longer just complements a written story. It is the story. In our increasingly data-driven world, visualization is becoming an essential tool for journalists from national papers to blogs with a staff of one.

I recently spent two days discussing the state of data journalism with Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. While he stressed the importance of data visualization for efficient communication and audience engagement, Cairo argued that “Above all else, visualizations — when done right — are a vehicle of clarification and truth.”…(More)”

Supporting Collaborative Political Decision Making: An Interactive Policy Process Visualization System

Curated on October 27, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tobias Ruppert et al: “The process of political decision making is often complex and tedious. The policy process consists of multiple steps, most of them are highly iterative. In addition, different stakeholder groups are involved in political decision making and contribute to the process. A series of textual documents accompanies the process. Examples are official documents, discussions, scientific reports, external reviews, newspaper articles, or economic white papers. Experts from the political domain report that this plethora of textual documents often exceeds their ability to keep track of the entire policy process. We present PolicyLine, a visualization system that supports different stakeholder groups in overview-and-detail tasks for large sets of textual documents in the political decision making process. In a longitudinal design study conducted together with domain experts in political decision making, we identified missing analytical functionality on the basis of a problem and domain characterization. In an iterative design phase, we created PolicyLine in close collaboration with the domain experts. Finally, we present the results of three evaluation rounds, and reflect on our collaborative visualization system….(More)”

Could online democracy lead to governance by Trumps and trolls?

Curated on October 24, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Opray in The Guardian: “The first two user tutorials are pretty stock standard but, from there, things escalate dramatically. After mastering How to Sign Up and How to RecoverYour Password, users are apparently ready to advance to lesson number three: How to Create a Democracy.

As it turns out, on DemocracyOS, this is a relatively straightforward matter – not overthrowing the previous regime nor exterminating the last traces of the royal lineage in order to pave the way for a new world order. Instead Argentinian developers Democracia en Red have made it a simple matter of clicking a button to form a group and thrash out the policies voters wish to see enacted.

It is one of a range of digital platforms for direct democracy created by developers and activists to redefine the relationship between citizens and their governments,with the powers that be in Latin American city councils through to European anti-austerity parties making the upgrade to democracy 2.0.

Reshaping how government works is a difficult enough pitch by itself but,beyond that, there’s another challenge facing developers – the online trolls are ready and waiting.

Britain alone this year offered up two examples of what impact trolls could have on online direct democracy – there was the case of “BoatyMcBoatface” famously winning a Natural Environment ResearchCouncil poll to determine the name of a multimillion-pound arctic research vessel, and then there was the more serious case of trolls adding the signatures of thousands of residents of countries such as the Cayman Islands and Vatican City to a formal petition calling for a second Brexit referendum, in order to have the entire document disregarded as an online prank.

In the US presidential election even the politicians are getting in on it,with a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC (political action committee) hiring an army of online commenters to defend the candidate in arguments on social media, while the Republican contender, Donald Trump, is himself engaging in textbook trolling behaviour – whether that’s urging the hacking of Clinton’s emails, revealing the phone number of a Republican rival during the primaries, or unleashing a constant stream of controversial statements as a means of derailing conversations, attracting attention and humiliating his targets.

So what does this mean for digital platforms for direct democracy? By merging the world of the internet with that of politics, will we all end up governed by some fusion of trolls and Trumps promising to build Wally McWallfaces on our borders? And will the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution also usher in a revolution in how democracy functions?…(More)”

Emotional States: Sites and spaces of affective governance

Curated on October 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Eleanor Jupp, Jessica Pykett, and Fiona M. Smith: “What is the political allure, value and currency of emotions within contemporary cultures of governance? What does it mean to govern more humanely? Since the emergence of an emotional turn in human geography over the last decade, the notion that our emotions matter in understanding an array of social practices, spatial formations and aspects of everyday life is no longer seen as controversial. This book brings recent developments in emotional geography into dialogue with social policy concerns and contemporary issues of governance. It sets the intellectual scene for research into the geographical dimensions of the emotionalized states of the citizen, policy maker and public service worker, and highlights new research on the emotional forms of governance which now characterise public life.

An international range of empirical field studies are used to examine issues of regulation, modification, governance and potential manipulation of emotional affects, professional and personal identities and political technologies. Contributors provide analysis of the role of emotional entanglements in policy strategy, policy implementation, service delivery, citizenship and participation as well as considering the emotional nature of the research process itself. It will be of interest to researchers and students within social policy, human geography, politics and related disciplines….(More)”

The Future of Drone Use: Opportunities and Threats from Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Curated on October 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bart Custers: “Given the popularity of drones and the fact that they are easy and cheap to buy, it is generally expected that the ubiquity of drones will significantly increase within the next few years. This raises questions as to what is technologically feasible (now and in the future), what is acceptable from an ethical point of view and what is allowed from a legal point of view. Drone technology is to some extent already available and to some extent still in development. The aim and scope of this book is to map the opportunities and threats associated with the use of drones and to discuss the ethical and legal issues of the use of drones.
This book provides an overview of current drone technologies and applications and of what to expect in the next few years. The question of how to regulate the use of drones in the future is addressed, by considering conditions and contents of future drone legislation and by analyzing issues surrounding privacy and safeguards that can be taken. As such, this book is valuable to scholars in several disciplines, such as law, ethics, sociology, politics and public administration, as well as to practitioners and others who may be confronted with the use of drones in their work, such as professionals working in the military, law enforcement, disaster management and infrastructure management. Individuals and businesses with a specific interest in drone use may also find in the nineteen contributions contained in this volume unexpected perspectives on this new field of research and innovation….(More)”

The power of prediction markets

Curated on October 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mann in Nature: “It was a great way to mix science with gambling, says Anna Dreber. The year was 2012, and an international group of psychologists had just launched the ‘Reproducibility Project’ — an effort to repeat dozens of psychology experiments to see which held up¹. “So we thought it would be fantastic to bet on the outcome,” says Dreber, who leads a team of behavioural economists at the Stockholm School of Economics.

In particular, her team wanted to see whether scientists could make good use of prediction markets: mini Wall Streets in which participants buy and sell ‘shares’ in a future event at a price that reflects their collective wisdom about the chance of the event happening. As a control, Dreber and her colleagues first asked a group of psychologists to estimate the odds of replication for each study on the project’s list. Then the researchers set up a prediction market for each study, and gave the same psychologists US$100 apiece to invest.

When the Reproducibility Project revealed last year that it had been able to replicate fewer than half of the studies examined², Dreber found that her experts hadn’t done much better than chance with their individual predictions. But working collectively through the markets, they had correctly guessed the outcome 71% of the time³.

Experiments such as this are a testament to the power of prediction markets to turn individuals’ guesses into forecasts of sometimes startling accuracy. That uncanny ability ensures that during every US presidential election, voters avidly follow the standings for their favoured candidates on exchanges such as Betfair and the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). But prediction markets are increasingly being used to make forecasts of all kinds, on everything from the outcomes of sporting events to the results of business decisions. Advocates maintain that they allow people to aggregate information without the biases that plague traditional forecasting methods, such as polls or expert analysis….

Prediction markets have also had some high-profile misfires, however — such as giving the odds of a Brexit ‘stay’ vote as 85% on the day of the referendum, 23 June. (UK citizens in fact narrowly voted to leave the European Union.) And prediction markets lagged well behind conventional polls in predicting that Donald Trump would become the 2016 Republican nominee for US president.

Such examples have inspired academics to probe prediction markets. Why do they work as well as they do? What are their limits, and why do their predictions sometimes fail?…(More)”

Knowledge – Is Knowledge Power?

Curated on October 16, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Marian Adolf and Nico Stehr: “As we move through our modern world, the phenomenon we call knowledge is always involved. Whether we talk of know-how, technology, innovation, politics or education, it is the concept of knowledge that ties them all together. But despite its ubiquity as a modern trope we seldom encounter knowledge in itself. How is it produced, where does it reside, and who owns it? Is knowledge always beneficial, will we know all there is to know at some point in the future, and does knowledge really equal power? This book pursues an original approach to this concept that seems to define so many aspects of modern societies. It explores the topic from a distinctly sociological perspective, and traces the many ways that knowledge is woven into the very fabric of modern society….(More)”