For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.

The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.

One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.

China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.

When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.

“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.

The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.

What else could lotteries do?

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.

Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.

More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.

The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.

The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”

Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., Daniel Boden: “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government.Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)”

The Architecture of Innovation

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Hollie Russon Gilman, and Jessica Gover at the Beeck Center: “Technology is transforming how we live our lives—from new solutions in health, education, defense, and beyond. The private sector provides user-centric, digital, customer-oriented solutions—in real time. We should expect the same from government. The government needs to evolve to keep up with these rapid changes in technology and data use. We need a government that is nimble and adaptive to change. More importantly, we need to create a culture within government that allows for a culture of innovation that leads to outcomes. At the same time, innovation—new technologies, data, and partnerships—have also triggered a need for rapid change in governance and public policy. With the election only a month away, the next president has the opportunity to pivot—to adopt a governance structure that proactively drives change and delivers results.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of our latest publication, “The Architecture of Innovation: Institutionalizing Innovation in Federal Policymaking,” produced in partnership with The Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The report provides recommendations for how the next administration can pilot, iterate, and scale innovative approaches to more effectively serve the needs of the American people. “The Architecture of Innovation” offers recommendations for how government can structurally organize for change at the highest levels to not only adapt and meet the challenges of today, but also anticipate and meet the needs of tomorrow.

We are launching the report today at our Fall convening, Data for Social Good: Innovation in the Next Administration. The report launch will be bookended by a fireside chat retrospective on innovation in the Obama Administration and a panel discussing innovation in past, present, and future administrations.

As presidential transition teams on both sides are building out their plans for the next administration, they have an unprecedented opportunity to maximize and grow the strides made by the Obama administration to create impactful change. For federal policymaking to create lasting outcomes, we believe that creating a holistic culture of innovation in government is the key to solving some of our biggest civic challenges. We hope that our report and today’s convening will provide a helpful roadmap as to best organization for innovation in government for 2016 and beyond…(More)”

Lessons Learned Implementing Bold Ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Emig at Bloomberg Philanthropies: “Since 2013, hundreds of cities around the world have competed in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge by proposing bold new ideas that solve urban challenges, improve city life – and have the potential to spread….

Today, we released a report that offers important advice from the winning cities to municipalities looking to bring bold ideas to life. In summary, the lessons are:

Playing Politics:

  • The bigger and bolder the idea, the more political support is needed to make it happen. However, city administrations change, re-election campaigns can shift priorities, and political atmospherics in general are challenging. This makes it all the more important for innovators to understand the political space they are working in and try to be inclusive in forming alliances and relationships that can support their case.

Support Can Come from Anywhere: 

  • Political approval is great, but so are resources from outside government. Cities should capitalize on the energy surrounding innovative projects and bring on board a diversity of organizations and people who can offer advice, make introductions, provide funding, and advocate on behalf of the city.

Managing Internal Affairs:

  • Innovation leaders know they have to manage up – but they also must skillfully engage their peers in order to succeed. In particular, middle managers are crucial to successfully implementing bold new ideas, so their buy-in must be earned. Taking the time to create enthusiasm for a new strategy among middle managers and helping them understand how a successful rollout is not just good for end-users, but good for them and their career as well, will pay dividends in the long run.

The Right Team for the Job:

  • A team that excels in producing a framework for a bold new idea may not be the perfect team to actually implement it. Understanding the team’s strengths and weaknesses and how individuals fit together as a whole is essential to bringing an idea to life. Passionate and visionary leaders also need comrades with common sense skills who can simply get things done.

Keeping Eyes on the Prize:

  • It’s critical to create a compelling narrative that sustains the attention and enthusiasm of government workers and the public. The winning teams constantly reminded their colleagues that the day-to-day tasks and deliverables were all in pursuit of a higher and larger goal; nothing less than changing the world, if only a little at a time. It’s that kind of powerful and ambitious narrative that builds passion and brings out the best in people….(More)”

Behavioral Economics and Fed Policymaking

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Essay by Mark A. Calabria in Cato Journal: “Behavioral economics has continued to gain momentum in challenging the standard rational actor model in economics. With a few exceptions, the emphasis has been on the cognitive failure of individuals outside of government. Niclas Berggren (2013: 200) estimates that 95.5 percent of behavioral economics articles in the leading economics journals do not contain an analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers. In this article, I offer a preliminary analysis of potential cognitive failures in the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy. Proposals to “debias” monetary policymaking are offered, along with a discussion of how the Fed’s existing institutional structure ameliorates or exasperates potential biases…(More)”

Civic political engagement and social change in the new digital age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Koc-Michalska, K. and Vedel, T. in new media & society: “Over recent decades, research on the Internet and political participation has substantially developed, from speculative studies on possible impacts in social and economic life to detailed analyses of organizational usage. In the field of politics, focus is increasingly shifting from understanding organizational, or supply side, to the usage and dimension of citizen engagement. Citizens have various ways to engage in civic political life, with many new forms of engagement facilitated by digital technologies. The question is to what extent these forms of engagement have any impact on society and the way society is governed. More particularly, what forms of engagement have impact, what type of impact is evidenced, is that impact positive or negative, in what ways, and for whom? Phrasing the question in this way recognizes that citizen engagement can have a range of differing impacts, in multifaceted forms, and these impacts may not always be positive for broader society.

Civic political engagement is at the center of political science research, especially concentrating on voting behavior and what are described as traditional forms of political participation: demonstrating, contacting elected representatives, or joining political organizations. While these remain core to democratic society, debates are emerging surrounding new forms of participation offered by new digital wave era technologies. In particular, should we recognize actions facilitated by the participatory opportunities offered by new communication platforms (such as social networks and microblogs) as forms of political participation? The US election campaigns of 2008 and 2012, and Barack Obama’s engagement with interactive communication and empowerment of citizens through his campaigning strategy, has led to new thinking around how political communication can be performed. Obama’s campaign happened against a backdrop of activism among those Karpf (2012) describes as “Internet-mediated issue generalists”: citizens who populate forums, contribute to blogs, and initiate petitions. Data suggest that the mechanisms for facilitating political participation are evolving alongside technological innovations….(More)”

Artificial intelligence is hard to see

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Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker on “Why we urgently need to measure AI’s societal impacts“: “How will artificial intelligence systems change the way we live? This is a tough question: on one hand, AI tools are producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and leukemia detection. There is extraordinary potential to do much more in the future. On the other hand, AI systems are already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives.

AI and decision-support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions, from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see. For example, Facebook’s automated content editing system recently censored the Pulitzer-prize winning image of a nine-year old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. The girl is naked; to an image processing algorithm, this might appear as a simple violation of the policy against child nudity. But to human eyes, Nick Ut’s photograph, “The Terror of War”, means much more: it is an iconic portrait of the indiscriminate horror of conflict, and it has an assured place in the history of photography and international politics. The removal of the image caused an international outcry before Facebook backed down and restored the image. “What they do by removing such images, no matter what good intentions, is to redact our shared history,” said the Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg.

It’s easy to forget that these high-profile instances are actually the easy cases. As Tarleton Gillespie has observed, hundreds of content reviews are occurring with Facebook images thousand of times per day, and rarely is there a Pulitzer prize to help determine lasting significance. Some of these reviews include human teams, and some do not. In this case, there is alsoconsiderable ambiguity about where the automated process ended and the human review began: which is part of the problem. And Facebook is just one player in complex ecology of algorithmically-supplemented determinations with little external monitoring to see how decisions are made or what the effects might be.

The ‘Terror of War’ case, then, is the tip of the iceberg: a rare visible instance that points to a much larger mass of unseen automated and semi-automated decisions. The concern is that most of these ‘weak AI’ systems are making decisions that don’t garner such attention. They are embedded at the back-end of systems, working at the seams of multiple data sets, with no consumer-facing interface. Their operations are mainly unknown, unseen, and with impacts that take enormous effort to detect.

Sometimes AI techniques get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong. Only rarely will those errors be seen by the public: like the Vietnam war photograph, or when a AI ‘beauty contest’ held this month was called out for being racist for selecting white women as the winners. We can dismiss this latter case as a problem of training data — they simply need a more diverse selection of faces to train their algorithm with, and now that 600,000 people have sent in their selfies, they certainly have better means to do so. But while a beauty contest might seem like a bad joke, or just a really good trick to get people to give up their photos to build a large training data set, it points to a much bigger set of problems. AI and decision-support systems are reaching into everyday life: determining who will be on a predictive policing‘heat list’, who will be hired or promoted, which students will be recruited to universities, or seeking to predict at birth who will become a criminal by the age of 18. So the stakes are high…(More)”

Open data, transparency and accountability

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Topic guide by Liz Carolan: “…introduces evidence and lessons learned about open data, transparency and accountability in the international development context. It discusses the definitions, theories, challenges and debates presented by the relationship between these concepts, summarises the current state of open data implementation in international development, and highlights lessons and resources for designing and implementing open data programmes.

Open data involves the release of data so that anyone can access, use and share it. The Open DataCharter (2015) describes six principles that aim to make data easier to find, use and combine:

  • open by default
  • timely and comprehensive
  • accessible and usable
  • comparable and interoperable
  • for improved governance and citizen engagement
  • for inclusive development and innovation

One of the main objectives of making data open is to promote transparency.

Transparency is a characteristic of government, companies, organisations and individuals that are open in the clear disclosure of information, rules, plans, processes and actions. Trans­parency of information is a crucial part of this. Within a development context, transparency and accountability initiatives have emerged over the last decade as a way to address developmental failures and democratic deficits.

There is a strong intersection between open data and transparency as concepts, yet as fields of study and practice, they have remained somewhat separate. This guide draws extensively on analysis and evidence from both sets of literature, beginning by outlining the main concepts and the theories behind the relationships between them.

Data release and transparency are parts of the chain of events leading to accountability.  For open data and transparency initiatives to lead to accountability, the required conditions include:

  • getting the right data published, which requires an understanding of the politics of data publication
  • enabling actors to find, process and use information, and to act on any outputs, which requires an accountability ecosystem that includes equipped and empowered intermediaries
  • enabling institutional or social forms of enforceability or citizens’ ability to choose better services,which requires infrastructure that can impose sanctions, or sufficient choice or official support for citizens

Programmes intended to increase access to information can be impacted by and can affect inequality. They can also pose risks to privacy and may enable the misuse of data for the exploitation of individuals and markets.

Despite a range of international open data initiatives and pressures, developing countries are lagging behind in the implementation of reforms at government level, in the overall availability of data, and in the use of open data for transparency and accountability. What is more, there are signs that ‘open-washing’ –superficial efforts to publish data without full integration with transparency commitments – may be obscuring backsliding in other aspects of accountability.

The topic guide pulls together lessons and guidance from open data, transparency and accountability work,including an outline of technical and non-technical aspects of implementing a government open data initiative. It also lists further resources, tools and guidance….(More)”

Can Direct Democracy Be Revived Through New Voting Apps?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adele Peters at FastCo-Exist: “…a new app and proposed political party called MiVote—aims to rethink how citizens participate in governance. Instead of voting only in elections, people using the app can share their views on every issue the government considers. The idea is that parliamentary representatives of the “MiVote party” would commit to support legislation only when it’s in line with the will of the app’s members—regardless of the representative’s own opinion….

Like Democracy Earth, a nonprofit that started in Argentina, MiVote uses the blockchain to make digital voting and identity fully secure. Democracy Earth also plans to use a similar model of representation, running candidates who promise to adhere to the results of online votes rather than a particular ideology.

But MiVote takes a somewhat different approach to gathering opinions. The app will give users a notification when a new issue is addressed in the Australian parliament. Then, voters get access to a digital “information packet,” compiled by independent researchers, that lets them dive into four different approaches.

“We don’t talk about the bill or the legislation at all,” says Jacoby. “If you put it into a business context, the bill or the legislation is the contract. In no business would you write the contract before you know what the deal looks like. If we’re looking for genuine democracy, the bill has to be determined by the people . . . Once we know where the people want to go, then we focus on making sure the bill gets us there.”

If the parliament is going to vote about immigration, for example, you might get details about a humanitarian approach, a border security approach, a financially pragmatic approach, and an approach that focuses on international relations. For each frame of reference, the app lets you dive into as much information as you need to decide. If you don’t read anything, it won’t let you cast a vote.

“We’re much more interested in a solutions-oriented approach rather than an ideological approach,” he says. “Ideology basically says I have the answer for you before you’ve even asked the question. There is no ideology, no worldview, that has the solution to everything that ails us.”

Representatives of this hypothetical new party won’t have to worry about staying on message, because there is no message; the only goal is to vote after the people speak. That might free politicians to focus on solutions rather than their image…(More)”

Civil Solutions

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Brian R. Calfano on “addressing social and political ills through the solutions journalism approach” in The Blue Review: “…To effectively work in the public interest as a member of the media covering politics in a national election year, I argue that stories evaluating and proposing solutions to our major societal problems must be an integral part of the media menu served to the public. Solutions are certainly not the only thing we need to cover in the media, but greater focus on problem solving is needed than what is provided at present.

A “solutions journalism” approach to covering political stories holds promise because it focuses attention on the evaluation of effectiveness in dealing with some of the most pressing problems we face as a society. Along the way, the solutions-based focus may even tamp down the incivility that plagues our politics.The author is a member of the Solutions Journalism Network.

So, how do we get started with a solutions journalism approach?

The Solutions Journalism Network has already done much of the legwork in setting up the scaffolding for journalists looking to sink their teeth into the consideration of “what works” in solving a social problem.

In their Solutions Journalism Toolkit (2015, pdf), the Solutions Journalism Network suggests focusing on the following questions when determining a topic to cover (pgs. 6-7):

  • Does the story explain the causes of social problem?
  • Does the story present an associated response to that problem?
  • Does the story get into the problem solving and how to details of implementation?
  • Does the story present evidence of results linked to the response?
  • Does the story explain limitations of the response?
  • Does the story convey an insight or teachable lesson?

…Most interesting about this approach is that it calls on my experience as a social science researcher. I’m tempted to go into full researcher mode and critique the all-too-frequent use of basic cross-tabulations and observational survey data as means for showing cause and effect. Generally speaking, audiences may not care about research methods, but my job is to make the story compelling enough — including the bits about methodology — to make them interested.

Importantly, I’m not alone in this effort. Sources like the website evidencebasedprograms.org feature a litany of randomized controlled trials that allow determination of direct impact from a policy intervention on issues like the “cliff effect.”

My work is made more difficult if the organizations I interview for the solutions journalism stories on the “cliff effect” are not using the randomized trial approach. At the least, I’ll have to point out to the viewer that the solutions an organization proposes are not being evaluated with the strongest possible assessment tools. This is not so much a problem, however, as an opportunity, as the organization might benefit from the critique of its own evaluation practices to find what works “better than average.”…(More)”.