From “Economic Man” to Behavioral Economics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Justin Fox at the Harvard Business Review: “When we make decisions, we make mistakes. We all know this from personal experience, of course. But just in case we didn’t, a seemingly unending stream of experimental evidence in recent years has documented the human penchant for error. This line of research—dubbed heuristics and biases, although you may be more familiar with its offshoot, behavioral economics—has become the dominant academic approach to understanding decisions. Its practitioners have had a major influence on business, government, and financial markets. Their books—Predictably Irrational; Thinking, Fast and Slow; and Nudge, to name three of the most important—have suffused popular culture.

So far, so good. This research has been enormously informative and valuable. Our world, and our understanding of decision making, would be much poorer without it.

It is not, however, the only useful way to think about making decisions. Even if you restrict your view to the academic discussion, there are three distinct schools of thought. Although heuristics and biases is currently dominant, for the past half century it has interacted with and sometimes battled with the other two, one of which has a formal name—decision analysis—and the other of which can perhaps best be characterized as demonstrating that we humans aren’t as dumb as we look.

Adherents of the three schools have engaged in fierce debates, and although things have settled down lately, major differences persist. This isn’t like David Lodge’s aphorism about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small. Decision making is important, and decision scholars have had real influence.

This article briefly tells the story of where the different streams arose and how they have interacted, beginning with the explosion of interest in the field during and after World War II (for a longer view, see “A Brief History of Decision Making,” by Leigh Buchanan and Andrew O’Connell, HBR, January 2006). The goal is to make you a more informed consumer of decision advice—which just might make you a better decision maker….(More)”

Secure app could enable people to vote from their smartphone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There has been a lot of talk about the outdated nature of voting infrastructures. Citizens can now shop, bank and date online, but are still required to visit a polling station in person to participate in democratic votes. Harvard start-up Voatz hopes to change that with their secure, global mobile voting and campaigning platform.

Voatz could enable members of the public to cast their vote, participate in opinion polls and make campaign donations from their smartphone during elections in the not too distant future. Voters would be required to undergo comprehensive identity verification and use a biometric-enabled smartphone in order to participate in the remote, electronic voting. Voatz hope the technology can help to make voting more simple and accessible using familiar technology…(More)”

Inspiring and Informing Citizens Online: A Media Richness Analysis of Varied Civic Education Modalities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brinker, David and Gastil, John and Richards, Robert C. in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Forthcoming): “Public deliberation on the Internet is a promising but unproven practice. Online deliberation can engage large numbers of citizens at relatively low cost, but it is unclear whether such programs have substantial civic impact. One factor in determining their effectiveness may be the communicative features of the online setting in which they occur. Within a Media Richness Theory framework, we conducted a quasi-experiment to assess the civic outcomes of interventions executed online by non-profit organizations prior to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The results assess the impact of these interventions on issue knowledge and civic attitudes. Comparisons of the interventions illustrate the importance of considering media richness online, and our discussion considers the theoretical and practical implications of these findings….(More)”

We, the government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Davied van Berlo has published a new book about the role of government in the network society. It has not yet been published in English  but can be downloaded in Dutch at boek.ambtenaar20.nl.

The Civil Servant 2.0 book is available Uk_flag_300.png in English.”

About “We, the government”:

“The network society. Everybody’s talking about it, but what does it really mean? What effect does the networking age in society have on government? The public good is no longer just a government issue but a cocreation between government and society. However, what will this collaboration look like and will we be able to execute political goals in such a networked society?

In his third book Davied van Berlo, writer of Civil Servant 2.0 and Civil Servant 2.0 beta, explores the role of government in the network society. “We, the government” gives a new perspective on the working of government and offers civil servants and public officials a hand in shaping their new role in society.”…

Davied has used parts of his new book in the presentation he gave to the Dutch chapter of the Internet Society, see the video. Below the video an english version of the Prezi is available….(More)”

Open-Data Project Adds Transparency to African Elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jessica Weiss at the International Center for Journalists: “An innovative tool developed to help people register to vote in Kenya is proving to be a valuable asset to voters across the African continent.

GotToVote was created in 2012 by two software developers under the guidance of ICFJ’s Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein for use during Kenya’s general elections. In just 24 hours, the developers took voter registration information in a government PDF and turned it into a simple website with usable data that helped people locate the nearest voting center where they could register for elections. Kenyan media drove a large audience to the site, which resulted in a major boost in voter registrations.

Since then, GotToVote has helped people register to vote in Malawi and Zimbabwe. Now, it is being adapted for use in national elections in Ghana and Uganda in 2016.

Ugandan civic groups led by The African Freedom of Information Centre are planning to use it to help people register, to verify registrations and for SMS registration drives. They are also proposing new features—including digital applications to help citizens post issues of concern and compare political positions between parties and candidates so voters better understand the choices they are being offered.

In Ghana, GotToVote is helping citizens find their nearest registration center to make sure they are eligible to vote in that country’s 2016 national elections. The tool, which is optimized for mobile devices, makes voter information easily accessible to the public. It explains who is eligible to register for the 2016 general elections and gives a simple overview of the voter registration process. It also tells users what documentation to take with them to register…..

Last year, Malawi’s national government used GotToVote to check whether voters were correctly registered. As a result, more than 20,000 were found to be incorrectly registered, because they were not qualified voters or were registered in the wrong constituency. In 2013, thousands used GotToVote via their mobile and tablet devices to find their polling places in Zimbabwe.

The successful experiment provides a number of lessons about the power and feasibility of open data projects, showing that they don’t require large teams, big budgets or a lot of time to build…(More)“

Improving public policy through behavioral economics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Podcast Interview with Andy Feldman (Play in new window): “How can tools from the behavioral sciences, such as behavioral economics, improve the design and implementation of public policies? We examine that question with a leading economist, Raj Chetty of Harvard University. In his recent keynote speech at the American Economic Association meeting, he argued that insights from the behavioral sciences can expand the scope of tools that are available to policymakers — insights such as the importance of defaults, salience and loss aversion.

Professor Chetty has been widely recognized for his research that combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. This is Part One of our conversation.

For part 2 of our conversation, on the use of administrative data (or “big data”) for research on what works in public policy, click here.”

Eight ways to make government more experimental

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jonathan Breckon et al at NESTA: “When the banners and bunting have been tidied away after the May election, and a new bunch of ministers sit at their Whitehall desks, could they embrace a more experimental approach to government?

Such an approach requires a degree of humility.  Facing up to the fact that we don’t have all the answers for the next five years.  We need to test things out, evaluate new ways of doing things with the best of social science, and grow what works.  And drop policies that fail.

But how best to go about it?  Here are our 8 ways to make it a reality:

  1. Make failure OK. A more benign attitude to risk is central to experimentation.  As a 2003 Cabinet Office review entitled Trying it Out said, a pilot that reveals a policy to be flawed should be ‘viewed as a success rather than a failure, having potentially helped to avert a potentially larger political and/or financial embarrassment’. Pilots are particularly important in fast moving areas such as technology to try promising fresh ideas in real-time. Our ‘Visible Classroom’ pilot tried an innovative approach to teacher CPD developed from technology for television subtitling.
  2. Avoid making policies that are set in stone.  Allowing policy to be more project–based, flexible and time-limited could encourage room for manoeuvre, according to a previous Nesta report State of Uncertainty; Innovation policy through experimentation.  The Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Retention and Advancement pilot scheme to help people back to work was designed to influence the shape of legislation. It allowed for amendments and learning as it was rolled out.  We need more policy experiments like this.
  3. Work with the grain of current policy environment. Experimenters need to be opportunists. We need to be nimble and flexible. Ready to seize windows of opportunity to  experiment. Some services have to be rolled out in stages due to budget constraints. This offers opportunities to try things out before going national. For instance, The Mexican Oportunidades anti-poverty experiments which eventually reached 5.8 million households in all Mexican states, had to be trialled first in a handful of areas. Greater devolution is creating a patchwork of different policy priorities, funding and delivery models – so-called ‘natural experiments’. Let’s seize the opportunity to deliberately test and compare across different jurisdictions. What about a trial of basic income in Northern Ireland, for example, along the lines of recent Finnish proposals, or universal free childcare in Scotland?
  4. Experiments need the most robust and appropriate evaluation methods such as, if appropriate, Randomised Controlled Trials. Other methods, such as qualitative research may be needed to pry open the ‘black box’ of policies – to learn about why and how things are working. Civil servants should use the government trial advice panel as a source of expertise when setting up experiments.
  5. Grow the public debate about the importance of experimentation. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to psychological experiments on their 689,000 users web-users. Approval by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities – is essential, but we can’t just rely on experts. We need a dedicated public understanding of experimentation programmes, perhaps run by Evidence Matters or Ask for Evidence campaigns at Sense about Science. Taking part in an experiment in itself can be a learning opportunity creating  an appetite amongt the public, something we have found from running an RCT with schools.
  6. Create ‘Skunkworks’ institutions. New or improved institutional structures within government can also help with experimentation.   The Behavioural Insights Team, located in Nesta,  operates a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, semi-detached from day-to-day bureaucracy. The nine UK What Works Centres help try things out semi-detached from central power, such as the The Education Endowment Foundation who source innovations widely from across the public and private sectors- including Nesta-  rather than generating ideas exclusively in house or in government.
  7. Find low-cost ways to experiment. People sometimes worry that trials are expensive and complicated.  This does not have to be the case. Experiments to encourage organ donation by the Government Digital Service and Behavioural Insights Team involved an estimated cost of £20,000.  This was because the digital experiments didn’t involve setting up expensive new interventions – just changing messages on  web pages for existing services. Some programmes do, however, need significant funding to evaluate and budgets need to be found for it. A memo from the White House Office for Management and Budget has asked for new Government schemes seeking funding to allocate a proportion of their budgets to ‘randomized controlled trials or carefully designed quasi-experimental techniques’.
  8. Be bold. A criticism of some experiments is that they only deal with the margins of policy and delivery. Government officials and researchers should set up more ambitious experiments on nationally important big-ticket issues, from counter-terrorism to innovation in jobs and housing….(More)

Why governments need guinea pigs for policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Breckon in the Guardian:”People are unlikely to react positively to the idea of using citizens as guinea pigs; many will be downright disgusted. But there are times when government must experiment on us in the search for knowledge and better policy….

Though history calls into question the ethics of experimentation, unless we try things out, we will never learn. The National Audit Office says that £66bn worth of government projects have no plans to evaluate their impact. It is unethical to roll out policies in this arbitrary way. We have to experiment on a small scale to have a better understanding of how things work before rolling out policies across the UK. This is just as relevant to social policy, as it is to science and medicine, as set out in a new report by the Alliance for Useful Evidence.

Whether it’s the best ways to teach our kids to read, designing programmes to get unemployed people back to work, or encouraging organ donation – if the old ways don’t work, we have to test new ones. And that testing can’t always be done by a committee in Whitehall or in a university lab.

Experimentation can’t happen in isolation. What works in Lewisham or Londonnery, might not work in Lincoln – or indeed across the UK. For instance, there is a huge amount debate around the current practice of teaching children to read and spell using phonics, which was based on a small-scale study in Clackmannanshire, as well as evidence from the US. A government-commissioned review on the evidence for phonics led professor Carole Torgerson, then at York University, to warn against making national policy off the back of just one small Scottish trial.

One way round this problem is to do larger experiments. The increasing use of the internet in public services allows for more and faster experimentation, on a larger scale for lower cost – the randomised controlled trial on voter mobilisation that went to 61 million users in the 2010 US midterm elections, for example. However, the use of the internet doesn’t get us off the ethical hook. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to secret psychological tests on their 689,000 users.

Contentious experiments should be approved by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities.

We are also not interested in freewheeling trial-and-error; robust and appropriate research techniques to learn from experiments are vital. It’s best to see experimentation as a continuum, ranging from the messiness of attempts to try something new to experiments using the best available social science, such as randomised controlled trials.

Experimental government means avoiding an approach where everything is fixed from the outset. What we need is “a spirit of experimentation, unburdened by promises of success”, as recommended by the late professor Roger Jowell, author of the 2003 Cabinet Office report, Trying it out [pdf]….(More)”

Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

  • all 28 current members of the European Union ;
  • 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…

The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.

Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:

  • the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
  • the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
  • the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)

Institutional isomorphism, policy networks, and the analytical depreciation of measurement indicators: The case of the EU e-government benchmarking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Cristiano Codagnone et al: “This article discusses the socio-political dimension of measurement in the context of benchmarking e-government within the European Union׳s Open Method of Coordination. It provides empirical evidence of how this has resulted in institutional isomorphism within the self-referential policy network community involved in the benchmarking process. It argues that the policy prominence retained by supply-side benchmarking of e-government has probably indirectly limited efforts made to measure and evaluate more tangible impacts. High scores in EU benchmarking have contributed to increasing the institutionally-perceived quality but not necessarily the real quality and utility of e-government services. The article concludes by outlining implications for policy and practical recommendations for filling the gaps identified in measurement and evaluation of e-government. It proposes a more comprehensive policy benchmarking framework, which aims to ensure a gradual improvement in measurement activities with indicators that reflect and follow the pace of change, align measurement activities to evaluation needs and, eventually, reduce measurement error….(More)”