The Global State of Democracy Report 2021

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDEA Report: “The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many  democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a “new normal” of Covid-19 restrictions. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy. …

Yet, democracy is resilient.

Protest and civic action are alive and well.  Pro-democracy movements have braved repression around the world, and global social movements for tackling climate change and fighting racial inequalities have emerged. In spite of restrictions, more than three-quarters of countries have experienced protests during the pandemic.  

Many democracies have proved resilient to the pandemic, introducing or expanding democratic innovations and adapting their practices and institutions in record time. Countries around the world rapidly activated Special Voting Arrangements to allow citizens to continue to hold elections in exceedingly difficult conditions….(More)”

Perspectives on Platform Regulation

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Open Access Book edited by Judit Bayer, Bernd Holznage, Päivi Korpisaari and Lorna Woods: “Concepts and Models of Social Media GovernanceOnline social media platforms set the agenda and structure for public and private communication in our age. Their influence and power is beyond any traditional media empire. Their legal regulation is a pressing challenge, but currently, they are mainly governed by economic pressures. There are now diverse legislative attempts to regulate platforms in various parts of the world. The European Union and most of its Member States have historically relied on soft law, but are now looking to introduce regulation.

Leading researchers of the field analyse the hard questions and the responses given by various states. The book offers legislative solutions from various parts of the world, compares regulatory concepts and assesses the use of algorithms….(More)”.

How to Budget for Equity and Drive Lasting Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Andrew Kleine and Josh Inaba: “After George Floyd’s tragic death last year sparked calls to “defund the police,” government leaders across the country looked at all their operations under a new lens of equity. Most importantly, state and local leaders examined ways to invest in equitable services. While it is often said that government budgets are value statements, the past year has revealed that many budgets need to be revisited so that they better demonstrate the values of the people they serve.

To address misalignments between government spending and community values, leaders should focus on budgeting for equity, which has four fundamental facets: prioritizing equity, using data and evidence, budgeting for outcomes and engaging the community in new ways…

Data and evidence are important components of any efforts to address racial equity because they allow governments to pinpoint disparities, establish goals to remedy them and find solutions that work. This means that government leaders should be using data to evaluate not just “How well did we do it?” and “Is anyone better off?” but also consider the question “Is everyone better off?”

Asking “Is everyone better off”? is what led Boston officials to take a deep dive into its sidewalk repair data. Analysts found that because repairs were driven by 311 complaints instead of an objective assessment of need, the sidewalks in poorer, minority neighborhoods were in worse shape than those in wealthier parts of the city. Boston now uses a sidewalk condition index and other need-based factors to prioritize its sidewalk capital program.

Similarly, evidence can help governments address more long-standing inequities such as kindergarten readiness. In Maryland, for example, 60% of white students were ready for kindergarten in 2019 compared with 42% of Black students and 26% of Hispanic students, a readiness gap that has widened in recent years. Although Maryland has acted to expand early childhood education, the root cause of the disparity starts before childbirth, when the health and preparedness of mothers can make or break early childhood outcomes.

Evidence-based upstream interventions, such as Nurse-Family Partnership programs, help improve early childhood educational outcomes by supporting low-income, first-time mothers from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. Initiatives like these can help to address long-standing inequities, and governments can use clearinghouses, such as Results for America’s Economic Mobility Catalog, to identify evidence-based strategies to address a wide variety of these equity-related gaps…(More)”.

Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age: A Briefing For Potential Research Collaborators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age (TPSDA) is an international collaboration of scholars and practitioners focused on increasing the number of public servants who have the fundamental skills they need to succeed in the digital era. …TPSDA’s primary approach to making social impact is to help educators teach critical new skills to current and future public servants. We do this by developing and sharing open access teaching materials, and by actively teaching and networking with educators who want to deliver better digital era skills to their students, whether in universities or in governments.

Thus far we have published two key sets of materials, which are available free of charge on our website:

  • A set of Digital Era Competencies, describing the minimum capabilities all public services leaders now need to have.
  • A full syllabus developed for use by MPP and MPA lecturers, professors and program directors. This syllabus has already been translated into German, and is now being translated into Spanish, by members of our community….

The content of TPSDA’s competencies and syllabus is largely based on a set of hypotheses about the skills and knowledge that public servants need for the digital age. These hypotheses emerge from a sort of modern craft tradition: they reflect accepted best practice in leading digital era workplaces, and have been largely validated in the private sector….(More)”.

The fight against disinformation and the right to freedom of expression

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Report of the European Union: This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the LIBE Committee, aims at finding the balance between regulatory measures to tackle disinformation and the protection of freedom of expression. It explores the European legal framework and analyses the roles of all stakeholders in the information landscape. The study offers recommendations to reform the attention-based, data-driven information landscape and regulate platforms’ rights and duties relating to content moderation…(More)”.

How to Fix Social Media

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Essay by Nicholas Carr: “Arguments over whether and how to control the information distributed through social media go to the heart of America’s democratic ideals.

It’s a mistake, though, to assume that technological changes, even profound ones, render history irrelevant. The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation. Particularly pertinent are the distinctions between different forms of communication that informed the Supreme Court’s decision in the Carlin case — and that had guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era. Digitization has blurred those distinctions at a technical level — all forms of communication can now be transmitted through a single computer network — but it has not erased them.

By once again making such distinctions, particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions….(More)”.

What Universities Owe Democracy

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Book by Ronald J. Daniels with Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector: “Universities play an indispensable role within modern democracies. But this role is often overlooked or too narrowly conceived, even by universities themselves. In What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that—at a moment when liberal democracy is endangered and more countries are heading toward autocracy than at any time in generations—it is critical for today’s colleges and universities to reestablish their place in democracy.

Drawing upon fields as varied as political science, economics, history, and sociology, Daniels identifies four distinct functions of American higher education that are key to liberal democracy: social mobility, citizenship education, the stewardship of facts, and the cultivation of pluralistic, diverse communities. By examining these roles over time, Daniels explains where colleges and universities have faltered in their execution of these functions—and what they can do going forward.

Looking back on his decades of experience leading universities, Daniels offers bold prescriptions for how universities can act now to strengthen democracy. For those committed to democracy’s future prospects, this book is a vital resource…(More)”.

Pandora Papers & Data Journalism: how investigative journalists use tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article at Moonshot: “The Pandora Papers’s 11.9 million records arrived from 14 different offshore services firms; a 2.94 terabyte data trove exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories.

It contains data for 330 politicians and public officials, from more than 90 countries and territories, including 35 current and former country leaders, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.

It involved more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries.

It took ICIJ more than a year to structure, research and analyze the data, which will be incorporated into the Offshore Leaks database: The task involved three main elements: journalists, technology and time….(More)”

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jonathan Rauch: “Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn’t even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do so—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone…(More)”.

The Privatized State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Chiara Cordelli: “Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot.

In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called “a state of nature.” Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking.

The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just….(More)”.