Can Technology Save Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adele Peters in Fast Company: “On March 11, in a state parliament election in West Australia, 24 candidates made only one campaign promise: If they won, they promised to vote on every bill according to the wishes of their constituents, as determined via an app called Flux. (While the votes are still being tallied, it looks unlikely that any will win.)

Flux’s app is one of a handful of new platforms that aim to use technology to let people participate directly in politics, at scale. All are premised on the fact that–around the world–representative democracy isn’t working well. But technology could potentially help end corruption and lobbying, allow people to delegate votes to trusted friends rather than politicians, and empower experts in a field to meaningfully impact policy.

Does Democracy Work?

In 2015, shortly after Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, polls found that only 19% of Americans trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.” (The survey has not been repeated, but presumably, the numbers have not improved.) Only 11% approved of Congress.

Those numbers are historic lows; in 1958, when a poll first asked the question, 73% of Americans said that they could trust the government most of the time. The results can be partisan–people are less likely to trust the government when the opposing party is in power, and Republicans are less likely to trust government, in general, than Democrats. But the overall message is clear. Most people don’t think democracy is working in its current form….

The problems may stem from our form of government. “The problem, fundamentally, is representative democracy,” says Nathan Spataro, cofounder of both the Flux political party in Australia and XO.1, the startup making the software that powers the Flux app. “It is not that your politicians are corrupt, it’s that the politicians are corrupt because of the system. You don’t have to look far to watch how politicians start their career, and how then the system fundamentally changes them by the time they get to the end of it.”

Liquid Democracy

True direct democracy, in which every member of a society votes on everything, could eliminate the problem of lobbying, but has rarely existed. In ancient Athens, assemblies made up of all the citizens gathered to make decisions (women and slaves were not allowed to be citizens). In some Swiss cantons, citizens can participate directly in local government. In both cases, though, issues facing voters were relatively simple and limited in scope. While direct democracy might be the ideal–a government that’s literally by the people and for the people–it’s hard to scale up. In a large society with complex issues, it isn’t possible for even the most dedicated individual to keep up with every possible item that requires a vote–or have an informed opinion about them.

Representative democracy, which ideally solves that problem, also struggles with size. “One of the key problems of the U.S. political system is that it runs into scaling limits,” says Bryan Ford, a computer scientist who leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Sixteen years ago, Ford began thinking about what he calls delegative democracy, now also known as liquid democracy. “The whole idea of delegative democracy is to try to create a representative system that responds to the needs of individuals but also scales,” he says. “In some sense, delegative or liquid democracy is an approximation to the completely impractical idea of fully participatory, direct democracy.”

It works like this: Rather than asking citizens to vote on every issue, it gives each person the power to vote or to appoint a delegate to vote for them. Unlike a typical representative, that delegate could be changed at any time depending on the issue….(More)”.

Does digital democracy improve democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thamy Pogrebinschi at Open Democracy: “The advancement of tools of information and communications technology (ICT) has the potential to impact democracy nearly as much as any other area, such as science or education. The effects of the digital world on politics and society are still difficult to measure, and the speed with which these new technological tools evolve is often faster than a scholar’s ability to assess them, or a policymaker’s capacity to make them fit into existing institutional designs.

Since their early inception, digital tools and widespread access to the internet have been changing the traditional means of participation in politics, making them more effective. Electoral processes have become more transparent and effective in several countries where the paper ballot has been substituted for electronic voting machines. Petition-signing became a widespread and powerful tool as individual citizens no longer needed to be bothered out in the streets to sign a sheet of paper, but could instead be simultaneously reached by the millions via e-mail and have their names added to virtual petition lists in seconds. Protests and demonstrations have also been immensely revitalized in the internet era. In the last few years, social networks like Facebook and WhatsApp have proved to be a driving-force behind democratic uprisings, by mobilizing the masses, invoking large gatherings, and raising awareness, as was the case of the Arab Spring.

While traditional means of political participation can become more effective by reducing the costs of participation with the use of ICT tools, one cannot yet assure that it would become less subject to distortion and manipulation. In the most recent United States’ elections, computer scientists claimed that electronic voting machines may have been hacked, altering the results in the counties that relied on them. E-petitions can also be easily manipulated, if safe identification procedures are not put in place. And in these times of post-facts and post-truths, protests and demonstrations can result from strategic partisan manipulation of social media, leading to democratic instability as has recently occurred in Brazil. Nevertheless, the distortion and manipulation of these traditional forms of participation were also present before the rise of ICT tools, and regardless, even if the latter do not solve these preceding problems, they may manage to make political processes more effective anyway.

The game-changer for democracy, however, is not the revitalization of the traditional means of political participation like elections, petition-signing and protests through digital tools. Rather, the real change on how democracy works, governments rule, and representation is delivered comes from entirely new means of e-participation, or the so-called digital democratic innovations. While the internet may boost traditional forms of political participation by increasing the quantity of citizens engaged, democratic innovations that rely on ICT tools may change the very quality of participation, thus in the long-run changing the nature of democracy and its institutions….(More)”

Digital Media Integration for Participatory Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rocci Luppicini and Rachel Baarda: “Digital technology has revitalized the landscape of political affairs. As e-government continues to become more prominent in society, conducting further research in this realm is vital to promoting democratic advancements.

Digital Media Integration for Participatory Democracy provides a comprehensive examination of the latest methods and trends used to engage citizens with the political world through new information and communication technologies. Highlighting innovative practices and applications across a variety of areas such as technoethics, civic literacy, virtual reality, and social networking, this book is an ideal reference source for government officials, academicians, students, and researchers interested in the enhancement of citizen engagement in modern democracies….(More)”

Restoring Trust in Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Minouche Shafik at Project Syndicate: “…public confidence in experts is at a crossroads. With news becoming more narrowly targeted to individual interests and preferences, and with people increasingly choosing whom to trust and follow, the traditional channels for sharing expertise are being disrupted. Who needs experts when you have Facebook, Google, Mumsnet, and Twitter?

Actually, we all do. Over the course of human history, the application of expertise has helped tackle disease, reduce poverty, and improve human welfare. If we are to build on this progress, we need reliable experts to whom the public can confidently turn.

Restoring confidence requires, first, that those describing themselves as “experts” embrace uncertainty. Rather than pretending to be certain and risk frequently getting it wrong, commentators should be candid about uncertainty. Over the long term, such an approach will rebuild credibility. A good example of this is the use of “fan charts” in forecasts produced by the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), which show the wide range of possible outcomes for issues such as inflation, growth, and unemployment.

Yet conveying uncertainty increases the complexity of a message. This is a major challenge. It is easy to tweet “BoE forecasts 2% growth.” The fan chart’s true meaning – “If economic circumstances identical to today were to prevail on 100 occasions, the MPC’s best collective judgment is that the mature estimate of GDP growth would lie above 2% on 50 occasions and below 2% on 50 occasions” – doesn’t even fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit.

This underscores the need for sound principles and trustworthy practices to become more widespread as technology changes the way we consume information. Should journalists and bloggers be exposed for reporting or recirculating falsehoods or rumors? Perhaps principles and practices widely used in academia – such as peer review, competitive processes for funding research, transparency about conflicts of interests and financing sources, and requirements to publish underlying data – should be adapted and applied more widely to the world of think tanks, websites, and the media….

Schools and universities will have to do more to educate students to be better consumers of information. Striking research by the Stanford History Education Group, based on tests of thousands of students across the US, described as “bleak” their findings about young people’s ability to evaluate information they encounter online. Fact-checking websites appraising the veracity of claims made by public figures are a step in the right direction, and have some similarities to peer review in academia.

Listening to the other side is crucial. Social media exacerbates the human tendency of groupthink by filtering out opposing views. We must therefore make an effort to engage with opinions that are different from our own and resist algorithmic channeling to avoid difference. Perhaps technology “experts” could code algorithms that burst such bubbles.

Finally, the boundary between technocracy and democracy needs to be managed more carefully. Not surprisingly, when unelected individuals steer decisions that have huge social consequences, public resentment may not be far behind. Problems often arise when experts try to be politicians or politicians try to be experts. Clarity about roles – and accountability when boundaries are breached – is essential.

We need expertise more than ever to solve the world’s problems. The question is not how to manage without experts, but how to ensure that expertise is trustworthy. Getting this right is vital: if the future is not to be shaped by ignorance and narrow-mindedness, we need knowledge and informed debate more than ever before….(More)”.

Democracy at Work: Moving Beyond Elections to Improve Well-Being

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Michael Touchton, Natasha Borges Sugiyama and Brian Wampler in the American Political Science Review: “How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this article, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. We draw from the citizenship debates to argue that democratic practices allow citizens to gain access to a wide range of rights, which then serve as the foundation for improving social well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities from 2006 to 2013 demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. It is important to note that these relationships are independent of local economic growth, which also influences infant mortality. The result of our thorough analysis offers a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development….(More)”.

Playing (with) Democracy: A Review of Gamified Participation Approaches

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah-Kristin Thiel, Michaela Reisinger, Kathrin Röderer, Peter Fröhlich in the Journal of Democracy and Open Government: “Albeit a wide range of e-participation platforms being already available, the level of public participation remains low. Governments around the world as well as academia are currently exploring new ways to design participation methods that are more engaging to use and will foster participation. One of the strategies is gamification. By adding game elements to e-participation platforms it is hoped to motivate for citizens to engage. This paper reviewed a large number of e-participation platforms, seeking to provide an overview of the current state of the art of so-called gamified participation initiatives. Our results show that while about half of the review projects can be categorized as game-related, only a small amount employs gamification. Moreover, current gamified participation initiatives seem to focus on reward-based gamification, a strategy which is said to come with risks. In this paper we further provide recommendations for future gamified participation projects….(More)”

Digital Democracy: The Tools Transforming Political Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Julie Simon, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman and Geoff Mulgan: “… shares lessons from Nesta’s research into some of the pioneering innovations in digital democracy which are taking place across Europe and beyond.

Key findings

  • Digital democracy is a broad concept and not easy to define. The paper provides a granular approach to help encompass its various activities and methods (our ‘typology of digital democracy’).
  • Many initiatives exist simply as an app, or web page, driven by what the technology can do, rather than by what the need is.
  • Lessons from global case studies describe how digital tools are being used to engage communities in more meaningful political participation, and how they are improving the quality and legitimacy of decision-making.
  • Digital democracy is still young. Projects must embed better methods for evaluation of their goals if the field is to grow.

Thanks to digital technologies, today we can bank, read the news, study for a degree, and chat with friends across the world – all without leaving the comfort of our homes. But one area that seems to have remained impervious to these benefits is our model of democratic governance, which has remained largely unchanged since it was invented in the 20th century.

New experiments are showing how digital technologies can play a critical role in engaging new groups of people, empowering citizens and forging a new relationship between cities and local residents, and parliamentarians and citizens.

At the parliamentary level, including in Brazil and France, experiments with new tools are enabling citizens to contribute to draft legislation. Political parties such as Podemos in Spain and the Icelandic Pirate Party are using tools such as Loomio, Reddit and Discourse to enable party members and the general public to deliberate and feed into policy proposals. Local governments have set up platforms to enable citizens to submit ideas and information, rank priorities and allocate public resources…..

Lessons from the innovators 

  • Develop a clear plan and process: Pioneers in the field engage people meaningfully by giving them a clear stake; they conduct stakeholder analysis; operate with full transparency; and access harder-to-reach groups with offline methods.
  • Get the necessary support in place: The most successful initiatives have clear-backing from lawmakers; they also secure the necessary resources to promote to the process properly (PR and advertising), as well as the internal systems to manage and evaluate large numbers of ideas.
  • Choose the right tools: The right digital tools help to improve the user-experience and understanding of the issue, and can help remove some of the negative impacts of those who might try to damage or ‘game’ the process….(More)”

Thesis, antithesis and synthesis: A constructive direction for politics and policy after Brexit and Trump

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan at Nesta: “In the heady days of 1989, with communism collapsing and the Cold War seemingly over, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared that we were witnessing the “end of history” which had culminated in the triumph of liberal democracy and the free market.

Fukuyama was drawing on the ideas of German philosopher Georg Hegel, but of course, history didn’t come to an end, and, as recent events have shown, the Cold War was just sleeping, not dead.

Now, following the political convulsions of 2016, we’re at a very different turning point, which many are trying to make sense of. I want to suggest that we can again usefully turn to Hegel, but this time to his idea that history evolves in dialectical ways, with successive phases of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

This framework fits well with where we stand today.  The ‘thesis’ that has dominated mainstream politics for the last generation – and continues to be articulated shrilly by many proponents – is the claim that the combination of globalisation, technological progress and liberalisation empowers the great majority.

The antithesis, which, in part, fuelled the votes for Brexit and Trump, as well as the rise of populist parties and populist authoritarian leaders in Europe and beyond, is the argument that this technocratic combination merely empowers a minority and disempowers the majority of citizens.

A more progressive synthesis – which I will outline – then has to address the flaws of the thesis and the grievances of the antithesis, in fields ranging from education and health to democracy and migration, dealing head on with questions of power and its distribution: questions about who has power, and who feels powerful….(More)”

Open innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sabrina Diaz Rato in OpenDemocracy: “For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy – more open, more direct, more interactive – is being developed and embraced. It is a framework that overcomes the closed architecture on which the praxis of governance (closed, hierarchical, one-way) have been cemented in almost all areas. The series The ecosystem of open democracy explores the different aspects of this ongoing transformation….

How can innovation contribute to building an open democracy? The answer is summed up in these ten connectors of innovation.

  1. placing innovation and collective intelligence at the center of public management strategies,
  2. aligning all government areas with clearly-defined goals on associative platforms,
  3. shifting the frontiers of knowledge and action from the institutions to public deliberation on local challenges,
  4. establishing leadership roles, in a language that everyone can easily understand, to organize and plan the wealth of information coming out of citizens’ ideas and to engage those involved in the sustainability of the projects,
  5. mapping the ecosystem and establishing dynamic relations with internal and, particularly, external agents: the citizens,
  6. systematizing the accumulation of information and the creative processes, while communicating progress and giving feedback to the whole community,
  7. preparing society as a whole to experience a new form of governance of the common good,
  8. cooperating with universities, research centers and entrepreneurs in establishing reward mechanisms,
  9. aligning people, technologies, institutions and the narrative with the new urban habits, especially those related to environmental sustainability and public services,
  10. creating education and training programs in tune with the new skills of the 21st century,
  11. building incubation spaces for startups responding to local challenges,
  12. inviting venture capital to generate a satisfactory mix of open innovation, inclusive development policies and local productivity.

Two items in this list are probably the determining factors of any effective innovation process. The first has to do with the correct decision on the mechanisms through which we have pushed the boundaries outwards, so as to bring citizen ideas into the design and co-creation of solutions. This is not an easy task, because it requires a shared organizational mentality on previously non-existent patterns of cooperation, which must now be sustained through dialog and operational dynamics aimed at solving problems defined by external actors – not just any problem.

Another key aspect of the process, related to the breaking down of the institutional barriers that surround and condition action frameworks, is the revaluation of a central figure that we have not yet mentioned here: the policy makers. They are not exactly political leaders or public officials. They are not innovators either. They are the ones within Public Administration who possess highly valuable management skills and knowledge, but who are constantly colliding against the glittering institutional constellations that no longer work….(More)”

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound.

 Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’ whose job is to establish and manage the country’s relationship with the world’s most powerful tech companies?

Denmark’s “digital ambassador” is a first. No country has ever created such a role. Their job will be to liase with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Given the fraught relationship many European countries have with American big-tech – especially on issues of taxation, privacy, and national security – Denmark’s decision to extend an olive branch seems sensible.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”….(More)”