Book edited by Ann Delgado that “… provides insights on how emerging technosciences come together with new forms of governance and ethical questioning. Combining science and technologies and ethics approaches, it looks at the emergence of three key technoscientific domains – body enhancement technologies, biometrics and technologies for the production of space -exploring how human bodies and minds, the movement of citizens and space become matters of technoscientific governance. The emergence of new and digital technologies pose new challenges for representative democracy and existing forms of citizenship. As citizens encounter and have to adapt to technological change in their everyday life, new forms of conviviality and contestation emerge. This book is a key reference for scholars interested in the governance of emerging technosciences in the fields of science and technology studies and ethics….(More)”
Inside the Digital Revolution
Heather Brooks in the Journal of International Affairs: “Technology and transparency combined to create the digital revolution, which in turn has ushered in a new form o f monitory democracy. Communicative abundance and global interconnection mean the democratic franchise can expand and deepen, but the author argues that it matters who is made transparent and for what purpose. Content and context matter. Technology and transparency can be used to strengthen democracy by opening up government to citizens, but the same tools can also be used by the state to surveil and disempower citizens, thereby damaging democracy. The author uses three case studies to discuss the impact o f digitizing information on power relations between citizens and states. First, her observations as the journalist and litigant in the legal case that forced the digitization o f UK parliamentary expense records, which when leaked created one o f the biggest political scandals in that country for decades. Second, she obtained the entire set o f U. S. diplomatic cables and reported on their contents for the Guardian. Lastly, she served as a member o f the Independent Surveillance Review Panel, set up by the UK government to investigate allegations made by Edward Snowden that the UK and U.S. governments were conducting mass surveillance programs that were potentially illegal and lacked adequate oversight. The case studies show how journalism is integral not only to identifying useful civic information but also maximizing the public good from leaked information while minimizing harm….(More)”
Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?
Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?
Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.
The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.
Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.
The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..
….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…
…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….
…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”
Open or Closed? Open Licensing of Real-Time Public Sector Transit Data
Teresa Scassa and Alexandra Diebel in Journal of e-Democracy: “This paper explores how real-time data are made available as “open data” using municipal transit data as a case study. Many transit authorities in North America and elsewhere have installed technology to gather GPS data in real-time from transit vehicles. These data are in high demand in app developer communities because of their use in communicating predicted, rather than scheduled, transit vehicle arrival times. While many municipalities have chosen to treat real-time GPS data as “open data,” the particular nature of real-time GPS data requires a different mode of access for developers than what is needed for static data files. This, in turn, has created a conflict between the “openness” of the underlying data and the sometimes restrictive terms of use which govern access to the real-time data through transit authority Application Program Interfaces (APIs). This paper explores the implications of these terms of use and considers whether real-time data require a separate standard for openness. While the focus is on the transit data context, the lessons from this area will have broader implications, particularly for open real-time data in the emerging smart cities environment….(More)”
Measuring the quality of democracy
Introduction by Brigitte Geissel, Marianne Kneuer, and Hans-Joachim Lauth of Special Issue of the International Political Science Review on Measuring the Quality of Democracy: “Within the last couple of years, scholarly interest in measuring democracy experienced a shift. While ‘classical’ indices like Polity or Freedom House aim at capturing the variety of regimes types – mostly in nuanced scale from democracies to autocracies – more recent approaches are taking a closer look at those democracies that are regarded as consolidated. Examples are the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, 2012), the Democracy Barometer (Bühlmann et al., 2013), and the Varieties of Democracy Project (Coppedge et al., 2011). Measuring the quality of consolidated democracies is a young yet very dynamic field of research, with the number of indices growing considerably. Today, more than a dozen different measurements claim to evaluate the quality of democracy. However, there is no consensus about underlying models of democracy, concepts, variables, yardsticks and methods. This research field is still in its fledgling stages (e.g. Munck, 2016).
This Special Issue has a conceptual orientation that seeks to structure as well as to broaden the research agenda by introducing hitherto neglected, yet, in our view, crucial aspects. It therefore does not intend to supplement the methodological debate that accompanies the research area of democracy measurement ever since its emergence. The guiding idea is rather to offer a fresh look, with conceptual contributions clarifying current debates and challenging existing conceptualizations. Hence, these objectives cannot be reached at one stroke with one single edition, but the articles provide crucial steps and substantial progress in the direction of developing an overarching framework for the quality of democracy research.
Before providing detail, we want to clarify our understanding of measuring the quality of democracy, which seems diffuse at times. Measuring democracy pursues two aims, firstly, to classify whether a regime is a democracy and, secondly, if it is, to determine the degree of democracy (Lauth, 2004). The second task requires analyzing whether empirical findings meet the standard defined in the respective definitions of democracy. If the results conform to this standard, the democracy is assessed as of high quality. If the definition of democracy involves only a low standard, then differences among established democracies can hardly be identified. In other words, gradations of democratic quality cannot be detected. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a standard that enables gradations. Given this demanding task, the current conceptual controversies are not surprising.
A central issue which runs like a thread through the debate on measuring the quality of democracy constitutes the question of which definition of democracy to identify as the basis….(More)”.
Datafication and democracy: Recalibrating digital information systems to address societal interests
Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy
Ariel Procaccia in Wired: “…Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one….. Maine recently became the first US state to adopt instant-runoff voting; the approach will be used for choosing the governor and members of Congress and the state legislature….
So why aren’t we already using cutting-edge voting systems in national elections? Perhaps because changing election systems usually itself requires an election, where short-term political considerations may trump long-term, scientifically grounded reasoning….Despite these difficulties, in the last few years state-of-the-art voting systems have made the transition from theory to practice, through not-for-profit online platforms that focus on facilitating elections in cities and organizations, or even just on helping a group of friends decide where to go to dinner. For example, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team has created an online tool whereby residents of a city can vote on how to allocate the city’s budget for public projects such as parks and roads. This tool has been used by New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle to allocate millions of dollars. Building on this success, the Stanford team is experimenting with groundbreaking methods, inspired by computational thinking, to elicit and aggregate the preferences of residents.
The Princeton-based project All Our Ideas asks voters to compare pairs of ideas, and then aggregates these comparisons via statistical methods, ultimately providing a ranking of all the ideas. To date, roughly 14 million votes have been cast using this system, and it has been employed by major cities and organizations. Among its more whimsical use cases is the Washington Post’s 2010 holiday gift guide, where the question was “what gift would you like to receive this holiday season”; the disappointingly uncreative top idea, based on tens of thousands of votes, was “money”.
Finally, the recently launched website RoboVote (which I created with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard) offers AI-driven voting methods to help groups of people make smart collective decisions. Applications range from selecting a spot for a family vacation or a class president, to potentially high-stakes choices such as which product prototype to develop or which movie script to produce.
These examples show that centuries of research on voting can, at long last, make a societal impact in the internet age. They demonstrate what science can do for democracy, albeit on a relatively small scale, for now….(More)’
The Econocracy: The perils of leaving economics to the experts
Book by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, Zach Ward-Perkins, and Series edited by Mick Moran: “One hundred years ago the idea of ‘the economy’ didn’t exist. Now, improving the economy has come to be seen as perhaps the most important task facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are conducted in the language of economics and economic logic shapes how political issues are thought about and addressed. The result is that the majority of citizens, who cannot speak this language, are locked out of politics while political decisions are increasingly devolved to experts. The econocracy explains how economics came to be seen this way – and the damaging consequences. It opens up the discipline and demonstrates its inner workings to the wider public so that the task of reclaiming democracy can begin….(More)”
Power To The People! (And Settings for Using It Wisely?)
Public Agenda: “From its inception in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting (PB) has incorporated, to varying degrees, both direct and deliberative democracy.
In deliberative democracy, citizens become informed about an issue, talk about their concerns and goals, weigh different policy options and find common ground. They may give policy input to public officials, develop action ideas for implementation by other people and organizations or work to implement ideas themselves, or they may engage in some combination of the three. Advocates of deliberative democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective learners, advisors and volunteers.
In direct democracy, people have the opportunity to vote on policy questions through initiatives and referenda. Advocates of direct democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective public decision makers.
This white paper examines the extent to which North American PB processes are applying deliberative principles and practices, explore the tensions and challenges in making PB more deliberative, suggest questions for further research and offer recommendations for public officials and practitioners for improving their PB processes.
Boosting deliberative engagement in PB processes could have a variety of benefits for communities. First, higher levels of deliberation might produce greater empathy among citizens who hold different opinions or value different things about their communities—and greater understanding between residents and city staff. Second, more deliberative discussions would be more likely to bring to the surface issues of race, religion, class, immigration status and other differences that are always influential but seldom addressed in public life. Finally, the budget ideas produced might be more likely to represent compromises between different groups or opinions, and they might inspire greater efforts by participants to help implement them, beyond the decision to allocate public money.
PB organizers might improve the level and quality of deliberation in their processes in a number of ways:
1. Be more explicit about the importance of deliberation in the process…
2. Ensure participants have the chance to share their stories…
3. Connect the PB process to a broader discussion of city and/or district goals and priorities…
This report is the companion to “Brazil Has Reduced Inequality, Incrementally—Can We Do the Same?,” which focuses on the intersection of PB and economic inequality. Both draw on the data gathered by local PB researchers and by Public Agenda; on local evaluations of PB processes; and on interviews with public officials, also conducted by Public Agenda…(More)”.
Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation
Christopher M. Kelty at Current Anthropology: “Participation is a concept and practice that governs many aspects of new media and new publics. There are a wide range of attempts to create more of it and a surprising lack of theorization. In this paper I attempt to present a “grammar” of participation by looking at three cases where participation has been central in the contemporary moment of new, social media and the Internet as well as in the past, stretching back to the 1930s: citizen participation in public administration, workplace participation, and participatory international development. Across these three cases I demonstrate that the grammar of participation shifts from a language of normative enthusiasm to one of critiques of co-optation and bureaucratization and back again. I suggest that this perpetually aspirational logic results in the problem of “too much democracy in all the wrong places.”…(More)”