Rule by the lowest common denominator? It’s baked into democracy’s design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “The Trump victory, and the general disaster for Democrats this year, was the victory of ignorance, critics moan.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Georgetown’s Jason Brennan called it “the dance of the dunces” and wrote that “Trump owes his victory to the uninformed.”…

For liberals, Trump’s victory was the triumph of prejudice, bigotry and forces allied against truth and expertise in politics, science and culture at large. Trump brandishes unconcern for traditional political wisdom and protocol – much less facts – like a badge of honor, and his admirers roar with glee. His now famous rallies, the chastened media report, are often scary, sometimes giving way to violence, sometimes threatening to spark broader recriminations and social mayhem. This is a glimpse of how tyrants rise to power, some political minds worry; this is how tyrants enlist the support of rabid masses, and get them to do their bidding.

For the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however, the Trump victory provides a useful reminder of the essential nature of democracy – a reminder of what precisely makes it vibrant. And liable to lapse into tyranny at once….

Democracy is rule by the rabble, in Plato’s view. It is the rule by the lowest common denominator. In a democracy, passions are inflamed and proliferate. Certain individuals may take advantage of and channel the storm of ignorance, Plato feared, and consolidate power out of a desire to serve their own interests.

As Rancière explains, there is a “scandal of democracy” for Plato: The best and the high born “must bow before the law of chance” and submit to the rule of the inexpert, the commoner, who knows little about politics or much else.

Merit ought to decide who rules, in Plato’s account. But democracy consigns such logic to the dustbin. The rabble may decide they want to be ruled by one of their own – and electoral conditions may favor them. Democracy makes it possible that someone who has no business ruling lands at the top. His rule may prove treacherous, and risk dooming the state. But, Rancière argues, this is a risk democracies must take. Without it, they lack legitimacy….

Rancière maintains people more happily suffer authority ascribed by chance than authority consigned by birth, merit or expertise. Liberals may be surprised about this last point. According to Rancière, expertise is no reliable, lasting or secure basis for authority. In fact, expertise soon loses authority, and with it, the legitimacy of the state. Why?…(More)”

Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel J. Solove at Technology, Academics, Policy: “Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2016….

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy

From my blurb: “Chris Hoofnagle has written the definitive book about the FTC’s involvement in privacy and security. This is a deep, thorough, erudite, clear, and insightful work – one of the very best books on privacy and security.”

My interview with Hoofnagle about his book: The 5 Things Every Privacy Lawyer Needs to Know about the FTC: An Interview with Chris Hoofnagle

My further thoughts on the book in my interview post above: “This is a book that all privacy and cybersecurity lawyers should have on their shelves. The book is the most comprehensive scholarly discussion of the FTC’s activities in these areas, and it also delves deep in the FTC’s history and activities in other areas to provide much-needed context to understand how it functions and reasons in privacy and security cases. There is simply no better resource on the FTC and privacy. This is a great book and a must-read. It is filled with countless fascinating things that will surprise you about the FTC, which has quite a rich and storied history. And it is an accessible and lively read too – Chris really makes the issues come alive.”

Gary T. Marx, Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

From Peter Grabosky: “The first word that came to mind while reading this book was cornucopia. After decades of research on surveillance, Gary Marx has delivered an abundant harvest indeed. The book is much more than a straightforward treatise. It borders on the encyclopedic, and is literally overflowing with ideas, observations, and analyses. Windows into the Soul commands the attention of anyone interested in surveillance, past, present, and future. The book’s website contains a rich abundance of complementary material. An additional chapter consists of an intellectual autobiography discussing the author’s interest in, and personal experience with, surveillance over the course of his career. Because of its extraordinary breadth, the book should appeal to a wide readership…. it will be of interest to scholars of deviance and social control, cultural studies, criminal justice and criminology. But the book should be read well beyond the towers of academe. The security industry, broadly defined to include private security and intelligence companies as well as state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, would benefit from the book’s insights. So too should it be read by those in the information technology industries, including the manufacturers of the devices and applications which are central to contemporary surveillance, and which are shaping our future.”

Susan C. Lawrence, Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics

From the book blurb: “When the new HIPAA privacy rules regarding the release of health information took effect, medical historians suddenly faced a raft of new ethical and legal challenges—even in cases where their subjects had died years, or even a century, earlier. In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of these new privacy rules, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work.”

Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone

From Mark Tushnet: “Professor Krotoszynski provides a valuable overview of how several constitutional systems accommodate competing interests in privacy, speech, and democracy. He shows how scholarship in comparative law can help one think about one’s own legal system while remaining sensitive to the different cultural and institutional settings of each nation’s law. A very useful contribution.”

Laura K. Donohue, The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age…

Gordon Corera, Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage…

J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film…(More; See also Nonfiction Privacy + Security Books).

Technoscience and Citizenship: Ethics and Governance in the Digital Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jonathan Gray at IPPR: “Digital information systems have come to play a central role in how we organise and imagine collective life in the 21st century. The limits of our world are demarcated by electronic equipment scanning the movements of the clouds and space debris above us and the oceanic currents deep below. Within this comparatively narrow band around the surface of the Earth where life is possible – which geologists call the ‘critical zone’ – ever more activity is registered, connected, facilitated and mediated by digital technologies, resulting in vast reserves of data. In addition to the familiar genres of enumerating people, resources, space and time which have been institutionalised for centuries (through official statistics or accounting practices, for example), the digital infrastructures and devices that surround us proliferate data as a result of their every interaction.
These processes of ‘datafication’ – or ways of seeing and engaging with the world by means of digital data – are not just limited to the neutral representation of phenomena: data can also actively participate in the shaping of the world around us. The very act of generating data can change behaviour, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways and with unintended consequences, as we see, for example, in the dynamics created by league tables and performance metrics, rankings, indexes and indicators. Economic sociologist Donald MacKenzie wrote that financial models are not just like cameras that depict behaviour within markets, they can also act as engines that change them. The same is doubtless true of the quantitative appraisal of life in the workplace, in the classroom, in the home, on the street.
Data not only refers or designates: it can also stage, guide and enact social life in different settings. Historians and sociologists of statistics argue that classificatory practices at public institutions have brought new social categories into existence. Today, computers and algorithms play a role in the grouping and ordering of society. Information brokers propose new ways of classifying society drawing on the automated analysis of large volumes of data from different sources – proposing consumer profiles such as ‘credit crunched: city families’, ‘ethnic second-city strugglers’ and ‘rural and barely making it’. Such emerging forms of ‘data work’ can have huge social, political, economic, environmental and cultural consequences….(More)”

Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cover

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)”