democracy

The Perils of Experimentation

Curated on June 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael A. Livermore: “More than eighty years after Justice Brandeis coined the phrase “laboratories of democracy,” the concept of policy experimentation retains its currency as a leading justification for decentralized governance. This Article examines the downsides of experimentation, and in particular the potential for decentralization to lead to the production of information that exacerbates public choice failures. Standard accounts of experimentation and policy learning focus on information concerning the social welfare effects of alternative policies. But learning can also occur along a political dimension as information about ideological preferences, campaign techniques, and electoral incentives is revealed. Both types of information can be put to use in the policy arena by a host of individual and institutional actors that have a wide range of motives, from public-spirited concern for the general welfare to a desire to maximize personal financial returns. In this complex environment, there is no guarantee that the information that is generated by experimentation will lead to social benefits. This Article applies this insight to prior models of federalism developed in the legal and political science literature to show that decentralization can lead to the over-production of socially harmful information. As a consequence, policy makers undertaking a decentralization calculation should seek a level of decentralization that best balances the costs and benefits of information production. To illustrate the legal and policy implications of the arguments developed here, this Article examines two contemporary environmental rulemakings of substantial political, legal, and economic significance: a rule to define the jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act; and a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity generating sector….(More)”.

Is civic technology the killer app for democracy?

Curated on June 2, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lorelei Kelly at TechCrunch: “Smartphone apps have improved convenience for public transportation in many urban centers. In Washington, DC, riders can download apps to help them figure out where to go, when to show up and how long to wait for a bus or train. However, the problem with public transport in DC is not the lack of modern, helpful and timely information. The problem is that the Metro subway system is onfire.

Critical infrastructure refers to the vital systems that connect us. Like the water catastrophe in Flint, Michigan and our crumbling roads, bridges and airports, the Metro system in DC is experiencing a systems failure. The Metro’s problems arise from typical public challenges like poor management and deferred maintenance.

Upgrades of physical infrastructure are not easy and nimble like a software patch or an agile design process. They are slow, expensive and subject to deliberation and scrutiny. In other words, they are the fundamental substance of democratic decision-making: big decisions with long-term implications that require thoughtful strategy, significant investment, political leadership and public buy-in.

A killer app is an application you love so much you buy into a whole new way of doing things. Email and social media are good examples of killer apps. The killer app for Metro would have to get political leaders to look beyond their narrow, short-term interests and be willing to invest in modern public transportation for our national capital region.

The same is true for fixing our critical infrastructure throughout the nation. The killer apps for the systems on which we rely daily won’t be technical, they will be human. It will be Americans working together to a build a technology-enabled resilient democracy —one that is inclusive, responsive and successful in the Information Age.

In 2007, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi river. During his presidential bid, Senator John McCain used this event as an example of the failure of our leaders to make trade-offs for common national purpose. Case in point, an extravagantly expensive congressionally funded Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” that served just a handful of people on an island. But how many apps to nowhere are we building?.

In DC, commuters who can afford alternatives will leave Metro. They’ll walk, drive, ordera car service or locate a bikeshare. The people who suffer from the public service risk and imbalance of the current Metro system are those who have no choice.

So here’s the challenge: Modern technology needs to create an inclusive society. Our current technical approach too often means that we’re prioritizing progress or profit for the few over the many. This pattern defeats the purpose of both the technology revolution and American democracy. Government and infrastructure are supposed to serve everyone, but technology thus far has made it so that public failures affect some Americans more than others. …

For democracy to succeed in the Information Age, we’ll need some new rules of engagement with technology. The White House recently released its third report on data and its implications for society. The 2016 report pays special attention to the ethics of machine automation and algorithms. The authors stress the importance of ethical analytics and propose the principle of “equal opportunity by design.” It’s an excellent point of departure as we recalibrate old systems and build new bridges to a more resilient, inclusive and prosperous nation….(more)”

These Online Platforms Make Direct Democracy Possible

Curated on June 1, 2016October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Ladendorf in InTheseTimes: “….Around the world, organizations from political parties to cooperatives are experimenting with new modes of direct democracy made possible by the internet.

“The world has gone through extraordinary technological innovation,” says Agustín Frizzera of Argentina’s Net Party. “But governments and political institutions haven’t innovated enough.”

The founders of the four-year-old party have also built an online platform, DemocracyOS, that lets users discuss and vote on proposals being considered by their legislators.

Anyone can adopt the technology, but the Net Party uses it to let Buenos Aires residents debate City Council measures. A 2013 thread, for example, concerned a plan to require bars and restaurants to make bathrooms free and open to the public.

“I recognize the need for freely available facilities, but it is the state who should be offering this service,” reads the top comment, voted most helpful by users. Others argued that private bathrooms open the door to discrimination. Ultimately, 56.9 percent of participants supported the proposal, while 35.3 percent voted against and 7.8 percent abstained….

A U.S. company called PlaceAVote, launched in 2014, takes what it calls a more pragmatic approach. According to cofounder Job Melton, PlaceAVote’s goal is to “work within the system we have now and fix it from the inside out” instead of attempting the unlikely feat of building a third U.S. party.

Like the Net Party and its brethren, PlaceAVote offers an online tool that lets voters participate in decision making. Right now, the technology is in public beta at PlaceAVote.com, allowing users nationwide to weigh in on legislation before Congress….

But digital democracy has applications that extend beyond electoral politics. A wide range of groups are using web-based decision-making tools internally. The Mexican government, for example, has used DemocracyOS to gather citizen feedback on a data-protection law, and Brazilian civil society organizations are using it to encourage engagement with federal and municipal policy-making.

Another direct-democracy tool in wide use is Loomio, developed by a cooperative in New Zealand. Ben Knight, one of Loomio’s cofounders, sums up his experience with Occupy as one of “seeing massive potential of collective decision making, and then realizing how difficult it could be in person.” After failing to find an online tool to facilitate the process, the Loomio team created a platform that enables online discussion with a personal element: Votes are by name and voters can choose to “disagree” with or even “block” proposals. Provo, Utah, uses Loomio for public consultation, and a number of political parties use Loomio for local decision making, including the Brazilian Pirate Party, several regional U.K. Green Party chapters and Spain’s Podemos. Podemos has enthusiastically embraced digital-democracy tools for everything from its selection of European Parliament candidates to the creation of its party platform….(More)”

Infomocracy (Novel)

Curated on June 1, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Malka Older’s debut novel: “It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?…(More)

On Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution

Curated on May 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Larry Lessig: “In the history of constitutions across the world, America has had a unique place: Ours was the first constitution ratified by the people in convention. But Iceland has now done something much more significant: For the first time in the history of the world, and using a technology only possible in the21st century, the people of a nation have crafted their own constitution through an open and inclusive crowd-sourcing process. Yet astonishingly,that constitution remains unenforced.

As everyone in [Iceland] knows, after the financial disasters of 2008, the citizens of Iceland began a process to claim back their own sovereignty.Building on the values identified by 1,000 randomly selected citizens,Icelanders launched a process to crowdsource a new constitution. That initiative was then ratified when the Parliament established a procedure for selecting delegates to a drafting commission. More than 500 citizens ran to serve on that 25 person commission. Over four months, the commissioners met to draft a constitution, with their work made available for public comment throughout the process. More than 3600 comments were offered by the public, leading to scores of modifications. The final draft, adopted unanimously, was then sent to the parliament and to the people. More than2/3ds of voters endorsed the document in a non-binding referendum as the basis of a new constitution.

Never in the history of constitutionalism has anything like this ever been done. If democracy is rule by the people — if the sovereignty of a democratic nation is ultimately the people — then this process and the constitution it produced is as authentic and binding as any in the world. Yet the parliament of Iceland has refused to allow this constitution to go into effect. And the question that anyone in the movements for democracy across the world must ask is just this: By what right?

No doubt, the procedure for crafting and ultimately ratifying the constitution included as the final step Parliament’s sanction — just as the procedure for selecting a government in Britain is subject ultimately to theQueen’s sanction. But the Queen understands the limited power that right conveys — if Britain is to call itself a democracy. And the same is true ofIceland. When the people have acted as they have here — by crafting a constitution in the most inclusive and reflective way that has ever, in the history of constitutionalism, happened, and then endorsed that work by a popular vote, by what moral authority does the Parliament now say no? No doubt, there are parts of the constitution that some don’t like. But democracy is not a promise of perfection. And no constitution in the history of the world has ever been loved by everyone it affected — just ask the million African slaves whose freedom was made unconstitutional through1808 by America’s popularly ratified constitution.

The question for Iceland is, who is sovereign? Is it the people or is it not?And if it is the people, will the people demand that their will be respected?…(More)”

Public Spending, by the People

Curated on May 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Public Agenda: “From 2014 to 2015, more than 70,000 residents across the United States and Canada directly decided how their cities and districts should spend nearly $50 million in public funds through a process known as participatory budgeting (PB). PB is among the fastest growing forms of public engagement in local governance, having expanded to 46 communities in the U.S. and Canada in just 6 years.

PB is a young practice in the U.S. and Canada. Until now, there’s been no way for people to get a general understanding of how communities across the U.S. implement PB, who participates, and what sorts of projects get funded. Our report, “Public Spending, By the People” offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of PB in the U.S. and Canada.

Here’s a summary of what we found:

Overall, communities using PB have invested substantially in the process and have seen diverse participation. But cities and districts vary widely in how they implemented their processes, who participated and what projects voters decided to fund. Officials vary in how much money they allocate to PB and some communities lag far behind in their representation of lower-income and less educated residents.

The data in this report came from 46 different PB processes across the U.S. and Canada. The report is a collaboration with local PB evaluators and practitioners. The work was funded by the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation, and completed through a research partnership with the Kettering Foundation.

You can read the findings in brief below, download a PDF of the executive summary, download the full report or scroll through charts and graphics from the report. This report is also part of an ongoing Public Agenda project on participatory budgeting – you can read about the project here.”

Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland

Curated on May 4, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore in Policy & Internet: “This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term “crowdsourced deliberation” to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on “deliberative systems.”…(More)”

Poli-hobbyism: A Theory of Mass Politics

Curated on April 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eitan D. Hersh: “For many citizens, participation in politics is not motivated by civic duty or selfinterest, but by hobbyism: the objective is self-gratification. I offer a theory of political hobbyism, situate the theory in existing literature, and define and distinguish the hobbyist motivation from its alternatives. I argue that the prevalence of political hobbyism depends on historical conditions related to the nature of leisure time, the openness of the political process to mass participation, and the level of perceived threat. I articulate an empirical research agenda, highlighting how poli-hobbyism can help explain characteristics of participants, forms of participation, rates of participation, and the nature of partisanship. Political hobbyism presents serious problems for a functioning democracy, including participants confusing high stakes for low stakes, participation too focused on the gratifying aspects of politics, and unnecessarily potent partisan rivalries….(More)”

The Wisdom of the Many in Global Governance: An Epistemic-Democratic Defence of Diversity and Inclusion

Curated on April 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stevenson, H. : “Over the past two decades, a growing body of literature has highlighted moral reasons for taking global democracy seriously. This literature justifies democracy on the grounds of its intrinsic value. But democracy also has instrumental value: the rule of the many is epistemically superior to the rule of one or the rule of the few. This paper draws on the tradition of epistemic democracy to develop an instrumentalist justification for democratizing global governance. The tradition of epistemic democracy is enjoying a renaissance within political theory and popular non-fiction, yet its relevance for international relations remains unexplored. I develop an epistemic-democratic framework for evaluating political institutions, which is constituted by three principles. The likelihood of making correct decisions within institutions of global governance will be greater when (1) human development and capacity for participation is maximised; (2) the internal cognitive diversity of global institutions is maximised; and (3) public opportunities for sharing objective and subjective knowledge are maximised. Applying this framework to global governance produces a better understanding of the nature and extent of the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance, as well as the actions required to address this deficit….(More)”