Paper by Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch: “Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25 percent of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long-run cross-country database to study the macroeconomic history of populism. We identify 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020 and show that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is 10 percent lower compared to a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual. Economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule…(More)”.
A Blueprint for Designing Better Digital Government Services
Article by Joe Lee: “Public perceptions about government and government service delivery are at an all-time low across the United States. Plagued government legacy systems—too often using outdated programming language—are struggling to hold up under the weight of increased demand, and IT modernization efforts are floundering at all levels of government. This is taking place against the backdrop of a rapidly digitizing world that places a premium on speedy, seamless, simple, and secure customer service.
Government’s “customers” typically confront a whiplash experience between accessing services from the private sector and government. If a customer doesn’t like the quality of service they get from a particular business, they can usually turn to any number of competitors; that same customer has no viable alternative to a service provided by government, regardless of the quality of that service.
When Governor Josh Shapiro took office earlier this year in Pennsylvania, the start of a new administration presented an opportunity to reexamine how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania delivered services for residents and visitors. As veteran government technologist, Jennifer Pahlka, points out, government tends to be fixated on ensuring compliance with policies and procedures frequently at the expense of the people they serve. In other words, while government services may fulfill statutory and policy requirements, the speed, seamlessness, and simplicity in which that service is ultimately delivered to the end customer is oftentimes an afterthought.
There’s a chorus of voices in the growing public interest technology movement working to shift this stubborn paradigm to proactively and persistently center people at the heart of each interaction between government and the customer. In fact, Pennsylvania is part of a growing coalition of states transforming their digital services across the country. For Pennsylvania and so many states, the road to creating truly accessible digital services involves excavating a mountain of legacy systems and policies, changing cultural and organizational paradigms, and building a movement that puts people at the center of the problem…(More)”.
What causes such maddening bottlenecks in government? ‘Kludgeocracy.’
Article by Jennifer Pahlka: “Former president Donald Trump wants to “obliterate the deep state.” As a Democrat who values government, I am chilled by the prospect. But I sometimes partly agree with him.
Certainly, Trump and I are poles apart on the nature of the problem. His “deep state” evokes a shadowy cabal that doesn’t exist. What is true, however, is that red tape and misaligned gears frequently stymie progress on even the most straightforward challenges. Ten years ago, Steven M. Teles, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, coined the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the problem. Since then, it has only gotten worse.
Whatever you call it, the sprawling federal bureaucracy takes care of everything from the nuclear arsenal to the social safety net to making sure our planes don’t crash. Public servants do critical work; they should be honored, not disparaged.
Yet most of them are frustrated. I’ve spoken with staffers in a dozen federal agencies this year while rolling out my book about government culture and effectiveness. I heard over and over about rigid, maximalist interpretations of rules, regulations, policies and procedures that take precedence over mission. Too often acting responsibly in government has come to mean not acting at all.
Kludgeocracy Example No. 1: Within government, designers are working to make online forms and applications easier to use. To succeed, they need to do user research, most of which is supposed to be exempt from the data-collection requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act. Yet compliance officers insist that designers send their research plans for approval by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) under the act. Countless hours can go into the preparation and internal approvals of a “package” for OIRA, which then might post the plans to the Federal Register for the fun-house-mirror purpose of collecting public input on a plan to collect public input. This can result in months of delay. Meanwhile, no input happens, and no paperwork gets reduced.
Kludgeocracy Example No. 2: For critical economic and national security reasons, Congress passed a law mandating the establishment of a center for scientific research. Despite clear legislative intent, work was bogged down for months when one agency applied a statute to prohibit a certain structure for the center and another applied a different statute to require that structure. The lawyers ultimately found a solution, but it was more complex and cumbersome than anyone had hoped for. All the while, the clock was ticking.
What causes such maddening bottlenecks? The problem is mainly one of culture and incentives. It could be solved if leaders in each branch — in good faith — took the costs seriously…(More)”.
Despite Its Problems, Network Technology Can Help Renew Democracy
Essay by Daniel Araya: “The impact of digital technologies on contemporary economic and social development has been nothing short of revolutionary. The rise of the internet has transformed the way we share content, buy and sell goods, and manage our institutions. But while the hope of the internet has been its capacity to expand human connection and bring people together, the reality has often been something else entirely.
When social media networks first emerged about a decade ago, they were hailed as “technologies of liberation” with the capacity to spread democracy. While these social networks have undeniably democratized access to information, they have also helped to stimulate social and political fragmentation, eroding the discursive fibres that hold democracies together.
Prior to the internet, news and media were the domain of professional journalists, overseen by powerful experts, and shaped by gatekeepers. However, in the age of the internet, platforms circumvent the need for gatekeepers altogether. Bypassing the centralized distribution channels that have served as a foundation to mass industrial societies, social networks have begun reshaping the way democratic societies build consensus. Given the importance of discourse to democratic self-government, concern is growing that democracy is failing…(More)”.
Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe
Book edited by Sophia Psarra, Uta Staiger, and Claudia Sternberg: “As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.
Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?
This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history…(More)”
Networked Press Freedom
Book by Mike Ananny: “…offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public’s freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny’s notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear.
Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today’s press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” Ananny urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike…(More)”.
Transparent. A phony-baloney ideal.
Essay by Wilfred M. McCla: ““I’m looking through you,” sang Paul McCartney, “where did you go?”
Ah, yes. People of a certain age will recognize these lyrics from a bittersweet song of the sixties about the optics of fading love. (Poor Jane Asher, where did she go?) But more than that, the song also gives us a neat summation of what might be called, with apologies to Kant, the antinomies of pure transparency.
Let me explain. I am sure you have noticed that the adjective transparent has undergone an overhaul in recent years. For one thing, it is suddenly everywhere. It used to be employed narrowly, mainly to describe the neutral quality we expect to find in a window: the capacity to allow the unhindered passage of light. Or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the property of transmitting light, so as to render bodies lying beyond completely visible.” The point was not the window, but the thing the window enabled us to see.
The word has also enjoyed figurative usages, as in the beauty of the “transparent Helena” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or in George Orwell’s admonition that “good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.” Or in the ecstatic visions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who experienced unmediated nature as if he were “a transparent eye-ball,” able to “see all” and feel “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” Or less grandly, the word is often used as a negative intensifier, as in the term “transparent liar,” which is used so frequently that it has a Twitter hashtag. In every instance, the general sense of being “completely visible” is paramount.
In recent years, by contrast, transparent has become one of the staples of our commercial discourse, a form of bureaucratic-corporate-therapeutic-speak that, like all such language, is designed to conceal more than it reveals and defeat its challengers by the abstract elusiveness of its meaning. Its promiscuous use is an unfortunate development. In practice, it generally means the opposite of what it promises; transparency would mean irreproachable openness, guilelessness, simplicity, “nothing to hide.” But when today’s T-shirt–clad executives and open-collar politicians assure us, at the beginning of their remarks, that “we want to be completely transparent,” it is time to watch out. They are making a statement about themselves, about what good and generous and open and kind folks they are, and why you should therefore trust them. They are signaling their personal virtue. They are not talking about the general accessibility of their account books and board minutes and confidential personnel records…(More)”.
AI-tocracy
Article by Peter Dizikes: “It’s often believed that authoritarian governments resist technical innovation in a way that ultimately weakens them both politically and economically. But a more complicated story emerges from a new study on how China has embraced AI-driven facial recognition as a tool of repression.
“What we found is that in regions of China where there is more unrest, that leads to greater government procurement of facial-recognition AI,” says coauthor Martin Beraja, an MIT economist. Not only has use of the technology apparently worked to suppress dissent, but it has spurred software development. The scholars call this mutually reinforcing situation an “AI-tocracy.”
In fact, they found, firms that were granted a government contract for facial-recognition technologies produce about 49% more software products in the two years after gaining the contract than before. “We examine if this leads to greater innovation by facial-recognition AI firms, and indeed it does,” Beraja says.
Adding it all up, the case of China indicates how autocratic governments can potentially find their political power enhanced, rather than upended, when they harness technological advances—and even generate more economic growth than they would have otherwise…(More)”.
Democratic self-government and the algocratic shortcut: the democratic harms in algorithmic governance of society
Paper by Nardine Alnemr: “Algorithms are used to calculate and govern varying aspects of public life for efficient use of the vast data available about citizens. Assuming that algorithms are neutral and efficient in data-based decision making, algorithms are used in areas such as criminal justice and welfare. This has ramifications on the ideal of democratic self-government as algorithmic decisions are made without democratic deliberation, scrutiny or justification. In the book Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont argued against “shortcutting” democratic self-government. Lafont’s critique of shortcuts turns to problematise taken-for-granted practices in democracies that bypass citizen inclusion and equality in authoring decisions governing public life. In this article, I extend Lafont’s argument to another shortcut: the algocratic shortcut. The democratic harms attributable to the algocratic shortcut include diminishing the role of voice in politics and reducing opportunities for civic engagement. In this article, I define the algocratic shortcut and discuss the democratic harms of this shortcut, its relation to other shortcuts to democracy and the limitations of using shortcuts to remedy algocratic harms. Finally, I reflect on remedy through “aspirational deliberation”…(More)”.
Deliberation is no silver bullet for the ‘problem’ of populism
Article by Kristof Jacobs: “Populists are not satisfied with the way democracy works nowadays. They do not reject liberal democracy outright, but want it to change. Indeed, they feel the political elite is unresponsive. Not surprisingly, then, populist parties thrive in settings where there is widespread feeling that politicians do not listen to the people.
What if… decision-makers gave citizens a voice in the decision-making process? In fact, this is happening across the globe. Democratic innovations, that is: decision-making processes that aim to deepen citizens’ participation and engagement in political decision-making, are ever more popular. They come in many shapes and forms, such as referendums, deliberative mini-publics or participatory budgeting. Deliberative democratic innovations in particular are popular, as is evidenced by the many nation-level citizens’ assemblies on climate change. We have seen such assemblies not only in France, but also in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Spain and Austria.
Several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that deliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism
Scholars of deliberation are optimistic about the potential of such deliberative events. In one often-cited piece in Science, several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that ‘[d]eliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism’.
But is that optimism warranted? What does the available empirical research tell us? To examine this, one must distinguish between populist citizens and populist parties…(More)”.