Topics: democracy

The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard H. Thaler in the New York Times: “Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science, and when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.

Whenever I’m asked to autograph a copy of “Nudge,” the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, “Nudge for good.” Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation.

Three principles should guide the use of nudges:

■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.

■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.

■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.
As far as I know, the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously. But the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior.

For example, last spring I received an email telling me that the first prominent review of a new book of mine had appeared: It was in The Times of London. Eager to read the review, I clicked on a hyperlink, only to run into a pay wall. Still, I was tempted by an offer to take out a one-month trial subscription for the price of just £1. As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print. As expected, I would have to provide credit card information and would be automatically enrolled as a subscriber when the trial period expired. The subscription rate would then be £26 (about $40) a month. That wasn’t a concern because I did not intend to become a paying subscriber. I just wanted to read that one article.

But the details turned me off. To cancel, I had to give 15 days’ notice, so the one-month trial offer actually was good for just two weeks. What’s more, I would have to call London, during British business hours, and not on a toll-free number. That was both annoying and worrying. As an absent-minded American professor, I figured there was a good chance I would end up subscribing for several months, and that reading the article would end up costing me at least £100….

These examples are not unusual. Many companies are nudging purely for their own profit and not in customers’ best interests. In a recent column in The New York Times, Robert Shiller called such behavior “phishing.” Mr. Shiller and George Akerlof, both Nobel-winning economists, have written a book on the subject, “Phishing for Phools.”

Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.

I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”

As customers, we can help one another by resisting these come-ons. The more we turn down questionable offers like trip insurance and scrutinize “one month” trials, the less incentive companies will have to use such schemes. Conversely, if customers reward firms that act in our best interests, more such outfits will survive and flourish, and the options available to us will improve….(More)

‘Democracy vouchers’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gregory Krieg at CNN: “Democracy vouchers” could be coming to an election near you. Last week, more than 60% of Seattle voters approved the so-called “Honest Elections” measure, or Initiative 122, a campaign finance reform plan offering a novel way of steering public funds to candidates who are willing to swear off big money PACs.

For supporters, the victory — authorizing the use by voters of publicly funded “democracy vouchers” that they can dole out to favored candidates — marks what they hope will be the first step forward in a wide-ranging reform effort spreading to other cities and states in the coming year….

The voucher model also is “a one-two punch” for candidates, Silver said. “They become more dependent on their constituents because their constituents become their funders, and No. 2, they’re part of what I would call a ‘dilution strategy’ — you dilute the space with lots of small-dollar contributions to offset the undue influence of super PACs.”

How “democracy vouchers” work

Beginning next summer, Seattle voters are expected to begin receiving $100 from the city, parceled out in four $25 vouchers, to contribute to local candidates who accept the new law’s restrictions, including not taking funds from PACs, adhering to strict spending caps, and enacting greater transparency. Candidates can redeem the vouchers with the city for real campaign cash, which will likely flow from increased property taxes.

The reform effort began at the grassroots, but morphed into a slickly managed operation that spent nearly $1.4 million, with more than half of that flowing from groups outside the city.

Alan Durning, founder of the nonprofit sustainability think tank Sightline, is an architect of the Seattle initiative. He believes the campaign helped identify a key problem with other reform plans.

“We know that one of the strongest arguments against public funding for campaigns is the idea of giving tax dollars to candidates that you disagree with,” Durning told CNN. “There are a lot of people who hate the idea.”

Currently, most such programs offer to match with public funds small donations for candidates who meet a host of varying requirements. In these cases, taxpayer money goes directly from the government to the campaigns, limiting voters’ connection to the process.

“The benefit of vouchers … is you can think about it as giving the first $100 of your own taxes to the candidate that you prefer,” Durning explained. “Your money is going to the candidate you send it to — so it keeps the choice with the individual voter.”

He added that the use of vouchers can also help the approach appeal to conservative voters, who generally are supportive of voucher-type programs and choice.

But critics call that a misleading argument.

“You’re still taking money from people and giving it to politicians who they may not necessarily want to support,” said Patrick Basham, the founder and director of the Democracy Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“Now, if you, as Voter X, give your four $25 vouchers to Candidate Y, then that’s your choice, but only some of [the money] came from you. It also came from other people.”…(More)”

Politics and the New Machine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Lepore in the NewYorker on “What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy”: “…The modern public-opinion poll has been around since the Great Depression, when the response rate—the number of people who take a survey as a percentage of those who were asked—was more than ninety. The participation rate—the number of people who take a survey as a percentage of the population—is far lower. Election pollsters sample only a minuscule portion of the electorate, not uncommonly something on the order of a couple of thousand people out of the more than two hundred million Americans who are eligible to vote. The promise of this work is that the sample is exquisitely representative. But the lower the response rate the harder and more expensive it becomes to realize that promise, which requires both calling many more people and trying to correct for “non-response bias” by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond. Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has recalled how, in the nineteen-eighties, when the response rate at the firm where he was working had fallen to about sixty per cent, people in his office said, “What will happen when it’s only twenty? We won’t be able to be in business!” A typical response rate is now in the single digits.

Meanwhile, polls are wielding greater influence over American elections than ever….

Still, data science can’t solve the biggest problem with polling, because that problem is neither methodological nor technological. It’s political. Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if it’s bad?

A “poll” used to mean the top of your head. Ophelia says of Polonius, “His beard as white as snow: All flaxen was his poll.” When voting involved assembling (all in favor of Smith stand here, all in favor of Jones over there), counting votes required counting heads; that is, counting polls. Eventually, a “poll” came to mean the count itself. By the nineteenth century, to vote was to go “to the polls,” where, more and more, voting was done on paper. Ballots were often printed in newspapers: you’d cut one out and bring it with you. With the turn to the secret ballot, beginning in the eighteen-eighties, the government began supplying the ballots, but newspapers kept printing them; they’d use them to conduct their own polls, called “straw polls.” Before the election, you’d cut out your ballot and mail it to the newspaper, which would make a prediction. Political parties conducted straw polls, too. That’s one of the ways the political machine worked….

Ever since Gallup, two things have been called polls: surveys of opinions and forecasts of election results. (Plenty of other surveys, of course, don’t measure opinions but instead concern status and behavior: Do you own a house? Have you seen a doctor in the past month?) It’s not a bad idea to reserve the term “polls” for the kind meant to produce election forecasts. When Gallup started out, he was skeptical about using a survey to forecast an election: “Such a test is by no means perfect, because a preelection survey must not only measure public opinion in respect to candidates but must also predict just what groups of people will actually take the trouble to cast their ballots.” Also, he didn’t think that predicting elections constituted a public good: “While such forecasts provide an interesting and legitimate activity, they probably serve no great social purpose.” Then why do it? Gallup conducted polls only to prove the accuracy of his surveys, there being no other way to demonstrate it. The polls themselves, he thought, were pointless…

If public-opinion polling is the child of a strained marriage between the press and the academy, data science is the child of a rocky marriage between the academy and Silicon Valley. The term “data science” was coined in 1960, one year after the Democratic National Committee hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from M.I.T., to provide strategic analysis in advance of the upcoming Presidential election. Pool and his team collected punch cards from pollsters who had archived more than sixty polls from the elections of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, representing more than a hundred thousand interviews, and fed them into a UNIVAC. They then sorted voters into four hundred and eighty possible types (for example, “Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrat”) and sorted issues into fifty-two clusters (for example, foreign aid). Simulmatics’ first task, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, was a study of “the Negro vote in the North.” Its report, which is thought to have influenced the civil-rights paragraphs added to the Party’s platform, concluded that between 1954 and 1956 “a small but significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1 per cent of the total votes in 8 key states.” After the nominating convention, the D.N.C. commissioned Simulmatics to prepare three more reports, including one that involved running simulations about different ways in which Kennedy might discuss his Catholicism….

Data science may well turn out to be as flawed as public-opinion polling. But a stage in the development of any new tool is to imagine that you’ve perfected it, in order to ponder its consequences. I asked Hilton to suppose that there existed a flawless tool for measuring public opinion, accurately and instantly, a tool available to voters and politicians alike. Imagine that you’re a member of Congress, I said, and you’re about to head into the House to vote on an act—let’s call it the Smeadwell-Nutley Act. As you do, you use an app called iThePublic to learn the opinions of your constituents. You oppose Smeadwell-Nutley; your constituents are seventy-nine per cent in favor of it. Your constituents will instantly know how you’ve voted, and many have set up an account with Crowdpac to make automatic campaign donations. If you vote against the proposed legislation, your constituents will stop giving money to your reëlection campaign. If, contrary to your convictions but in line with your iThePublic, you vote for Smeadwell-Nutley, would that be democracy? …(More)”

 

Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes: “Changing relations between science and democracy – and controversies over issues such as climate change, energy transitions, genetically modified organisms and smart technologies – have led to a rapid rise in new forms of public participation and citizen engagement. While most existing approaches adopt fixed meanings of ‘participation’ and are consumed by questions of method or critiquing the possible limits of democratic engagement, this book offers new insights that rethink public engagements with science, innovation and environmental issues as diverse, emergent and in the making. Bringing together leading scholars on science and democracy, working between science and technology studies, political theory, geography, sociology and anthropology, the volume develops relational and co-productionist approaches to studying and intervening in spaces of participation. New empirical insights into the making, construction, circulation and effects of participation across cultures are illustrated through examples ranging from climate change and energy to nanotechnology and mundane technologies, from institutionalised deliberative processes to citizen-led innovation and activism, and from the global north to global south. This new way of seeing participation in science and democracy opens up alternative paths for reconfiguring and remaking participation in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways….(More)”

Open government: a new paradigm in social change?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rosie Williams: In a recent speech to the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANSOG) annual conference, technology journalist and academic Suelette Drefyus explained the growing ‘information asymmetry’ that characterises the current-day relationship between government and citizenry.

According to Dreyfus:

‘Big Data makes government very powerful in its relationship with the citizen. This is even more so with the rise of intelligent systems, software that increasingly trawls, matches and analyses that Big Data. And it is moving toward making more decisions once made by human beings.’

The role of technology in the delivery of government services gives much food for thought in terms of both its implications for potential good and the potential dangers it may pose. The concept of open government is an important one for the future of policy and democracy in Australia. Open government has at its core a recognition that the world has changed, that the ways people engage and who they engage with has transformed in ways that governments around the world must respond to in both technological and policy terms.

As described in the ANSOG speech, the change within government in how it uses technology is well underway, however in many regards we are at the very beginning of understanding and implementing the potential of data and technology in providing solutions to many of our shared problems. Australia’s pending membership of the Open Government Partnership is integral to how Australia responds to these challenges. Membership of the multi-lateral partnership requires the Australian government to create a National Action Plan based on consultation and demonstrate our credentials in the areas of Fiscal Transparency, Access to Information, Income and Asset Disclosure, and Citizen Engagement.

What are the implications of the National Action Plan for policy consultation formulation, implementation and evaluation? In relative terms, Australia’s history with open government is fairly recent. Policies on open data have seen the roll out of data.gov.au – a repository of data published by government agencies and made available for re-use in efforts such as the author’s own financial transparency site OpenAus.

In this way citizen activity and government come together for the purposes of achieving open government. These efforts express a new paradigm in government and activism where the responsibility for solving the problems of democracy are shared between government and the people as opposed to the government ‘solving’ the problems of a passive, receptive citizenry.

As the famous whistle-blowers have shown, citizens are no longer passive but this new capability also requires a consciousness of the responsibilities and accountability that go along with the powers newly developed by citizen activists through technological change.

The opening of data and communication channels in the formulation of public policy provides a way forward to create both a better informed citizenry and also better informed policy evaluation. When new standards of transparency are applied to wicked problems what shortcomings does this highlight?

This question was tested with my recent request for a basic fact missing from relevant government research and reviews but key to social issues of homelessness and domestic violence….(More)”

Smart Citizens, Smarter State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 8.30.59 AMBook by Beth Simone Noveck (TheGovLab): “Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age.They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges. Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decision-making could be more effective and legitimate if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise.

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. She puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing, but in people’s knowledge and know-how.”

Check out http://smarterstate.org/

Privacy Bridges: EU and US Privacy Experts in Search of Transatlantic Privacy Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IVIR and MIT: “The EU and US share a common commitment to privacy protection as a cornerstone of democracy. Following the Treaty of Lisbon, data privacy is a fundamental right that the European Union must proactively guarantee. In the United States, data privacy derives from constitutional protections in the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment as well as federal and state statute, consumer protection law and common law. The ultimate goal of effective privacy protection is shared. However, current friction between the two legal systems poses challenges to realizing privacy and the free flow of information across the Atlantic. Recent expansion of online surveillance practices underline these challenges.

Over nine months, the group prepared a consensus report outlining a menu of privacy “bridges” that can be built to bring the European Union and the United States closer together. The efforts are aimed at providing a framework of practical options that advance strong, globally-accepted privacy values in a manner that respects the substantive and procedural differences between the two jurisdictions….

(More)”

Room for a View: Democracy as a Deliberative System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Involve: “Democratic reform comes in waves, propelled by technological, economic, political and social developments. There are periods of rapid change, followed by relative quiet.

We are currently in a period of significant political pressure for change to our institutions of democracy and government. With so many changes under discussion it is critically important that those proposing and carrying out reforms understand the impact that different reforms might have.

Most discussions of democratic reform focus on electoral democracy. However, for all their importance in the democratic system, elections rarely reveal what voters think clearly enough for elected representatives to act on them. Changing the electoral system will not alone significantly increase the level of democratic control held by citizens.

Room for a View, by Involve’s director Simon Burall, looks at democratic reform from a broader perspective than that of elections. Drawing on the work of democratic theorists, it uses a deliberative systems approach to examine the state of UK democracy. Rather than focusing exclusively on the extent to which individuals and communities are represented within institutions, it is equally concerned with the range of views present and how they interact.

Adapting the work of the democratic theorist John Dryzek, the report identifies seven components of the UK’s democratic system, describing and analysing the condition of each in turn. Assessing the UK’s democracy though this lens reveals it to be in fragile health. The representation of alternative views and narratives in all of the UK system’s seven components is poor, the components are weakly connected and, despite some positive signs, deliberative capacity is decreasing.

Room for a View suggests that a focus on the key institutions isn’t enough. If the health of UK democracy is to be improved, we need to move away from thinking about the representation of individual voters to thinking about the representation of views, perspectives and narratives. Doing this will fundamentally change the way we approach democratic reform.

Can non-Western democracy help to foster political transformation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Youngs at Open Democracy: “…many non-Western countries are showing signs of a newly-vibrant civic politics, organized in ways that are not centered on NGOs but on more loosely structured social movements in participatory forms of democracy where active citizenship is crucial—not just structured or formal, representative democratic institutions. Bolivia is a good example.

Many Western governments were skeptical about President Evo Morales’ political project, fearing that he would prove to be just as authoritarian as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But some Western donors (including Germany and the European Union) have already increased their support to indigenous social movements in Bolivia because they’ve become a vital channel of influence and accountability between government and society.

Secondly, it’s clear that the political dimensions of democracy will be undermined if economic conditions and inequalities are getting worse, so democracy promotion efforts need to be delinked from pressures to adopt neo-liberal economic policies. Western interests need to do more to prove that they are not supporting democracy primarily as a means to further their economic interest in ‘free markets.’ That’s why the European Union is supporting a growing number of projects designed to build up social insurance schemes during the early phases of democratic transitions. European diplomats, at least, say that they see themselves as supporters of social and economic democracy.

Donors are becoming more willing to support the role of labor unions in pro-democracy coalition-building; and to protect labor standards as a crucial part of political transitions in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Georgia, China, Egypt and Ecuador. But they should do more to assess how the embedded structures of economic power can undermine the quality of democratic processes. Support for civil society organizations that are keen on exploring heterodox economic models should also be stepped up.

Thirdly, non-Western structures and traditions can help to reduce violent conflict successfully. Tribal chiefs, traditional decision-making circles and customary dispute resolution mechanisms are commonplace in Africa and Asia, and have much to teach their counterparts in the West. In Afghanistan, for example, international organizations realized that the standard institutions of Western liberal democracy were gaining little traction, and were probably deepening rather than healing pre-existing divisions, so they’ve started to support local-level deliberative forums instead.

Something similar is happening in the Balkans, where the United States and the European Union are giving priority to locally tailored, consensual power-sharing arrangements. The United Nations is working with customary justice systems in Somalia. And in South Sudan and Kenya, donors have worked with tribal chiefs and supported traditional authorities to promote a better understanding of human rights and gender justice issues. These forms of power-sharing and ‘consensual communitarianism’ can be quite effective in protecting minorities while also encouraging dialogue and deliberation.

As these brief examples show, different countries can both offer and receive ideas about democratic transformation regardless of geography, though this is never straightforward. It involves finding a balance between defending genuinely-universal norms on the one hand, and encouraging democratic experimentation on the other. This is a thin line to walk, and it requires, for example, recognition that the basic precepts of liberal democracy are not synonymous with what can be seen as an amoral individualism, particularly in highly religious communities.

Pro-democracy reformers and civic groups in non-Western countries often take international organizations to task for pushing too hard on questions of ‘Western liberal rights’ rather than supporting variations to the standard, individualist template, even where tribal structures and traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms work reasonably well. This has led to resistance against international support in places as diverse as Libya, Mali and Pakistan…..

Academic critical theorists argue that Western democracy promoters fail to take alternative models of democracy on board because they would endanger their own geostrategic and economic interests….(More)”

Understanding democracy as a product of citizen performances reduces the need for a defined ‘people’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Liron Lavi at Democratic Audit: “Dēmokratía, literally ‘the rule of the people’, is the basis for democracy as a political regime. However, ‘the people’ is a heterogeneous, open, and dynamic entity. So, how can we think about democracy without the people as a coherent entity, yet as the source of democracy? I employ a performative theorisation of democracy in order to answer this question. Democracy, I suggest, is an effect produced by repetitive performative acts and ‘the people’ is produced as the source of democratic sovereignty.

A quick search on ‘democratic performance’ will usually yield results (and concerns) regarding voter competence, government accountability, liberal values, and legitimacy. However, from the perspective of performative theory, the term gains a rather different meaning (as has been discussed at length by Judith Butler). It suggests that democracy is not a pre-given structure but rather needs to be constructed repeatedly. Thus, for a democracy to be recognised and maintained as such it needs to be performed by citizens, institutions, office-holders, the media, etc. Acts made by these players – voting, demonstrating, decision- and- law-making, etc. – give form to the abstract concept of democracy, thus producing it as their (imagined) source. There is, therefore, no finite set of actions that can determine once and for all that a social structure is indeed a democracy, for the regime is not a stable and pre-given structure, but rather produced and imagined through a multitude of acts and procedures.

Elections, for example, are a democratic performance insofar as they are perceived as an effective tool for expressing the public’s preferences and choosing its representatives and desired policies. Polling stations are therefore the site in which democracy is constituted insofar as all eligible members (can) participate in the act of voting, and therefore are constructed as the source of sovereignty. By this, elections produce democracy as their effect, as their source, and hold together the political imagination of democracy. And they do this periodically, thus open options for new variations (and failures) in the democratic effect they produce. Elections are therefore, not only an opportunity to replace representatives and incumbents, but also an opportunity to perform democracy, shape it, alter it, and load it with various meanings….(More)”

Proudly powered by WordPress