democracy

Designing digital democracy: a short guide

Curated on May 18, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan at NESTA: “I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light….

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones…..

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’…..

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. …

Clarity on identity and anonymity

…. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation….(More)

What’s gone wrong with democracy

Curated on May 11, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay in The Economist: “Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it?….

Even those lucky enough to live in mature democracies need to pay close attention to the architecture of their political systems. The combination of globalisation and the digital revolution has made some of democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated. Established democracies need to update their own political systems both to address the problems they face at home, and to revitalise democracy’s image abroad. Some countries have already embarked upon this process. America’s Senate has made it harder for senators to filibuster appointments. A few states have introduced open primaries and handed redistricting to independent boundary commissions. Other obvious changes would improve matters. Reform of party financing, so that the names of all donors are made public, might reduce the influence of special interests. The European Parliament could require its MPs to present receipts with their expenses. Italy’s parliament has far too many members who are paid too much, and two equally powerful chambers, which makes it difficult to get anything done.

But reformers need to be much more ambitious. The best way to constrain the power of special interests is to limit the number of goodies that the state can hand out. And the best way to address popular disillusion towards politicians is to reduce the number of promises they can make. The key to a healthier democracy, in short, is a narrower state—an idea that dates back to the American revolution. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men”, Madison argued, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The notion of limited government was also integral to the relaunch of democracy after the second world war. The United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) established rights and norms that countries could not breach, even if majorities wanted to do so.

These checks and balances were motivated by fear of tyranny. But today, particularly in the West, the big dangers to democracy are harder to spot. One is the growing size of the state. The relentless expansion of government is reducing liberty and handing ever more power to special interests. The other comes from government’s habit of making promises that it cannot fulfil, either by creating entitlements it cannot pay for or by waging wars that it cannot win, such as that on drugs. Both voters and governments must be persuaded of the merits of accepting restraints on the state’s natural tendency to overreach. Giving control of monetary policy to independent central banks tamed the rampant inflation of the 1980s, for example. It is time to apply the same principle of limited government to a broader range of policies. Mature democracies, just like nascent ones, require appropriate checks and balances on the power of elected government….

Several places are making progress towards getting this mixture right. The most encouraging example is California. Its system of direct democracy allowed its citizens to vote for contradictory policies, such as higher spending and lower taxes, while closed primaries and gerrymandered districts institutionalised extremism. But over the past five years California has introduced a series of reforms, thanks in part to the efforts of Nicolas Berggruen, a philanthropist and investor. The state has introduced a “Think Long” committee to counteract the short-term tendencies of ballot initiatives. It has introduced open primaries and handed power to redraw boundaries to an independent commission. And it has succeeded in balancing its budget—an achievement which Darrell Steinberg, the leader of the California Senate, described as “almost surreal”.

Similarly, the Finnish government has set up a non-partisan commission to produce proposals for the future of its pension system. At the same time it is trying to harness e-democracy: parliament is obliged to consider any citizens’ initiative that gains 50,000 signatures. But many more such experiments are needed—combining technocracy with direct democracy, and upward and downward delegation—if democracy is to zigzag its way back to health.

John Adams, America’s second president, once pronounced that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” He was clearly wrong. Democracy was the great victor of the ideological clashes of the 20th century. But if democracy is to remain as successful in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, it must be both assiduously nurtured when it is young—and carefully maintained when it is mature….(More)

Enhancing Social Accountability Through ICT: Success Factors and Challenges

Curated on May 9, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Wakabi, Wairagala and Grönlund, Åke for the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2015: “This paper examines the state of citizen participation in public accountability processes via Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It draws on three projects that use ICT to report public service delivery failures in Uganda, mainly in the education, public health and the roads sectors. While presenting common factors hampering meaningful use of ICT for citizens’ monitoring of public services and eParticipation in general, the paper studies the factors that enabled successful whistle blowing using toll free calling, blogging, radio talk shows, SMS texting, and e-mailing. The paper displays examples of the positive impacts of whistle-blowing mechanisms and draws up a list of success factors applicable to these projects. It also outlines common challenges and drawbacks to initiatives that use ICT to enable citizen participation in social accountability. The paper provides pathways that could give ICT-for-participation and for-accountability initiatives in countries with characteristics similar to Uganda a good chance of achieving success. While focusing on Uganda, the paper may be of practical value to policy makers, development practitioners and academics in countries with similar socio-economic standings….(More)”

Transparency in search of a theory

Curated on April 24, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Fenster in the European Journal of Social Theory: “Transparency’s importance as an administrative norm seems self-evident. Prevailing ideals of political theory stipulate that the more visible government is, the more democratic, accountable, and legitimate it appears. The disclosure of state information consistently disappoints, however: there is never enough of it, while it often seems not to produce a truer democracy, a more accountable state, better policies, and a more contented populace. This gap between theory and practice suggests that the theoretical assumptions that provide the basis for transparency are wrong. This article argues that transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public. Taking them fully into account, the article argues, should lead us to question the state’s ability to control information, which in turn should make us question not only the improbability of the state making itself visible, but also the improbability of the state keeping itself secret…(More)”

Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization

Curated on April 22, 2015October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Shoshana Zuboff in the Journal of Information Technology: “This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ Google is to surveillance capitalism what General Motors was to managerial capitalism. Therefore the institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries long evolution of market capitalism….(More)”

New Interactive Citizen-Generated Data Platform

Curated on April 21, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DataShift: “Following a study to better understand the number, type and scale of citizen-generated data initiatives across the world, the DataShift has visualised the resulting data to create an interactive online platform. Users are presented with a definition of a citizen-generated data initiative before being invited to browse the multiple initiatives according to the various themes that they address….(More)”

Rebooting Democracy

Curated on April 1, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

John Boik, Lorenzo Fioramonti, and Gary Milante at Foreign Policy: “….The next generation of political and economic systems may look very different from the ones we know today.

Some changes along these lines are already happening. Civil society groups, cities, organizations, and government agencies have begun to experiment with a host of innovations that promote decentralization, redundancy, inclusion, and diversity. These include participatory budgeting, where residents of a city democratically choose how public monies are spent. They also include local currency systems, open-source development, open-design, open-data and open-government, public banking, “buy local” campaigns, crowdfunding, and socially responsible business models.

Such innovations are a type of churning on the edges of current systems. But in complex systems, changes at the periphery can cascade to changes at the core. Further, the speed of change is increasing. Consider the telephone, first introduced by Bell in 1876. It took about 75 years to reach adoption by 50 percent of the market. A century later the Internet did the same in about 35 years. We can expect that the next major innovations will be adopted even faster.

Following the examples of the telephone and Internet, it appears likely that the technology of new economic and political decision-making systems will first be adopted by small groups, then spread virally. Indeed, small groups, such as neighborhoods and cities, are among today’s leaders in innovation. The influence of larger bodies, such as big corporations and non-governmental organizations, is also growing steadily as nation states increasingly share their powers, willingly or not.

Changes are evident even within large corporations. Open-source software development has become the norm, for example, and companies as large as Toyota have announced plans to freely share their intellectual property.

While these innovations represent potentially important parts of new political and economic systems, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Systems engineering design could eventually integrate these and other innovations into efficient, user-friendly, scalable, and resilient whole systems. But the need for this kind of innovation is not yet universally acknowledged. In its list of 14 grand challenges for the 21st century, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering addresses many of the problems caused by poor decision making, such as climate change, but not the decision-making systems themselves. The work has only just begun.

…

The development of new options will dramatically alter how democracy is used, adjusted, and exported. Attention will shift toward groups, perhaps at the city/regional level, who wish to apply the flexible tools freely available on the Internet. Future practitioners of democracy will invest more time and resources to understand what communities want and need — helping them adapt designs to make them fit for their purpose — and to build networked systems that beneficially connect diverse groups into larger political and economic structures. In time, when the updates to next-generation political and economic near completion, we might find ourselves more fully embracing the notion “engage local, think global.”…(More)

We, the government

Curated on March 31, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Davied van Berlo has published a new book about the role of government in the network society. It has not yet been published in English but can be downloaded in Dutch at boek.ambtenaar20.nl.

The Civil Servant 2.0 book is available in English.”

About “We, the government”:

“The network society. Everybody’s talking about it, but what does it really mean? What effect does the networking age in society have on government? The public good is no longer just a government issue but a cocreation between government and society. However, what will this collaboration look like and will we be able to execute political goals in such a networked society?

In his third book Davied van Berlo, writer of Civil Servant 2.0 and Civil Servant 2.0 beta, explores the role of government in the network society. “We, the government” gives a new perspective on the working of government and offers civil servants and public officials a hand in shaping their new role in society.”…

Davied has used parts of his new book in the presentation he gave to the Dutch chapter of the Internet Society, see the video. Below the video an english version of the Prezi is available….(More)”

The perils of extreme democracy

Curated on March 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “California cannot pass timely budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50 states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and Hollywood—be so poorly governed? ….But as our special report this week argues, the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from education to the regulation of chicken coops.

This citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California’s finances, shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications. And they have impoverished the state’s representative government. Who would want to sit in a legislature where 70-90% of the budget has already been allocated?

This has been a tragedy for California, but it matters far beyond the state’s borders. Around half of America’s states and an increasing number of countries have direct democracy in some form (article). Next month Britain will have its first referendum for years (on whether to change its voting system), and there is talk of voter recalls for aberrant MPs. The European Union has just introduced the first supranational initiative process. With technology making it ever easier to hold referendums and Western voters ever more angry with their politicians, direct democracy could be on the march.

And why not? There is, after all, a successful model: in Switzerland direct democracy goes back to the Middle Ages at the local level and to the 19th century at the federal. This mixture of direct and representative democracy seems to work well. Surely it is just a case of California (which explicitly borrowed the Swiss model) executing a good idea poorly?

Not entirely. Very few people, least of all this newspaper, want to ban direct democracy. Indeed, in some cases referendums are good things: they are a way of holding a legislature to account. In California reforms to curb gerrymandering and non-partisan primaries, both improvements, have recently been introduced by initiatives; and they were pushed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a governor elected through the recall process. But there is a strong case for proceeding with caution, especially when it comes to allowing people to circumvent a legislature with citizen-made legislation.

The debate about the merits of representative and direct democracy goes back to ancient times. To simplify a little, the Athenians favoured pure democracy (“people rule”, though in fact oligarchs often had the last word); the Romans chose a republic, as a “public thing”, where representatives could make trade-offs for the common good and were accountable for the sum of their achievements. America’s Founding Fathers, especially James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, backed the Romans. Indeed, in their guise of “Publius” in the “Federalist Papers”, Madison and Hamilton warn against the dangerous “passions” of the mob and the threat of “minority factions” (ie, special interests) seizing the democratic process.

Proper democracy is far more than a perpetual ballot process. It must include deliberation, mature institutions and checks and balances such as those in the American constitution. Ironically, California imported direct democracy almost a century ago as a “safety valve” in case government should become corrupt. The process began to malfunction only relatively recently. With Proposition 13, it stopped being a valve and instead became almost the entire engine.

….More important, direct democracy must revert to being a safety valve, not the engine. Initiatives should be far harder to introduce. They should be shorter and simpler, so that voters can actually understand them. They should state what they cost, and where that money is to come from. And, if successful, initiatives must be subject to amendment by the legislature. Those would be good principles to apply to referendums, too….(More)”