Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Klint Finley in Wired: “This is the decade of the protest. The Arab Spring. The Occupy Movement. And now the student demonstrations in Taiwan.
Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped up in countries that are at least nominally democratic, but so many people are still unhappy with their elected leaders. The problem, Mancini says, is that elected officials have drifted so far from the people they represent, that it’s too hard for the average person to be heard.
“If you want to participate in the political system as it is, it’s really costly,” she says. “You need to study politics in university, and become a party member and work your way up. But not every citizen can devote their lives to politics.”

Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them.

That’s why Mancini started the Net Democracy foundation, a not-for-profit that explores ways of improving civic engagement through technology. The foundation’s first project is something called Democracy OS, an online platform for debating and voting on political issues, and it’s already finding a place in the world. The federal government in Mexico is using this open-source tool to gather feedback on a proposed public data policy, and in Tunisia, a non-government organization called iWatch has adopted it in an effort to give the people a stronger voice.
Mancini’s dissatisfaction with electoral politics stems from her experience working for the Argentine political party Unión Celeste y Blanco from 2010 until 2012. “I saw some practices that I thought were harmful to societies,” she says. Parties were too interested in the appearances of the candidates, and not interested enough in their ideas. Worse, citizens were only consulted for their opinions once every two to four years, meaning politicians could get away with quite a bit in the meantime.
Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them. It operates on three levels: one for gathering information about political issues, one for public debate about those issues, and one for actually voting on specific proposals.
Various communities now use a tool called Madison to discuss policy documents, and many activists and community organizations have adopted Loomio to make decisions internally. But Democracy OS aims higher: to provide a common platform for any city, state, or government to actually put proposals to a vote. “We’re able to actually overthrow governments, but we’re not using technology to decide what to do next,” Mancini says. “So the risk is that we create power vacuums that get filled with groups that are already very well organized. So now we need to take it a bit further. We need to decide what democracy for the internet era looks like.”
Image: Courtesy of Net Democracy

Software Shop as Political Party

Today Net Democracy is more than just a software development shop. It’s also a local political party based in Beunos Aires. Two years ago, the foundation started pitching the first prototype of the software to existing political parties as a way for them to gather feedback from constituents, but it didn’t go over well. “They said: ‘Thank you, this is cool, but we’re not interested,’” Mancini remembers. “So we decided to start our own political party.”
The Net Democracy Party hasn’t won any seats yet, but it promises that if it does, it will use Democracy OS to enable any local registered voter to tell party representatives how to vote. Mancini says the party representatives will always vote the way constituents tell them to vote through the software.

‘We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time. What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.’

She also uses the term “net democracy” to refer to the type of democracy that the party advocates, a form of delegative democracy that attempts to strike a balance between representative democracy and direct democracy. “We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time,” Mancini explains. “What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.”
Individuals will also be able to delegate their votes to other people. “So, if you’re not comfortable voting on health issues, you can delegate to someone else to vote for you in that area,” she says. “That way people with a lot of experience in an issue, like a community leader who doesn’t have lobbyist access to the system, can build more political capital.”
She envisions a future where decisions are made on two levels. Decisions that involve specific knowledge — macroeconomics, tax reforms, judiciary regulations, penal code, etc. — or that affect human rights are delegated “upwards” to representatives. But then decisions related to local issues — transport, urban development, city codes, etc. — cab be delegated “downwards” to the citizens.

The Secret Ballot Conundrum

Ensuring the integrity of the votes gathered via Democracy OS will be a real challenge. The U.S. non-profit organization Black Box Voting has long criticized electronic voting schemes as inherently flawed. “Our criticism of internet voting is that it is not transparent and cannot be made publicly transparent,” says Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris. “With transparency for election integrity defined as public ability to see and authenticate four things: who can vote, who did vote, vote count, and chain of custody.”
In short, there’s no known way to do a secret ballot online because any system for verifying that the votes were counted properly will inevitably reveal who voted for what.
Democracy OS deals with that by simply doing away with secret ballots. For now, the Net Democracy party will have people sign-up for Democracy OS accounts in person with their government issued ID cards. “There is a lot to be said about how anonymity allows you to speak more freely,” Mancini says. “But in the end, we decided to prioritize the reliability, accountability and transparency of the system. We believe that by making our arguments and decisions public we are fostering a civic culture. We will be more responsible for what we say and do if it’s public.”
But making binding decisions based on these online discussions would be problematic, since they would skew not just towards those tech savvy enough to use the software, but also towards those willing to have their names attached to their votes publicly. Fortunately, the software isn’t yet being used to gather real votes, just to gather public feedback….”

Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Jacobin: “The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes what was the domain of elites.
Most on the Left would endorse these ends. The widespread availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals in some form. Yet the Left today is scattered, nearly toothless in most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?
Part of this disconnect between advancing technology and a retreating left can be explained by the advent of cyberlibertarianism, a view that widespread computerization naturally produces democracy and freedom.
In the 1990s, UK media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, US journalist Paulina Borsook, and US philosopher of technology Langdon Winner introduced the term to describe a prominent worldview in Silicon Valley and digital culture generally; a related analysis can be found more recently in Stanford communication scholar Fred Turner’s work. While cyberlibertarianism can be defined as a general digital utopianism, summed up by a simple slogan like “computerization will set us free” or “computers provide the solution to any and all problems,” these writers note a specific political formation — one Winner describes as “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.”
There are overt libertarians who are also digital utopians — figures like Jimmy Wales, Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Dread Pirate Roberts, and Sergey Brin, and the members of the Technology Liberation Front who explicitly describe themselves as cyberlibertarians. But the term also describes a wider ideological formation in which people embrace digital utopianism as compatible or even identical with leftist politics opposed to neoliberalism.
In perhaps the most pointed form of cyberlibertarianism, computer expertise is seen as directly applicable to social questions.  In The Cultural Logic of Computation, I argue that computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power. To the extent that algorithmic forms of reason and social organization can be said to have an inherent politics, these have long been understood as compatible with political formations on the Right rather than the Left.
Yet today, “hacktivists” and other promoters of the liberatory nature of mass computerization are prominent political voices, despite their overall political commitments remaining quite unclear. They are championed by partisans of both the Right and the Left as if they obviously serve the political ends of each. One need only reflect on the leftist support for a project like Open Source software to notice the strange and under-examined convergence of the Right and Left around specifically digital practices whose underlying motivations are often explicitly libertarian. Open Source is a deliberate commercialization of Richard Stallman’s largely noncommercial notion ofFree Software (see Stallman himself on the distinction). Open Source is widely celebrated by libertarians and corporations, and was started by libertarian Eric Raymond and programmer Bruce Perens, with support from businessman and corporate sympathizer Tim O’Reilly. Today the term Open Source has wide currency as a political imperative outside the software development community, despite its place on the Right-Left spectrum being at best ambiguous, and at worst explicitly libertarian and pro-corporate.
When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their work…”

Is Participatory Budgeting Real Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Clark in NextCity: “Drawing from a practice pioneered 25 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil and imported to North America via progressive leaders in Toronto and Quebec, participatory budgeting cracks open the closed-door process of fiscal decision-making in cities, letting citizens vote on exactly how government money is spent in their community. It’s an auspicious departure from traditional ways of allocating tax dollars, let alone in Chicago, which has long been known for deeply entrenched machine politics. As Alderman Joe Moore puts it, in Chicago, “so many decisions are made from the top down.”
Participatory budgeting works pretty simply in the 49th Ward. Instead of Moore deciding how to spend $1.3 million in “menu money” that is allotted annually to each of Chicago’s 50 council members for capital improvements, the councilman opens up a public process to determine how to spend $1 million of the allotment. The remaining $300,000 is socked away in the bank for emergencies and cost overruns.
And the unusual vote on $1 million in menu money is open to a wider swath of the community than your standard Election Day: you don’t have to be a citizen to cast a ballot, and the voting age is sixteen.
Thanks to the process, Rogers Park can now boast of a new community garden, dozens of underpass murals, heating shelters at three transit stations, hundreds of tree plantings, an outdoor shower at Loyola Park, a $110,000 dog park, and eye-catching “You Are Here” neighborhood information boards at transit station entrances.
…
Another prominent supporter of participatory budgeting? The White House. In December—about eight months after Joe Moore met with President Barack Obama about bringing participatory budgeting to the federal level—PB became an option for determining how to spend community development block-grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Obama administration also declared that, in a yet-to-be-detailed partnership, it will help create tools that can be used for participatory budgeting on a local level.
All this activity has so far added up to $45 million in tax dollars allocated to 203 voter-approved projects across the country. Some 46,000 people and 500 organizations nationwide have been part of the decision-making, according to the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project.
….
But to fulfill this vision, the process needs resources behind it—enough funds for projects to demonstrate a visible community benefit, and ample capacity from the facilitators of the process (whether it’s district officials or city hall) to truly reach out to the community. Without intention and capacity, PB risks duplicating the process of elections for ordinary representative democracy, where white middle- and upper-class voters are far more likely to vote and therefore enjoy an outsized influence on their neighborhood.
…
Participatory budgeting works differently for every city. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the process was created a generation ago by The Worker’s Party to give disadvantaged people a stronger voice in government, as many as 50,000 people vote on how to spend public money each year. More than $700 million has been funneled through the process since its inception. Vallejo, Calif., embraced participatory budgeting in 2012 after emerging from bankruptcy as part of its citywide reinvention. In its first PB vote in May 2013, 3,917 residents voted over the course of a week at 13 polling locations. That translated into four percent of the city’s eligible voters—a tiny number, but a much higher percentage than previous PB processes in Chicago and New York.
But the 5th Ward in Hyde Park, a South Side neighborhood that’s home to the University of Chicago, dropped PB in December, citing low turnout in neighborhood assemblies and residents who felt the process was too much work to be worthwhile. “They said it was very time consuming, a lot of meetings, and that they thought the neighborhood groups that they had were active enough to do it without having all of the expenses that were associated with it,” Alderman Leslie Hairston told the Hyde Park Herald. In 2013, its first year with participatory budgeting, the 5th Ward held a PB vote that saw only 100 ballots cast.
Josh Lerner of the Participatory Budgeting Project says low turnout is a problem that can be solved through outreach and promotion. “It is challenging to do this without capacity,” he said. Internationally, according to Lerner, PB is part of a city administration, with a whole office coordinating the process. Without the backing from City Hall in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting would have a hard time attracting the tens of thousands who now count themselves as part of the process. And even with the support from City Hall, the 50,000 participants represent less than one percent of the city’s population of 1.4 million.
…
So what’s next for participatory budgeting in Rogers Park and beyond?
Well, first off, Rahm Emanuel’s new Manager of Participatory Budgeting will be responsible for supporting council districts if and when they opt to go participatory. There won’t be a requirement to do so, but if a district wishes to follow the 49th, they will have high-level backup from City Hall.
But this new manager—as well as Chicago’s aldermen and engaged citizens—must understand that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for participatory budgeting. The process must be adapted to the unique needs and culture of each district if it is to resonate with locals. And timing is key for rolling out the process.
While still in the hazy early days, federal support through the new White House initiative may also prove crucial in streamlining the participatory budgeting process, easing the burden on local leaders and citizens, and ultimately generating better participation—and, therefore, better on-the-ground results in communities around the country.
One of the key lessons of participatory budgeting—as with democracy more broadly—is that efficiency is not the highest value in the public sphere. It would be much easier and more cost-effective for aldermen to return to the old days and simply check off the boxes for where he or she thinks menu money should be spent. “We could sign off on menu money in a couple hours, a couple days,” Vandercook said. By choosing the participatory path, aldermen effectively create more work for themselves. They risk low rates of participation and the possibility that winning projects may not be the most worthy. Scalability, too, is a problem — the larger the community served by the process, the more difficult it is to ensure that both the process and the resulting projects reflect the needs of the entire community.
Nonetheless, participatory budgeting serves a harder-to-measure purpose that may well be, in the final accounting, more important. It is a profound civic education for citizens, who dig into both the limits and possibilities of public money. They experience what their elected leaders must navigate every day. But it’s also a civic education for council members and city staff who may find that they are engaging with those they represent more than they ever had before, learning about what they value most. Owen Burgh, chief of staff for Alderman Joe Arena in Chicago’s 45th Ward, told the Participatory Budgeting Project, “I was really surprised by the amazing knowledge base we have among our volunteers. So many of our volunteers came to the process with a background where they understood some principles of traffic management, community development and urban planning. It was very refreshing. Usually, in an alderman’s office, people contact us to fix an isolated problem. Through this process, we discussed not just what needed to be fixed but what we wanted our community to be.”
The participatory budgeting process expands the scope and depth of civic spaces in the community, where elected leaders work with—not for—residents. Even for those who do not show up to vote, there is an empowerment that comes simply in knowing that they could; the sincere invitation to participate matters, whether or not it is accepted…”

The California Report Card

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The California Report Card (CRC) is an online platform developed by the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley and Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom that explores how smartphones and networks can enhance communication between the public and government leaders. The California Report Card allows visitors to grade issues facing California and to suggest issues for future report cards.

The CRC is a mobile-optimized web application that allows participants to advise the state government on timely policy issues.  We are exploring how technology can streamline and structure input from the public to elected officials, to provide them with timely feedback on the changing opinions and priorities of their constituents.

Version 1.0 of the CRC was launched in California on 28 January 2014. Since then, over 7000 people from almost every county have assigned over 20,000 grades to the State of California and suggested issues for the next report card.
Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom: “The California Report Card is a new way for me to keep an ear to the ground.  This new app/website makes it easy for Californians to assign grades and suggest pressing issues that merit our attention.  In the first few weeks, participants conveyed that they approve of our rollout of Obamacare but are very concerned about the future of California schools and universities.  I’m also gaining insights on issues ranging from speed limits to fracking to disaster preparedness.”
“This platform allows us to have our voices heard. The ability to review and grade what others suggest is important. It enables us and elected officials to hear directly how Californians feel.” – Matt Harris, Truck Driver, Ione, CA
“This is the first system that lets us directly express our feelings to government leaders.  I also really enjoy reading and grading the suggestions from other participants.”  – Patricia Ellis Pasko, Senior Care Giver, Apple Valley, CA
“Everyone knows that report cards can motivate learning by providing quantitative feedback on strengths and weaknesses.  Similarly, the California Report Card has potential to motivate Californians and their leaders to learn from each other about timely issues.  As researchers, the patterns of participation and how they vary over time and across geography will help us learn how to design future platforms.” – Prof. Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley.
It takes only two minutes and works on all screens (best on mobile phones held vertically), just click “Participate“.
Anyone can participate by taking a few minutes to assign grades to the State of California on issues such as: Healthcare, Education, Marriage Equality, Immigrant Rights, and Marijuana Decriminalization. Participants are also invited to enter an online “cafe” to propose issues that they’d like to see included in the next report card (version 2.0 will come out later this Spring).
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and UC Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg reviewed the data and lessons learned from version 1.0 in a public forum at UC Berkeley on 20 March 2014 that included participants who actively contributed to identifying the most important issues for version 2.0. The event can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1kv6523.
We offer community outreach programs/workshops to train local leaders on how to use the CRC and how to reach and engage under-represented groups (low-income, rural, persons with disabilities, etc.). If you are interested in participating in or hosting a workshop, please contact Brandie Nonnecke at nonnecke@citris-uc.org”

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page :”Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.
While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism –Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate) Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.
Each of these theoretical traditions has given rise to a large body of literature. Each is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence – some of it quantitative, some historical, some observational – concerning the importance of various sets of actors (or, all too often, a single set of actors) in U.S. policy making. This literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how American politics works and has helped illuminate how democratic or undemocratic (in various senses) our policy making process actually is. Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the diffe ring predictions of these theories against each other within a single statistical model that permits one to analyze
the independent effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.
Here – in a tentative and preliminary way – we offer such test, bringing a unique data set to bear on the problem. Our measures are far from
perfect, but we hope that this first step will help inspire further research into what we see as some of the most fundamental questions about American politics…”

Twenty-one European Cities Advance in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge Competition to Create Innovative Solutions to Urban Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today revealed the 21 European cities that have emerged as final contenders in its 2013-2014 Mayors Challenge, a competition to inspire cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life, and that ultimately can spread to other cities. One grand prize winner will receive €5 million for the most creative and transferable idea. Four additional cities will be awarded €1 million, and all will be announced in the fall. The finalists’ proposed solutions address some of Europe’s most critical issue areas: youth unemployment, aging populations, civic engagement, economic development, environment and energy concerns, public health and safety, and making government more efficient…
James Anderson, the head of government innovation for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said: “While the ideas are very diverse, we identified key themes. The ideas tended toward networked, distributed solutions as opposed to costly centralized ones. There was a lot of interest in citizen engagement as both a means and end. Technology that concretely and positively affects the lives of individual citizens – from the blind person in Warsaw to the unemployed youth in Amsterdam to the homeowner in Schaerbeek — also played a significant role.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies staff and an independent selection committee of 12 members from across Europe closely considered each application over multiple rounds of review, culminating in feedback and selection earlier this month, resulting in 21 cities’ ideas moving forward for further development. The submissions will be judged on four critieria: vision, potential for impact, implementation plan, and potential to spread to other cities. The finalists and their ideas are:

  1. AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Youth Unemployment: Tackling widespread youth unemployment by equipping young people with 21st century skills and connecting them with jobs and apprenticeships across Europe through an online game
  2. ATHENS, Greece – Civic Engagement: Empowering citizens with a new online platform to address the large number of small-scale urban challenges accelerated by the Greek economic crisis
  3. BARCELONA, Spain – Aging: Improving quality of life and limiting social isolation by establishing a network of public and private support – including family, friends, social workers, and volunteers – for each elderly citizen
  4. BOLOGNA, Italy – Youth Unemployment: Building an urban scale model of informal education labs and civic engagement to prevent youth unemployment by teaching children aged 6-16 entrepreneurship and 21st century skills
  5. BRISTOL, United Kingdom – Health/Anti-obesity: Tackling obesity and unemployment by creating a new economic system that increases access to locally grown, healthy foods
  6. BRNO, Czech Republic – Public Safety/Civic Engagement: Engaging citizens in keeping their own communities safe to build social cohesion and reduce crime
  7. CARDIFF, United Kingdom – Economic Development: Increasing productivity little by little in residents’ personal and professional lives, so that a series of small improvements add up to a much more productive city
  8. FLORENCE, Italy – Economic Development: Combatting unemployment with a new economic development model that combines technology and social innovation, targeting the city’s historic artisan and maker community
  9. GDAŃSK, Poland – Civic Engagement: Re-instilling faith in local democracy by mandating that city government formally debate local issues put forward by citizens
  10. KIRKLEES, United Kingdom – Social Capital: Pooling the city and community’s idle assets – from vehicles to unused spaces to citizens’ untapped time and expertise – to help the area make the most of what it has and do more with less
  11. KRAKOW, Poland – Transportation: Implementing smart, personalized transportation incentives and a seamless and unified public transit payment system to convince residents to opt for greener modes of transportation
  12. LISBON, Portugal – Energy: Transforming wasted kinetic energy generated by the city’s commuting traffic into electricity, reducing the carbon footprint and increasing environmental sustainability
  13. LONDON, United Kingdom – Public Health: Empowering citizens to monitor and improve their own health through a coordinated, multi-stakeholder platform and new technologies that dramatically improve quality of life and reduce health care costs
  14. MADRID, Spain – Energy: Diversifying its renewable energy options by finding and funding the best ways to harvest underground power, such as wasted heat generated by the city’s below-ground infrastructure
  15. SCHAERBEEK, Belgium – Energy: Using proven flyover and 3D geothermal mapping technology to provide each homeowner and tenant with a personalized energy audit and incentives to invest in energy-saving strategies
  16. SOFIA, Bulgaria – Civic Engagement: Transforming public spaces by deploying mobile art units to work side-by-side with local residents, re-envisioning and rejuvenating underused spaces and increasing civic engagement
  17. STARA ZAGORA, Bulgaria – Economic Development: Reversing the brain-drain of the city’s best and brightest by helping young entrepreneurs turn promising ideas into local high-tech businesses
  18. STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Environment: Combatting climate change by engaging citizens to produce biochar, an organic material that increases tree growth, sequesters carbon, and purifies storm runoff
  19. THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Civic Engagement: Enabling citizens to allocate a portion of their own tax money to support the local projects they most believe in
  20. WARSAW, Poland – Transportation/Accessibility: Enabling the blind and visually impaired to navigate the city as easily as their sighted peers by providing high-tech auditory alerts which will save them travel time and increase their independence
  21. YORK, United Kingdom – Government Systems: Revolutionizing the way citizens, businesses, and others can propose new ideas to solve top city problems, providing a more intelligent way to acquire or develop the best solutions, thus enabling greater civic participation and saving the city both time and money

Further detail and related elements for this year’s Mayors Challenge can be found via: http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/”

Finland opens new portal launched to support transparency and interaction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Epractice:” The Ministry of Justice (of Finland) has launched a new portal, demokratia.fi, which gathers together information from various democracy-related sites and news in the field of political decision-making. The site thereby makes it easier for citizens to find the best channels for participation and influence, and increases government transparency and interaction.
Demokratia.fi summarises the eDemocracy web services maintained by the Ministry of Justice, namely otakantaa.fi, kansalaisaloite.fi and kuntalaisaloite.fi. Later in spring 2014, a fourth site will be added, lausuntopalvelu.fi, which is intended to streamline the consultation procedures and make it transparent and open to the public. The service will digitise the current consultation process.
The administration is acting in accordance with the principles of the Finnish action plan for open government, to strengthen citizens’ rights to information and participation in the development of common solutions and services. Matters that are under preparation should be reported at an early stage of preparations so that citizens have genuine opportunities to influence the process.
Demokrati.fi also contains links to other public authorities’ websites with information on current matters that are being planned or prepared. In addition, it highlights the latest news from, for example, the parliament and the government.”

Book Review: 'The Rule of Nobody' by Philip K. Howard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stuart Taylor Jr in the Wall Street Journal: “Amid the liberal-conservative ideological clash that paralyzes our government, it’s always refreshing to encounter the views of Philip K. Howard, whose ideology is common sense spiked with a sense of urgency. In “The Rule of Nobody,” Mr. Howard shows how federal, state and local laws and regulations have programmed officials of both parties to follow rules so detailed, rigid and, often, obsolete as to leave little room for human judgment. He argues passionately that we will never solve our social problems until we abandon what he calls a misguided legal philosophy of seeking to put government on regulatory autopilot. He also predicts that our legal-governmental structure is “headed toward a stall and then a frightening plummet toward insolvency and political chaos.”
Mr. Howard, a big-firm lawyer who heads the nonpartisan government-reform coalition Common Good, is no conventional deregulator. But he warns that the “cumulative complexity” of the dense rulebooks that prescribe “every nuance of how law is implemented” leaves good officials without the freedom to do what makes sense on the ground. Stripped of the authority that they should have, he adds, officials have little accountability for bad results. More broadly, he argues that the very structure of our democracy is so clogged by deep thickets of dysfunctional law that it will only get worse unless conservatives and liberals alike cast off their distrust of human discretion.
The rulebooks should be “radically simplified,” Mr. Howard says, on matters ranging from enforcing school discipline to protecting nursing-home residents, from operating safe soup kitchens to building the nation’s infrastructure: Projects now often require multi-year, 5,000-page environmental impact statements before anything can begin to be constructed. Unduly detailed rules should be replaced by general principles, he says, that take their meaning from society’s norms and values and embrace the need for official discretion and responsibility.
Mr. Howard serves up a rich menu of anecdotes, including both the small-scale activities of a neighborhood and the vast administrative structures that govern national life. After a tree fell into a stream and caused flooding during a winter storm, Franklin Township, N.J., was barred from pulling the tree out until it had spent 12 days and $12,000 for the permits and engineering work that a state environmental rule required for altering any natural condition in a “C-1 stream.” The “Volcker Rule,” designed to prevent banks from using federally insured deposits to speculate in securities, was shaped by five federal agencies and countless banking lobbyists into 963 “almost unintelligible” pages. In New York City, “disciplining a student potentially requires 66 separate steps, including several levels of potential appeals”; meanwhile, civil-service rules make it virtually impossible to terminate thousands of incompetent employees. Children’s lemonade stands in several states have been closed down for lack of a vendor’s license.

 

Conservatives as well as liberals like detailed rules—complete with tedious forms, endless studies and wasteful legal hearings—because they don’t trust each other with discretion. Corporations like them because they provide not only certainty but also “a barrier to entry for potential competitors,” by raising the cost of doing business to prohibitive levels for small businesses with fresh ideas and other new entrants to markets. Public employees like them because detailed rules “absolve them of responsibility.” And, adds Mr. Howard, “lawsuits [have] exploded in this rules-based regime,” shifting legal power to “self-interested plaintiffs’ lawyers,” who have learned that they “could sue for the moon and extract settlements even in cases (as with some asbestos claims) that were fraudulent.”
So habituated have we become to such stuff, Mr. Howard says, that government’s “self-inflicted ineptitude is accepted as a state of nature, as if spending an average of eight years on environmental reviews—which should be a national scandal—were an unavoidable mountain range.” Common-sensical laws would place outer boundaries on acceptable conduct based on reasonable norms that are “far better at preventing abuse of power than today’s regulatory minefield.”
“As Mr. Howard notes, his book is part of a centuries-old rules-versus-principles debate. The philosophers and writers whom he quotes approvingly include Aristotle, James Madison, Isaiah Berlin and Roscoe Pound, a prominent Harvard law professor and dean who condemned “mechanical jurisprudence” and championed broad official discretion. Berlin, for his part, warned against “monstrous bureaucratic machines, built in accordance with the rules that ignore the teeming variety of the living world, the untidy and asymmetrical inner lives of men, and crush them into conformity.” Mr. Howard juxtaposes today’s roughly 100 million words of federal law and regulations with Madison’s warning that laws should not be “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”…

Democracy in Retreat

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Joshua Kurlantzick (Council on Foreign Relations) on “The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government”: “Since the end of the Cold War, most political theorists have assumed that as countries develop economically, they will also become more democratic—especially if a vibrant middle class takes root. The triumph of democracy, once limited to a tiny number of states and now spread across the globe, has been considered largely inevitable.
In Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government, CFR Fellow for Southeast Asia Joshua Kurlantzick identifies forces that threaten democracy and shows that conventional wisdom has blinded world leaders to a real crisis. “Today a constellation of factors, from the rise of China to the lack of economic growth in new democracies to the West’s financial crisis, has come together to hinder democracy throughout the developing world,” he writes. “Absent radical and unlikely changes in the international system, that combination of antidemocratic factors will have serious staying power.”
Kurlantzick pays particular attention to the revolt of middle class citizens, traditionally proponents of reform, who have turned against democracy in countries such as Venezuela, Pakistan, and Taiwan. He observes that countries once held up as model new democracies, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, have since curtailed social, economic, and political freedoms. Military coups have grabbed power from Honduras to Thailand to Fiji. The number of representative governments has fallen, and the quality of democracy has deteriorated in many states where it had been making progress, including Russia, Kenya, Argentina, and Nigeria.
The renewed strength of authoritarian rule, warns Kurlantzick, means that billions of people around the world continue to live under repressive regimes.”

The Unwisdom of Crowds



Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Applebaum on why people-powered revolutions are overrated in the New Republic: “..Yet a successful street revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive, positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya. Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors. Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917.
The crowd may not even represent the majority. Because a street revolution makes good copy, and because it provides great photographs, we often mistakenly confuse “people power” with democracy itself. In fact, the creation of democratic institutions—courts, legal systems, bills of rights—is a long and tedious process that often doesn’t interest foreign journalists at all. Tunisia’s ratification of a new constitution earlier this year represented the most significant achievement of the Arab Spring to date, but the agonizing negotiations that led up to that moment were hard for outsiders to understand—and not remotely telegenic
Equally, it is a dangerous mistake to imagine that “people power” can ever be a substitute for actual elections. On television, a demonstration can loom larger than it should. In both Thailand and Turkey, an educated middle class has recently taken to the streets to protest against democratically elected leaders who have grown increasingly corrupt and autocratic, but who might well be voted back into office tomorrow. In Venezuela, elections are not fair and the media is not free, but the president is supported by many Venezuelans who still have faith in his far-left rhetoric, however much his policies may be damaging the country. Demonstrations might help bring change in some of these countries, but if the change is to be legitimate—and permanent—the electorate will eventually have to endorse it.
As we often forget, some of the most successful transitions to democracy did not involve crowds at all. Chile became a democracy because its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, decided it would become one. In early 1989, well before mass demonstrations in Prague or Berlin, the leaders of the Polish opposition sat down at a large round table with their former jailers and negotiated their way out of communism. There are no spectacular photographs of these transitions, and many people found them unsatisfying, even unjust. But Chile and Poland remain democracies today, not least because their new leaders came to power without any overt opposition from the old regime.
It would be nice if these kinds of transitions were more common, but not every dictator is willing to smooth the path toward change. For that reason, the post-revolutionary moment is often more important than the revolution itself, for this is when the emotion of the mob has to be channeled rapidly—immediately—into legitimate institutions. Not everybody finds this easy. In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, demonstrators found it difficult to abandon Tahrir Square. “We won’t leave because we have to make sure this country is set on the right path,” one protester said at the time. In fact, he should already have been at home, back in his neighborhood, perhaps creating the grassroots political party that might have given Egyptians a real alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood…”