More Top-Down Participation, Please! Institutionalized empowerment through open participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michelle Ruesch and Oliver Märker in DDD: “…this is not another article on the empowering potential of bottom-up digital political participation. Quite the contrary: It instead seeks to stress the empowering potential of top-down digital political participation. Strikingly, the democratic institutionalization of (digital) political participation is rarely considered when we speak about power in the context of political participation. Wouldn’t it be true empowerment though if the right of citizens to speak their minds were directly integrated into political and administrative decision-making processes?

Institutionalized political participation

Political participation, defined as any act that aims to influence politics in some way, can be initiated either by citizens, referred to as “bottom-up” participation, or by government, often referred to as “top-down” participation.  For many, the word “top-down” instantly evokes negative connotations, even though top-down participatory spaces are actually the foundation of democracy. These are the spaces of participation offered by the state and guaranteed by democratic constitutions. For a long time, top-down participation could be equated with formal democratic participation such as elections, referenda or party politics. Today, however, in states like Germany we can observe a new form of top-down political participation, namely government-initiated participation that goes beyond what is legally required and usually makes extensive use of digital media.
Like many other Western states, Germany has to cope with decreasing voter turnout and a lack of trust in political parties. At the same time, according to a recent study from 2012, two-thirds of eligible voters would like to be more involved in political decisions. The case of “Stuttgart 21” served as a late wake-up call for many German municipalities. Plans to construct a new train station in the center of the city of Stuttgart resulted in a petition for a local referendum, which was rejected. Protests against the train station culminated in widespread demonstrations in 2010, forcing construction to be halted. Even though a referendum was finally held in 2011 and a slight majority voted in favor of the train station, the Stuttgart 21 case has since been cited by Chancellor Angela Merkel and others as an example of the negative consequences of taking decisions without consulting with citizens early on. More and more municipalities and federal ministries in Germany have therefore started acknowledging that the conventional democratic model of participation in elections every few years is no longer sufficient. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, for example, published a manual for “good participation” in urban development projects….

What’s so great about top-down participation?

Semi-formal top-down participation processes have one major thing in common, regardless of the topic they address: Governmental institutions voluntarily open up a space for dialogue and thereby obligate themselves to take citizens’ concerns and ideas into account.
As a consequence, government-initiated participation offers the potential for institutionalized empowerment beyond elections. It grants the possibility of integrating participation into political and administrative decision-making processes….
Bottom-up participation will surely always be an important mobilizer of democratic change. Nevertheless, the provision of spaces of open participation by governments can aid in the institutionalization of citizens’ involvement in political decision-making. Had Stuttgart offered an open space of participation early in the train station construction process, maybe protests would never have escalated the way they did.
So is top-down participation the next step in the process of democratization? It could be, but only under certain conditions. Most importantly, top-down open participation requires a genuine willingness to abandon the old principle of doing business behind closed doors. This is not an easy undertaking; it requires time and endurance. Serious open participation also requires creating state institutions that ensure the relevance of the results by evaluating them and considering them in political decisions. We have formulated ten conditions that we consider necessary for the genuine institutionalization of open political participation [14]:

  • There needs to be some scope for decision-making. Top-down participation only makes sense when the results of the participation can influence decisions.
  • The government must genuinely aim to integrate the results into decision-making processes.
  • The limits of participation must be communicated clearly. Citizens must be informed if final decision-making power rests with a political body, for example.
  • The subject matter, rules and procedures need to be transparent.
  • Citizens need to be aware that they have the opportunity to participate.
  • Access to participation must be easy, the channels of participation chosen according to the citizens’ media habits. Using the Internet should not be a goal in itself.
  • The participatory space should be “neutral ground”. A moderator can help ensure this.
  • The set-up must be interactive. Providing information is only a prerequisite for participation.
  • Participation must be possible without providing real names or personal data.
  • Citizens must receive continuous feedback regarding how results are handled and the implementation process.”

AskThem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“AskThem is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. AskThem is supported by a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative.
AskThem is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. It’s a not-for-profit tool for a stronger democracy, with open data for informed and engaged communities.
AskThem allows you to:

  • Find and ask questions to over 142,000 elected officials nationwide: federal, state and city levels of government.
  • Get signatures for your question or petition, have it delivered over email or Twitter, and push for a public response.
  • See questions from people near you, sign-on to questions you care about, and review answers from public figures.

It’s like a version of “We The People” for every elected official, from local city council members all the way up to U.S. senators. Enter your email above to be the first to ask a question when we launch and see previews of the site this Fall.
Elected officials: enter your email above and we’ll send you more information about signing up to answer questions on AskThem. It’s a free and non-partisan service to respond to your constituents in an open public forum and update them over email about your work. Or, be a leader in open-government and sign up now.
Issue-based organizations and media: sign up to help promote questions to government from people in your area. We’re working to launch with partnerships that build greater public accountability.
Previously known as the OpenGovernment.org project, AskThem is open-source and uses open government data – our code is available on GitHub – contributions welcome. For more development updates & discussion, join our low-traffic Google Group.
We’re a small non-profit organization actively seeking charitable funding support – help us launch this powerful new tool for public dialogue! Email us for a copy of our non-profit funding prospectus. If you can make a tax-exempt gift to support our work, please donate to PPF via OpenCongress. More background on the project is available on our Knight NewsChallenge proposal from March 2013.
Questions, feedback, ideas? Email David Moore, Executive Director of PPF – david at ppolitics.org, Twitter: @ppolitics; like our page on Facebook & follow @AskThemPPF on Twitter. Stay tuned!”

Technology Can Expose Government Sins, But You Need Humans to Fix Them

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lorelei Kelly: “We can’t bring accountability to the NSA unless we figure out how to give the whole legislative branch modern methods for policy oversight. Those modern methods can include technology, but the primary requirement is figuring out how to supply Congress with unbiased subject matter experts—not just industry lobbyists or partisan think tank analysts. Why? Because trusted and available expertise inside the process of policymaking is what is missing today.
According to calculations by the Sunlight Foundation, today’s Congress is operating with about 40 percent less staff than in 1979. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, it’s also contending with at least 800 percent more incoming communications. Yet, instead of helping Congress gain insight in new ways, instead of helping it sort and filter, curate and authenticate, technology has mostly created disorganized information overload. And the information Congress receives is often sentiment, not substance. Elected leaders should pay attention to both, but need the latter for policymaking.
The result? Congress defaults to what it knows. And that means slapping a “national security” label on policy questions that instead deserve to be treated as broad public conversations about the evolution of American democracy. This is a Congress that categorizes questions about our freedoms on the Internet as “cyber security.”
What can we do? First, recognize that Congress is an obsolete and incapacitated system, and treat it as such. Technology and transparency can help modernize our legislature, but they can’t fix the system of governance.
Activists, even tech-savvy ones, need to talk directly with Congressional members and staff at home. Hackers, you should invite your representatives to wherever you do your hacking. And then offer your skills to help them in any way possible. You may create some great data maps and visualization tools, but the real point is to make friends in Congress. There’s no substitute for repeated conversations, and long-haul engagement. In politics, relationships will leverage the technology. All technology can do is help you find one another.
Without our help and our knowledge, our elected leaders and governing institutions won’t have the bandwidth to cope with our complex world. This will be a steep climb. But, like nearly every good outcome in politics, the climb starts with an outstretched hand, not one that’s poised at a keyboard, ready to tweet.”

Digital Participation – The Case of the Italian 'Dialogue with Citizens'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Gianluca Sgueo presented at Democracy and Technology – Europe in Tension from the 19th to the 21th Century – Sorbonne Paris, 2013: “This paper focuses on the initiative named “Dialogue With Citizens” that the Italian Government introduced in 2012. The Dialogue was an entirely web-based experiment of participatory democracy aimed at, first, informing citizens through documents and in-depth analysis and, second, designed for answering to their questions and requests. During the year and half of life of the initiative roughly 90.000 people wrote (approximately 5000 messages/month). Additionally, almost 200.000 participated in a number of public online consultations that the government launched in concomitance with the adoption of crucial decisions (i.e. the spending review national program).
From the analysis of this experiment of participatory democracy three questions can be raised. (1) How can a public institution maximize the profits of participation and minimize its costs? (2) How can public administrations manage the (growing) expectations of the citizens once they become accustomed to participation? (3) Is online participatory democracy going to develop further, and why?
In order to fully answer such questions, the paper proceeds as follows: it will initially provide a general overview of online public participation both at the central and the local level. It will then discuss the “Dialogue with Citizens” and a selected number of online public consultations lead by the Italian government in 2012. The conclusions will develop a theoretical framework for reflection on the peculiarities and problems of the web-participation.”

Embracing Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Biella Coleman in Concurring Opinions: “I often describe hacker politics as Weapons of the Geek, in contrast to Weapons of the Weak—the term anthropologist James Scott uses to capture the unique, clandestine nature of peasant politics. While Weapons of the Weak is a modality of politics among disenfranchised, economically marginalized populations who engage in small-scale illicit acts —such as foot dragging and minor acts of sabotage—that don’t appear on their surface to be political, Weapons of the Geek is a modality of politics exercised by a class of privileged actors who often lie at the center of economic life. Among geeks and hackers, political activities are rooted in concrete experiences of their craft—administering a server or editing videos—and portion of these hackers channel these skills toward political life. To put another way hackers don’t necessarily have class-consciousness, though some certainly do, but they all tend to have craft consciousness. But they have already shown they are willing to engage in prolific and distinct types of political acts from policy making to party politics, from writing free software to engaging in some of the most pronounced and personally risky acts of civil disobedience of the last decade as we saw with Snowden. Just because they are hackers does not mean they are only acting out their politics through technology even if their technological experiences usually inform their politics.
It concerns and bothers me that most technologists are male and white but I am not concerned, in fact I am quite thrilled, these experts are taking political charge. I tend to agree with Michael Shudson’s reading of Walter Lippman that when it comes to democracy we need more experts not less: “The intellectual challenge is not to invent democracy without experts, but to seek a way to harness experts to a legitimately democratic function.”
Imagine if as many doctors and professors mobilized their moral authority and expertise as hackers have done, to rise up and intervene in the problems plaguing their vocational domains. Professors would be visibly denouncing the dismal and outrageous labor conditions of adjuncts whose pay is a pittance. Doctors would be involved in the fight for more affordable health care in the United States. Mobilizing expertise does not mean other stakeholders can’t and should not have a voice but there are many practical and moral reasons why we should embrace a politics of expertise, especially if configured to allow more generally contributions.
 
More than any other group of experts, hackers have shown how productive an expert based politics can be. And many domains of hacker and geek politics such as the Pirate Parties and Anonymous are interesting precisely for how they marry an open participatory element along with a more technical, expert-based one. Expertise can co-exist with participation if configured as such.
My sense is that hacker (re: technically informed) based politics will grow more important in years to come. Just last week I went to visit one hacker-activist, Jeremy Hammond who is in jail for his politically motivated acts of direct action. I asked him what he thought of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s blanket surveillance of American citizens. Along with saying he was encouraged for someone dared to expose this wrongdoing (as many of us are), he captured the enormous power held by hackers and technologists when he followed with this statement: “there are all these nerds who don’t agree with what is politically happening and they have power.”
Hammond and others are exercising their technical power and I generally think this is a net gain for democracy. But it is why we must diligently work toward establishing more widespread digital and technical literacy. The low numbers of female technologists and other minorities in and out of hacker-dom are appalling and disturbing (and why I am involved with initiatives like those of NCWIT to rectify this problem). There are certainly barriers internal to the hacker world but the problems are so entrenched and so systematic unless those are solved, the numbers of women in voluntary and political domains will continue to be low.
So it is not that expertise is the problem. It is the barriers that prevent a large class of individuals from ever becoming experts that concerns me the most”.

Explore the world’s constitutions with a new online tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Official Google Blog: “Constitutions are as unique as the people they govern, and have been around in one form or another for millennia. But did you know that every year approximately five new constitutions are written, and 20-30 are amended or revised? Or that Africa has the youngest set of constitutions, with 19 out of the 39 constitutions written globally since 2000 from the region?
The process of redesigning and drafting a new constitution can play a critical role in uniting a country, especially following periods of conflict and instability. In the past, it’s been difficult to access and compare existing constitutional documents and language—which is critical to drafters—because the texts are locked up in libraries or on the hard drives of constitutional experts. Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.
With this in mind, Google Ideas supported the Comparative Constitutions Project to build Constitute, a new site that digitizes and makes searchable the world’s constitutions. Constitute enables people to browse and search constitutions via curated and tagged topics, as well as by country and year. The Comparative Constitutions Project cataloged and tagged nearly 350 themes, so people can easily find and compare specific constitutional material. This ranges from the fairly general, such as “Citizenship” and “Foreign Policy,” to the very specific, such as “Suffrage and turnouts” and “Judicial Autonomy and Power.”
Our aim is to arm drafters with a better tool for constitution design and writing. We also hope citizens will use Constitute to learn more about their own constitutions, and those of countries around the world.”

Foundations of Digital Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Daniel Veit and Jan Huntgeburth: “Digital government consists in the purposeful use of information and communication technologies (ICT), in particular the internet, to transform the relationship between government and society in a positive manner. This book focuses on the current status, prospects and foundations of digital government. Integrating examples and cases from administrative practice, it covers all important aspects of digital government management. Learning outcomes include

  • Understanding the implications of the internet for government and society
  • Gaining deeper insights into the concept and opportunities of digital democracy
  • Understanding the challenges of moving public services online

Table of Contents: Preface.- 1 Introduction to Digital Government.- 2 Impact of Digital Government.- 3 The Digital Divide.- 4 Legal Aspects of Digital Service Delivery.- 5 Online One-Stop Government.- 6 Open Government.- 7 E-Procurement.- 8 E-Voting.- 9 E-Participation.- 10 Lesson Learned and Outlook.”

San Francisco To Test Online Participatory Budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Crunch.gov: “Taxpayers are sometimes the best people to decide how their money gets spent — sounds obvious, but usually we don’t have a direct say beyond who we elect. That’s changing for San Francisco residents.
It intends to be the first major US city to allow citizens to directly vote on portions of budget via the web. While details are still coming together, its plan is for each city district to vote on $100,000 in expenditures. Citizens will get to choose how the money is spent from a list of options, similar to the way they already vote from a list of ballot propositions. Topical experts will help San Francisco residents deliberate online.
So-called “participatory budgeting” first began in the festival city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, and has slowly been expanding throughout the world. While major cities, such as Chicago and New York, have piloted participatory budgeting, they have not incorporated the modern features of digital voting and deliberation that are currently utilized in Brazil.
According to participatory budgeting expert and former White House technology fellow, Hollie Russon Gilman, San Francisco’s experiment will mark a “frontier” in American direct democracy.
This is significant because the Internet engenders a different type of democracy: not one of mere expression, but one of ideas. The net is good at surfacing the best ideas hidden within the wisdom of the crowds. Modern political scientists refer to this as “Epistemic Democracy,” derived from the Greek word for knowledge, epistēmē. Epistemic Democracy values citizens most for their expertise and builds tools to make policy making more informed.
For example, participatory budgeting has been found to reduce infant mortality rates in Brazil. It turns out that the mothers in Brazil had a better knowledge of why children were dying than health experts. Through participatory budgeting, they “channeled a larger fraction of their total budget to key investments in sanitation and health services,” writes Sonia Goncalves of King’s College London. “I also found that this change in the composition of municipal expenditures is associated with a pronounced reduction in the infant mortality rates for municipalities which adopted participatory budgeting.” [PDF]”

The Tech Intellectuals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Essay by Henry Farrell in Democracy: “A quarter of a century ago, Russell Jacoby lamented the demise of the public intellectual. The cause of death was an improvement in material conditions. Public intellectuals—Dwight Macdonald, I.F. Stone, and their like—once had little choice but to be independent. They had difficulty getting permanent well-paying jobs. However, as universities began to expand, they offered new opportunities to erstwhile unemployables. The academy demanded a high price. Intellectuals had to turn away from the public and toward the practiced obscurities of academic research and prose. In Jacoby’s description, these intellectuals “no longer need[ed] or want[ed] a larger public…. Campuses [were] their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media.”
Over the last decade, conditions have changed again. New possibilities are opening up for public intellectuals. Internet-fueled media such as blogs have made it much easier for aspiring intellectuals to publish their opinions. They have fostered the creation of new intellectual outlets (Jacobin, The New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books), and helped revitalize some old ones too (The Baffler, Dissent). Finally, and not least, they have provided the meat for a new set of arguments about how communications technology is reshaping society.
These debates have created opportunities for an emergent breed of professional argument-crafters: technology intellectuals. Like their predecessors of the 1950s and ’60s, they often make a living without having to work for a university. Indeed, the professoriate is being left behind. Traditional academic disciplines (except for law, which has a magpie-like fascination with new and shiny things) have had a hard time keeping up. New technologies, to traditionalists, are suspect: They are difficult to pin down within traditional academic boundaries, and they look a little too fashionable to senior academics, who are often nervous that their fields might somehow become publicly relevant.
Many of these new public intellectuals are more or less self-made. Others are scholars (often with uncomfortable relationships with the academy, such as Clay Shirky, an unorthodox professor who is skeptical that the traditional university model can survive). Others still are entrepreneurs, like technology and media writer and podcaster Jeff Jarvis, working the angles between public argument and emerging business models….
Different incentives would lead to different debates. In a better world, technology intellectuals might think more seriously about the relationship between technological change and economic inequality. Many technology intellectuals think of the culture of Silicon Valley as inherently egalitarian, yet economist James Galbraith argues that income inequality in the United States “has been driven by capital gains and stock options, mostly in the tech sector.”
They might think more seriously about how technology is changing politics. Current debates are still dominated by pointless arguments between enthusiasts who believe the Internet is a model for a radically better democracy, and skeptics who claim it is the dictator’s best friend.
Finally, they might pay more attention to the burgeoning relationship between technology companies and the U.S. government. Technology intellectuals like to think that a powerful technology sector can enhance personal freedom and constrain the excesses of government. Instead, we are now seeing how a powerful technology sector may enable government excesses. Without big semi-monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to hoover up personal information, surveillance would be far more difficult for the U.S. government.
Debating these issues would require a more diverse group of technology intellectuals. The current crop are not diverse in some immediately obvious ways—there are few women, few nonwhites, and few non-English speakers who have ascended to the peak of attention. Yet there is also far less intellectual diversity than there ought to be. The core assumptions of public debates over technology get less attention than they need and deserve.”

The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Peter Dahlgren: “As democracy encounters increasing difficulties, many citizens are turning to the domain of alternative politics, and in so doing, making considerable use of the Web and other new communication technologies. Clearly this is having significant impact, and we see that new modes of political participation and even political cultures are emerging. Yet, we would be foolish to expect some simple ‘techno-fix’ for democracy; its problems are more complex than that. This volume analyses various factors that shape such Web-facilitated participation, including features of the Web itself as well as broader societal realities. Avoiding simplistic optimism or pessimism, the discussion highlights the tensions and force-fields that impact on participation. The presentation also addresses several key topics in regard to citizens’ engagement, such as civic subjectivity, web intellectuals, and cosmopolitanism. While anchored in an extensive literature and wide theoretical vistas, the book is written in a clear and accessible style.”