Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies (UK Parliament): “Democracy faces a daunting new challenge. The age where electoral activity was conducted through traditional print media, canvassing and door knocking, is rapidly vanishing. Instead it is dominated by digital and social media. They are now the source from which voters get most of their information and political messaging.

The digital and social media landscape is dominated by two behemoths–Facebook and Google. They largely pass under the radar, operating outside the rules that govern electoral politics. This has become acutely obvious in the current COVID-19 pandemic where online misinformation poses not only a real and present danger to our democracy but also to our lives. Governments have been dilatory in adjusting regulatory regimes to capture these new realities. The result is a crisis of trust.

Yet our profound belief is that this can change. Technology is not a force of nature. Online platforms are not inherently ungovernable. They can and should be bound by the same restraints that we apply to the rest of society. If this is done well, in the ways we spell out in this Report, technology can become a servant of democracy rather than its enemy. There is a need for Government leadership and regulatory capacity to match the scale and pace of challenges and opportunities that the online world presents.

The Government’s Online Harms programme presents a significant first step towards this goal. It needs to happen; it needs to happen fast; and the necessary draft legislation must be laid before Parliament for scrutiny without delay. The Government must not flinch in the face of the inevitable and powerful lobbying of Big Tech and others that benefit from the current situation.

Well drafted Online Harms legislation can do much to protect our democracy. Issues such as misinformation and disinformation must be included in the Bill. The Government must make sure that online platforms bear ultimate responsibility for the content that their algorithms promote. Where harmful content spreads virally on their service or where it is posted by users with a large audience, they should face sanctions over their output as other broadcasters do.

Individual users need greater protection. They must have redress against large platforms through an ombudsman tasked with safeguarding the rights of citizens.

Transparency of online platforms is essential if democracy is to flourish. Platforms like Facebook and Google seek to hide behind ‘black box’ algorithms which choose what content users are shown. They take the position that their decisions are not responsible for harms that may result from online activity. This is plain wrong. The decisions platforms make in designing and training these algorithmic systems shape the conversations that happen online. For this reason, we recommend that platforms be mandated to conduct audits to show how in creating these algorithms they have ensured, for example, that they are not discriminating against certain groups. Regulators must have the powers to oversee these decisions, with the right to acquire the information from platforms they need to exercise those powers….(More)”.

Citizenship: The Great Extinguisher of Hope

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Dimitry Kochenov: “Citizenship is a very unlikely concept to glorify: Its only purpose is to divide the world and appear unquestionable and “natural” in the face of the most obvious criticism. Its distribution around the world is entirely random and totalitarian: One is a citizen purely on the strength of having been assigned to a particular citizenship by an authority — an authority that brooks no dissent, should you claim to not belong. Your agreement is not necessary and your protests are of no avail, yet everything about you — from life expectancy to your income and basic freedoms inside and outside the assigning state the world over — is in direct correlation with this congenital assignment, in which you can neither participate nor refuse in the majority of cases.

The assignment of citizenship is entirely beyond our control and glorified as logical and “natural,” yet citizenship is not a force of nature: It is designed with certain groups and people in mind, making sure that those who are disliked or regarded as of little use by the relevant authority at any given moment and for whatever reason will surely be kept down at the time of the initial assignment or later. No protests are expected or tolerated: What is “natural” must be accepted.

This article is adapted from Dimitry Kochenov’s book “Citizenship.”

Given the radical differences in quality between different citizenships around the world — some bringing amazing rights, others merely poisonous liabilities — the randomized totalitarian assignment endows citizenship with its core function: the preservation of global inequality.

Distributed like prizes in a lottery where four-fifths of the world’s population loses, citizenship is clothed in the language of self-determination and freedom, elevating hypocrisy as one of the status’s core features. Even considering the truly minuscule proportion of the world’s population that ever changes its citizenship, the grip of citizenship on our lives is close to absolute, even if it is at times unnoticed. Citizenship’s connection to “freedom” and “self-determination” usually stops making any sense at the boundaries of the most affluent Western states. Citizenship, for most of the world’s population, is thus an empty rhetorical shell deployed to perpetuate abuse, dispossession, and exclusion. It is a means of directing former colonials to their unenviable place, spiced with a delightfully attractive hint of nationalism….(More)”.

Government Capacity, Societal Trust or Party Preferences? What Accounts for the Variety of National Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Europe?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dimiter Toshkov, Kutsal Yesilkagit and Brendan Carroll: “European states responded to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a variety of public policy measures. Governments across the continent acted more or less swiftly to close down schools, restrict arrival into their countries and travel within their territories, ban public meetings, impose local and national lockdowns, declare states of emergency and pass other emergency measures. Importantly, both the mix of policy tools as well as the speed with which they were enacted differed significantly even within the member states of the European Union.

In this article we ask what can account for this variation in policy responses, and we identify a number of factors related to institutions, general governance and specific health-sector related capacities, societal trust, government type, and party preferences as possible determinants. Using multivariate regression and survival analysis, we model the speed with which school closures, national lockdowns and states of emergency were announced. The models suggest a number of significant and often counterintuitive relationships: we find that more centralized countries with lower government effectiveness, freedom and societal trust, but with separate ministries of health and health ministers with medical background acted faster and more decisively. These results are important in light of the large positive effects early policy responses likely had on managing the impact of the pandemic….(More)”.

Good Bureaucracy: Max Weber on the 100th anniversary of his death

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Wolfgang Drechsler: “Max Weber passed away a century ago today at the early age of 56, a late victim of the last pandemic — the Spanish Flu.

During the last 100 years, Weber’s position as one of the world’s great economists, sociologists, social science theorists, and public administration scholars has been secure, if with ups and downs.

One can think with or against Weber in the areas he covered, but by and large, not really without him. Weber is often associated with Weberian bureaucracy, i.e. hierarchical, career-organized, competence-based, rules- and files-based public administration of the now traditional type (when he conceived of it, this was public sector innovation).

However, Weber was a Weberian only to the extent that Luther was a Lutheran or Marx was a Marxist: somewhat, but certainly not totally so. In fact, Weber did not particularly like what we understand today as Weberian public administration, often used interchangeably with the term “bureaucracy.” He just thought it was the optimal administrative form, in the sense of rationalization, for the time and society he was analyzing (Germany at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century — both for the public and for the private sector, incidentally).

Nobody would have been more surprised than him that his framework is still the most used — and best — 100 years later. Indeed, it is often applied to systems for which it was never intended.

In fact, Weberian public administration in the wider sense has been, and is, much maligned; bureaucracy is an easy target, and whining about it is a steady feature of complex human societies which always need and automatically generate it. And Weberian public administration has its systemic faults — slowness, process-orientation, a slippery slope to authoritarian, mindless hierarchization and shirking. However, this bureaucracy is in its optimal form ethics-based, high-capacity, and motivation-driven. It is meant to be both responsible — to a state that is above and beyond particular interests — as well as responsive — to groups and citizens, but not at the cost of the commonweal.

However we decide to manage the transition to a CO2-neutral world — via Green Growth or Post-Growth — that process will have to be implemented by competent, motivated, and yes, Weberian civil servants.

But neoliberal ideology never believed that this kind of civil service was real, or pretended not to. So Weberian public administration became the bête noire of the New Public Management (NPM)….(More)”.

COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by François Bonnici: “…Social innovators and social entrepreneurs have been working to solve market failures and demonstrate more sustainable models to build inclusive economies for years. The Schwab Foundation 2020 Impact Report “Two Decades of Impact” demonstrated how the network of 400 leading social innovators and entrepreneurs it supports have improved the lives of more than 622 million people, protecting livelihoods, driving movements for social inclusion and environmental sustainability, and providing improved access to health, sanitation, education and energy.

From providing reliable information, services and care for the most vulnerable, to developing community tracing initiatives or mental health support through mobile phones, the work of social entrepreneurs is even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they reach those who the market and governments are unable to account for.

But right now, these front-line organizations face severe constraints or even bankruptcy. Decades of work in the impact sector are at stake.

Over the past four decades, a sophisticated impact ecosystem has emerged to support the work of social innovators and impact enterprises. This includes funding provided by capital sources ranging from philanthropy and impact investing, intermediaries providing certification and standards, peer networks of learning and policy and regulation of this new “social economy” seeking to embed inclusive and sustainable organizational approaches imbued with principles of equality, justice and respect for our planet.

From this ecosystem, 40 leading global organizations collectively supporting more than 15,000 social entrepreneurs have united to launch the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs. The aim is to share knowledge, experience and resources to coordinate and amplify social entrepreneurs’ response to COVID-19….(More)”.

The Behavioral Economics Guide 2020

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Alain Samson. Introduction by Colin Camerer: “The goal of science is to accumulate knowledge, full stop. In my opinion, there is a lot of leakage in how we currently do this. The reproducibility “upgrade” (a term I prefer to “crisis”) going on in many areas of science is an example of trying to minimize leakage. Solid accumulation depends on not getting led too far or frequently astray by false positives which do not reproduce. A good infrastructure for rapidly evaluating and cumulating results is of special use for “hurry-up” social science. For example, as I write this there are probably hundreds of social science studies being done about COVID-19. It is essentially impossible for all those scientists to know what the other scientists are doing. There will be duplication and poorly designed
studies. (It is often said in design that everyone wants cheap, fast, and good. But you can only have two.)

When studies are written and circulated in preprints, a lot of null effects won’t be written up. Which studies will get the most attention? It will be a scrum of social media, presenting at seminars, slow and fast reviewing paces. The one thing that would undoubtedly be most useful—a giant dashboard summarizing weekly progress on each of those hundreds of studies—does not exist. This is a failure of good informatics.


Behavioral economics is accumulating knowledge about how different kinds of nudges influence behavior at a rapid pace. The challenge is that carefully assessing what an entire body of knowledge is telling us is actually quite difficult and is under-rewarded (by academic incentives). A lot of academic publishing, and similar career concerns within government or NGOs, depend on creativity and doing something new. This creates an incentive to exaggerate the novelty of one’s contribution compared to what is known from past studies….(More)”.

Nightmare of the Imaginaries: A Critique of Socio-technical Imaginaries Commonly Applied to Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Paul Waller: “This essay aims to analyse and debunk several technology-related concepts commonly discussed in papers, reports and speeches by academics, consultancies, politicians and governmental bodies. Each reflects a presumption about how technology, the internet in particular, and technology-enabled social and political processes might affect the practice of governing. The discussion characterizes the concepts as “socio-technical imaginaries”, a term for ideas that link the socio-political environment with technology. Socio-technical imaginaries start as a description of potentially attainable futures, turn into a prescription of futures that ought to be attained, then become received wisdom about the present day. They are speculation that takes root through reuse and endorsement by authoritative figures, becoming an asserted present reality on the basis of little or no evidence. Once imaginaries become widely accepted and used, they may shape trajectories of research and innovation, steering technological progress as well as public and private expenditure. The imaginaries addressed are: Public Sector Innovation, Digital Transformation of Government, Co-creation & Co-production of Public Services, Crowd-sourcing, Wisdom of Crowds, Collaborative Governance, Customer/Citizen Centricity, Once-only Principle, Personalisation, Big Data, Nudge (Behavioral Insights), Platform Government/GaaP, and Online Participation.

Four questions are posed to critique each imaginary: What is the received wisdom? What does that really mean? What is the problem/what has gone wrong? What to do better/what should it be? As a whole package, these imaginaries represent a nightmare for liberal, representative democracy. Some may enable the “panoptic” state, others may undermine existing institutions to open a void for it to step into. Many have the likelihood of creating or reinforcing inequality of opportunity, outcome or influence. But their grip is hard to loosen. The notions that they are inevitable or that issues will be resolved in due course by technology itself need to be challenged by surfacing the human, social and political dimensions and actively addressing them….(More)”.

Changing Citizen Behaviour: An Investigation on Nudge Approach in Developing Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dimas Budi Prasetyo: “It is widely explored that problems in developing society related to think and act logically and reflectively in a social context positively correlates with the cognition skill. In most developing societies, people are busy with problems that they face daily (i.e. working overtime), limits their cognitive capacity to properly process a social stimulus, which mostly asked their thoughtful response. Thus, a better design in social stimulus to tackle problematic behaviour, such as littering, to name a few, becomes more prominent. During the last decade, nudge has been famous for its subtle approach for behaviour change – however, there is relatively little known of the method applied in the developing society. The current article reviews the nudge approach to change human behaviour from two perspectives: cognitive science and consumer psychology. The article concludes that intervention using the nudge approach could be beneficial for current problematic behaviour…(More)”.

What Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s early work tells us about defunding the police

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Aaron Vansintjan: “…As she concluded in her autobiographical reflections published two years before she died in 2012, “For policing, increasing the size of governmental units consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments… consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”

But why did this happen? To explain this, Ostrom showed how, in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in monitoring their neighborhoods. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area and better connections with the community. 

She also found that larger, more centralized police forces also have a negative effect on other public services. With a larger police bureaucracy, other local frontline professionals with less funding — social workers, mental health support centers, clinics, youth support services — have less of a say in how to respond to a community’s issues  such as drug use or domestic violence. The bigger the police department, the less citizens — especially those that are already marginalized, like migrants or Black communities — have a say in how policing should be conducted.

This finding became a crucial step in Ostrom’s groundbreaking work on how communities manage their resources sustainably without outside help — through deliberation, resolving conflict and setting clear community agreements. This is what she ended up becoming famous for, and what won her the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, placing her next to some of the foremost economists in the world.

But her research on policing shouldn’t be forgotten: It shows that, when it comes to safer communities, having more funding or larger services is not important. What’s important is the connections and trust between the community and the service provider….(More)”.

Secondhand Smoke, Moral Sanctions, and How We Should Respond to COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Barry Schwartz: “How did we get from that day to this one, with widespread smoking bans in public places? The answer, I believe, was the discovery of the effects of secondhand smoke. When I smoked, it harmed innocent bystanders. It harmed children, including my own. The research on secondhand smoke began in the 1960s, showing negative effects on lab animals. As the work continued, it left no doubt that secondhand smoke contributes to asthma, cardiovascular disease, many types of cancer, stroke, cognitive impairment, and countless other maladies. These sorts of findings empowered people to demand, not request, that others put out their cigarettes. The secondhand smoke research led eventually to all the regulation that we now take for granted.

Why did this research change public attitudes and change them so fast—in a single generation? The answer, I think, is that research on secondhand smoke took an individual (perhaps foolish) choice and moralized it, by emphasizing its effects on others. It was no longer simply dumb to smoke; it was immoral. And that changed everything.

Psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the process of moralization. When activities get moralized, they move from being matters of individual discretion to being matters of obligation. Smoking went from being an individual consumer decision to being a transgression. And the process of moralization can go in the other direction, as we have seen, for most people, in the case of sexuality. In recent years, homosexuality has been “demoralized,” and moral sanctions against it have slowly been melting away….(More)”.