Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance


Book edited by Stephen Elstub and Oliver Escobar: “Democracies are currently undergoing a period of both challenge and renewal. Democratic innovations are proliferating in politics, governance, policy, and public administration. This Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance advances understanding of democratic innovations by critically reviewing their importance throughout the world. The overarching themes are a focus on citizens and their relationship to these innovations, and the resulting effects on political equality and policy impact.

The Handbook covers different types of democratic innovations; their potential to combat current problems with democracy; the various actors involved; their use in different areas of policy and governance; their application in different parts of the world; and the methods used to research them. Contributors therefore offer a definitive overview of existing research on democratic innovations, while also setting the agenda for future research and practice.

Featuring a critical combination of theoretical, empirical and methodological work on democratic innovations, this insightful Handbook balances depth, originality and accessibility to make it an ideal research companion for scholars and students of democratic governance alike. Public administrators and participation practitioners will also benefit from its guidance on citizen engagement processes….(More)”.

Innovation bureaucracies: How agile stability creates the entrepreneurial state


Paper by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo: “In this paper, we offer to redefine what entrepreneurial states are: these are states that are capable of unleashing innovations, and wealth resulting from those innovations, and of maintaining socio-political stability at the same time. Innovation bureaucracies are constellations of public organisations that deliver such agile stability. Such balancing acts make public bureaucracies unique in how they work, succeed and fail. The paper looks at the historical evolution of innovation bureaucracy by focusing on public organisations dealing with knowledge and technology, economic development and growth. We briefly show how agility and stability are delivered through starkly different bureaucratic organisations; hence, what matters for capacity and capabilities are not individual organisations, but organisational configurations and how they evolve….(More)”.

Understanding How Cultures Change


Excerpt of book by Geoff Mulgan on Social Innovation: How Societies Find the Power to Change: “…There are very few thinkers who have changed how we see the world, and even fewer who have changed how we think about how we see the world. Mary Douglas was one of the very rare exceptions. Her field was culture, but she was as unlike the stereotypical cultural academic as one could imagine. A devout Catholic whose late husband was head of research at Conservative Central Office, she used the decades after she passed retirement age in an extraordinary flowering of enquiry that provided striking insights in fields as diverse as the study of the Old Testament and the politics of climate change.

She was a rare example of a public intellectual whose theoretical apparatus allowed her to think in original ways about almost any topic—for example, in her ideas on enclaves, the small groups which at their most extreme become terrorist cells. Where others emphasize their strengths, she emphasized their weaknesses: how prone they are to splits and sectarianism, and how hard it is for their founders to impose and enforce rules. To survive, they create around themselves what she called a ‘wall of virtue’—the sense that they alone uphold justice, while all around them are suspect. Yet the very thing that binds them together encourages individuals to compete to demonstrate their own virtue and the failings of their peers. The only thing that can override this fragility is fear of the outside world—and so sects, whether political or religious, peaceful or violent, feed off the fear and hostility of states and societies, using it to reinforce their own solidarity and their own sense of virtue. The implication is clear, and challenging, for Western governments: in the long term, defeating terrorism depends on ratcheting fear down, not up, and on dismantling the “walls of virtue” rather than attacking them head on with declarations of war….

In each of these fields Douglas’s work set in motion new schools of thought. Perhaps the most fertile of all of these is now being used to make sense of why so many well-intentioned policies fail, and why some others succeed even though they appear to work less well on paper. Her starting point is a deceptively simple framework which she repeatedly used to make sense of organizations and societies. It is a framework which should be part of the mental furniture of any educated person, as basic as the laws of supply and demand in economics, or the laws of thermodynamics.

Any culture, she argues, can be mapped on two dimensions. On one axis is what she calls the “grid”—the extent to which behaviors and rules are defined and differentiated, for example by public rules deciding who can do what according to their age, race, gender or qualifications. Examples of a high grid would be a traditional corporation, a traditional agrarian society or families with clear demarcations of roles and times (when to eat, when to go to bed). On the other axis is what she calls “group”—the extent to which people bond with each other and divide the world into insiders and outsiders. The more people do with a group of other people, the more they experience testing trials, or the more difficult the group is to get into, the higher the sense of group belonging will be.

These two dimensions come together to provide a simple two-by-two matrix: high grid and high group mean hierarchy; low grid and low group mean individualism; high group and low grid lead to egalitarianism; and low group and high grid result in fatalism. This very simple model has turned out to be a powerful tool for understanding social relations and for making sense of how people see the world. We may like to believe that we choose and shape our own beliefs, but Douglas, drawing on the work of Émile Durkheim and others, suggests that it’s much easier to understand societies by turning that assumption on its head: societies and institutions think through us much more than the other way around….(More)”.

The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism


Book by Gary M. Shiffman: “How do we understand illicit violence? Can we prevent it? Building on behavioral science and economics, this book begins with the idea that humans are more predictable than we like to believe, and this ability to model human behavior applies equally well to leaders of violent and coercive organizations as it does to everyday people. Humans ultimately seek survival for themselves and their communities in a world of competition. While the dynamics of ‘us vs. them’ are divisive, they also help us to survive. Access to increasingly larger markets, facilitated through digital communications and social media, creates more transnational opportunities for deception, coercion, and violence. If the economist’s perspective helps to explain violence, then it must also facilitate insights into promoting peace and security. If we can approach violence as behavioral scientists, then we can also better structure our institutions to create policies that make the world a more secure place, for us and for future generations….(More)”.

Pessimism v progress


The Economist: “Faster, cheaper, better—technology is one field many people rely upon to offer a vision of a brighter future. But as the 2020s dawn, optimism is in short supply. The new technologies that dominated the past decade seem to be making things worse. Social media were supposed to bring people together. In the Arab spring of 2011 they were hailed as a liberating force. Today they are better known for invading privacy, spreading propaganda and undermining democracy. E-commerce, ride-hailing and the gig economy may be convenient, but they are charged with underpaying workers, exacerbating inequality and clogging the streets with vehicles. Parents worry that smartphones have turned their children into screen-addicted zombies.

The technologies expected to dominate the new decade also seem to cast a dark shadow. Artificial intelligence (ai) may well entrench bias and prejudice, threaten your job and shore up authoritarian rulers (see article). 5g is at the heart of the Sino-American trade war. Autonomous cars still do not work, but manage to kill people all the same. Polls show that internet firms are now less trusted than the banking industry. At the very moment banks are striving to rebrand themselves as tech firms, internet giants have become the new banks, morphing from talent magnets to pariahs. Even their employees are in revolt.

The New York Times sums up the encroaching gloom. “A mood of pessimism”, it writes, has displaced “the idea of inevitable progress born in the scientific and industrial revolutions.” Except those words are from an article published in 1979. Back then the paper fretted that the anxiety was “fed by growing doubts about society’s ability to rein in the seemingly runaway forces of technology”.

Today’s gloomy mood is centred on smartphones and social media, which took off a decade ago. Yet concerns that humanity has taken a technological wrong turn, or that particular technologies might be doing more harm than good, have arisen before. In the 1970s the despondency was prompted by concerns about overpopulation, environmental damage and the prospect of nuclear immolation. The 1920s witnessed a backlash against cars, which had earlier been seen as a miraculous answer to the affliction of horse-drawn vehicles—which filled the streets with noise and dung, and caused congestion and accidents. And the blight of industrialisation was decried in the 19th century by Luddites, Romantics and socialists, who worried (with good reason) about the displacement of skilled artisans, the despoiling of the countryside and the suffering of factory hands toiling in smoke-belching mills….(More)”.

Missions: A beginner's guide


UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose: “…The 21st century is becoming increasingly defined by the need to respond to major issues facing society, the environment around us and the possibility of developing a prosperous equal economy. Sometimes referred to as ‘grand challenges’, these include climate change, ageing societies, preventative healthcare, and generating sustainable growth for the benefit of all.

Innovation has not just a rate but also a direction. How that direction is set — not just by the government but by different actors and socio-political forces — is a key aspect of IIPP’s work. But how should we decide which direction? We use the concept of public value as a way to think about which direction innovation and industrial policy takes. Public value is value that is created collectively for a public purpose — this requires citizens to engage in defining purpose, nurturing capabilities and capacities, assess the value created, and ensure that societal value is distributed equitably…(More)”.

Tech-fear


Paper by Gall, A. et al: “Fear of technology has a bad reputation. It is often seen as irrational, unfounded and hostile to innovation. However, the relationship between fear and technology is far more complex than this common cliché. To highlight this multidimensional relationship of fear and technology, we created the term “tech-fear”. The aim of this special issue, focusing on the US, Japan, and Germany, is to show to what extent fear has historically influenced the development, design, social acceptance and use of technology. But it also makes clear that the history of fear benefits when it turns to the subject of technology since tech-fear has been an essential factor in the history of fear and has strongly influenced concepts and ways of dealing with fear in a wide variety of contexts….(More)”.

The Neuroscience of Trust


Paul J. Zak at Harvard Business Review: “…About a decade ago, in an effort to understand how company culture affects performance, I began measuring the brain activity of people while they worked. The neuroscience experiments I have run reveal eight ways that leaders can effectively create and manage a culture of trust. I’ll describe those strategies and explain how some organizations are using them to good effect. But first, let’s look at the science behind the framework.

What’s Happening in the Brain

Back in 2001 I derived a mathematical relationship between trust and economic performance. Though my paper on this research described the social, legal, and economic environments that cause differences in trust, I couldn’t answer the most basic question: Why do two people trust each other in the first place? Experiments around the world have shown that humans are naturally inclined to trust others—but don’t always. I hypothesized that there must be a neurologic signal that indicates when we should trust someone. So I started a long-term research program to see if that was true….

How to Manage for Trust

Through the experiments and the surveys, I identified eight management behaviors that foster trust. These behaviors are measurable and can be managed to improve performance.

Recognize excellence.

The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. Public recognition not only uses the power of the crowd to celebrate successes, but also inspires others to aim for excellence. And it gives top performers a forum for sharing best practices, so others can learn from them….(More)”.

New Orleans has declared a state of emergency after a cyberattack


MIT Technology Review: “The city told its employees to shut down their computers as a precaution this weekend after an attempted cyberattack on Friday.

The news: New Orleans spotted suspicious activity in its networks at around 5 a.m. on Friday, with a spike in the attempted attacks at 8 a.m. It detected phishing attempts and ransomware, Kim LaGrue, the city’s head of IT, later told reporters. Once they were confident the city was under attack, the team shut down its servers and computers. City authorities then filed a declaration of a state of emergency with the Civil District Court, and pulled local, state, and federal authorities into a (still pending) investigation of the incident. The city is still working to recover data from the attack but will be open as usual from this morning, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said on Twitter.

Was it ransomware? The nature of the attack is still something of a mystery. Cantrell confirmed that ransomware had been detected, but the city hasn’t received any demands for ransom money.

The positives: New Orleans was at least fairly well prepared for this attack, thanks to training for this scenario and its ability to operate many of its services without internet access, officials told reporters.

A familiar story: New Orleans is just the latest government to face ransomware attacks, after nearly two dozen cities in Texas were targeted in August, plus Louisiana in November (causing the governor to declare a state of emergency). The phenomenon goes beyond the US, too: in October Johannesburg became the biggest city yet to face a ransomware attack.…(More)”.

The cultural foundations of modern democracies


Damian J. Ruck, Luke J. Matthews, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin D. Atkinson & R. Alexander Bentley at Nature Human Behavior: “National democracy is a rare thing in human history and its stability has long been tied to the cultural values of citizens. Yet it has not been established whether changing cultural values made modern democracy possible or whether those values were a response to democratic institutions. Here we combine longitudinal data and cohort information of nearly 500,000 individuals from 109 nations to track the co-evolution of democratic values and institutions over the last century.

We find that cultural values of openness towards diversity predict a shift towards democracy and that nations with low institutional confidence are prone to political instability. In addition, the presence of democratic institutions did not predict any substantive changes in the measured cultural values. These results hold accounting for other factors, including gross domestic product per capita and non-independence between nations due to shared cultural ancestry. Cultural values lead to, rather than follow, the emergence of democracy. This indicates that current stable democracies will be under threat, should cultural values of openness to diversity and institutional confidence substantially decline… (More).”