Paper by Adam Hill: “Critics frequently argue that nudges are more covert, less transparent, and more difficult to monitor than traditional regulatory tools. Edward Glaeser, for example, argues that “[p]ublic monitoring of soft paternalism is much more difficult than public monitoring of hard paternalism.” As one of the leading proponents of soft paternalism, Cass Sunstein, acknowledges, while “[m]andates and commands are highly visible,” soft paternalism, “and some nudges in particular[,] may be invisible.” In response to this challenge, proponents of nudging argue that invisibility for any given individual in a particular choice environment is compatible with “careful public scrutiny” of the nudge. This paper offers first of its kind experimental evidence that tests whether nudges are, in fact, compatible with careful public scrutiny. Using two sets of experiments, the paper argues that, even when made visible, nudges attract less scrutiny than their “hard law” counterparts….(More)”
Developing transparency through digital means? Examining institutional responses to civic technology in Latin America
Rebecca Rumbul at Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government: “A number of NGOs across the world currently develop digital tools to increase citizen interaction with official information. The successful operation of such tools depends on the expertise and efficiency of the NGO, and the willingness of institutions to disclose suitable information and data. It is this institutional interaction with civic technology that this study examines. The research explores empirical interview data gathered from government officials, public servants, campaigners and NGO’s involved in the development and implementation of civic technologies in Chile, Argentina and Mexico. The findings identify the impact these technologies have had upon government bureaucracy, and the existing barriers to openness created by institutionalised behaviours and norms. Institutionalised attitudes to information rights and conventions are shown to inform the approach that government bureaucracy takes in the provision of information, and institutionalised procedural behaviour is shown to be a factor in frustrating NGOs attempting to implement civic technology….(More)”.
Datafication and democracy: Recalibrating digital information systems to address societal interests
Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy
Ariel Procaccia in Wired: “…Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one….. Maine recently became the first US state to adopt instant-runoff voting; the approach will be used for choosing the governor and members of Congress and the state legislature….
So why aren’t we already using cutting-edge voting systems in national elections? Perhaps because changing election systems usually itself requires an election, where short-term political considerations may trump long-term, scientifically grounded reasoning….Despite these difficulties, in the last few years state-of-the-art voting systems have made the transition from theory to practice, through not-for-profit online platforms that focus on facilitating elections in cities and organizations, or even just on helping a group of friends decide where to go to dinner. For example, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team has created an online tool whereby residents of a city can vote on how to allocate the city’s budget for public projects such as parks and roads. This tool has been used by New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle to allocate millions of dollars. Building on this success, the Stanford team is experimenting with groundbreaking methods, inspired by computational thinking, to elicit and aggregate the preferences of residents.
The Princeton-based project All Our Ideas asks voters to compare pairs of ideas, and then aggregates these comparisons via statistical methods, ultimately providing a ranking of all the ideas. To date, roughly 14 million votes have been cast using this system, and it has been employed by major cities and organizations. Among its more whimsical use cases is the Washington Post’s 2010 holiday gift guide, where the question was “what gift would you like to receive this holiday season”; the disappointingly uncreative top idea, based on tens of thousands of votes, was “money”.
Finally, the recently launched website RoboVote (which I created with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard) offers AI-driven voting methods to help groups of people make smart collective decisions. Applications range from selecting a spot for a family vacation or a class president, to potentially high-stakes choices such as which product prototype to develop or which movie script to produce.
These examples show that centuries of research on voting can, at long last, make a societal impact in the internet age. They demonstrate what science can do for democracy, albeit on a relatively small scale, for now….(More)’
The Econocracy: The perils of leaving economics to the experts
Book by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, Zach Ward-Perkins, and Series edited by Mick Moran: “One hundred years ago the idea of ‘the economy’ didn’t exist. Now, improving the economy has come to be seen as perhaps the most important task facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are conducted in the language of economics and economic logic shapes how political issues are thought about and addressed. The result is that the majority of citizens, who cannot speak this language, are locked out of politics while political decisions are increasingly devolved to experts. The econocracy explains how economics came to be seen this way – and the damaging consequences. It opens up the discipline and demonstrates its inner workings to the wider public so that the task of reclaiming democracy can begin….(More)”
Power To The People! (And Settings for Using It Wisely?)
Public Agenda: “From its inception in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting (PB) has incorporated, to varying degrees, both direct and deliberative democracy.
In deliberative democracy, citizens become informed about an issue, talk about their concerns and goals, weigh different policy options and find common ground. They may give policy input to public officials, develop action ideas for implementation by other people and organizations or work to implement ideas themselves, or they may engage in some combination of the three. Advocates of deliberative democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective learners, advisors and volunteers.
In direct democracy, people have the opportunity to vote on policy questions through initiatives and referenda. Advocates of direct democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective public decision makers.
This white paper examines the extent to which North American PB processes are applying deliberative principles and practices, explore the tensions and challenges in making PB more deliberative, suggest questions for further research and offer recommendations for public officials and practitioners for improving their PB processes.
Boosting deliberative engagement in PB processes could have a variety of benefits for communities. First, higher levels of deliberation might produce greater empathy among citizens who hold different opinions or value different things about their communities—and greater understanding between residents and city staff. Second, more deliberative discussions would be more likely to bring to the surface issues of race, religion, class, immigration status and other differences that are always influential but seldom addressed in public life. Finally, the budget ideas produced might be more likely to represent compromises between different groups or opinions, and they might inspire greater efforts by participants to help implement them, beyond the decision to allocate public money.
PB organizers might improve the level and quality of deliberation in their processes in a number of ways:
1. Be more explicit about the importance of deliberation in the process…
2. Ensure participants have the chance to share their stories…
3. Connect the PB process to a broader discussion of city and/or district goals and priorities…
This report is the companion to “Brazil Has Reduced Inequality, Incrementally—Can We Do the Same?,” which focuses on the intersection of PB and economic inequality. Both draw on the data gathered by local PB researchers and by Public Agenda; on local evaluations of PB processes; and on interviews with public officials, also conducted by Public Agenda…(More)”.
Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation
Christopher M. Kelty at Current Anthropology: “Participation is a concept and practice that governs many aspects of new media and new publics. There are a wide range of attempts to create more of it and a surprising lack of theorization. In this paper I attempt to present a “grammar” of participation by looking at three cases where participation has been central in the contemporary moment of new, social media and the Internet as well as in the past, stretching back to the 1930s: citizen participation in public administration, workplace participation, and participatory international development. Across these three cases I demonstrate that the grammar of participation shifts from a language of normative enthusiasm to one of critiques of co-optation and bureaucratization and back again. I suggest that this perpetually aspirational logic results in the problem of “too much democracy in all the wrong places.”…(More)”
Toward Evidence-Based Open Governance by Curating and Exchanging Research: OGRX 2.0
Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at OGRX : “The Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX) is a platform that seeks to identify, collect and share curated insights on new ways of solving public problems. It was created last year by the GovLab, World Bank Digital Engagement Evaluation Team and mySociety. Today, while more than 3000 representatives from more than 70 countries are gathering in Paris for the Open Government Partnership Summit, we are launching OGRX 2.0 with new features and functionalities to further help users identify the signal in the noise of research and evidence on more innovative means of governing….
What is new?
First, the new OGRX Blog provides an outlet for more easily digestible and shareable insights from the open governance research community. OGRX currently features over 600 publications on governance innovation – but how to digest and identify insights? This space will provide summaries of important works, analyses of key trends in the field of research, and guest posts from researchers working at the leading edge of governance innovation across regions and domains. Check back often to stay on top of what’s new in open governance research.
Second, the new OGRX Selected Readings series offers curated reading lists from well-known experts in open governance. These Selected Readings will give readers a sense of how to jumpstart their knowledge by focusing on those publications that have been curated by those in the known about the topics at hand. Today we are launching this new series with the Selected Readings on Civic Technology, curated by mySociety’s head of research Rebecca Rumbul; and the Selected Readings on Policy Informatics, curated by Erik Johnston of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance and director of the Arizona State University Center for Policy Informatics. New Selected Readings will be posted each month, so check back often!…Watch this space and #OGRX to stay abreast of new developments….”
Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All
Max Read in NewYork Magazine: “My favorite story about the internet is the one about the anonymous Japanese guy who liberated Czechoslovakia. In 1989, as open dissent was spreading across the country, dissidents were attempting to coordinate efforts outside the watchful eye of Czechoslovak state security. The internet was a nascent technology, and the cops didn’t use it; modems were banned, and activists were able to use only those they could smuggle over the border, one at a time. Enter our Japanese guy. Bruce Sterling, who first told the story of the Japanese guy in a 1995 Wired article, says he talked to four different people who’d met the quiet stranger, but no one knew his name. What really mattered, anyway, is what he brought with him: “a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems,” which he handed over to a group of engineering students in Prague before walking away. “The students,” Sterling would later write, “immediately used these red-hot 2400-baud scorcher modems to circulate manifestos, declarations of solidarity, rumors, and riot news.” Unrest expanded, the opposition grew, and within months, the Communist regime collapsed.
Is it true? Were free modems the catalyst for the Velvet Revolution? Probably not. But it’s a good story, the kind whose logic and lesson have become so widely understood — and so foundational to the worldview of Silicon Valley — as to make its truth irrelevant. Isn’t the best way to fortify the town square by giving more people access to it? And isn’t it nice to know, as one storied institution and industry after another falls to the internet’s disrupting sword, that everything will be okay in the end — that there might be some growing pains, but connecting billions of people to one another is both inevitable and good? Free speech will expand, democracy will flower, and we’ll all be rich enough to own MacBooks. The new princes of Silicon Valley will lead us into the rational, algorithmically enhanced, globally free future.
Or, they were going to, until earlier this month. The question we face now is: What happens when the industry destroyed is professional politics, the institutions leveled are the same few that prop up liberal democracy, and the values the internet disseminates are racism, nationalism, and demagoguery?
Powerful undemocratic states like China and Russia have for a while now put the internet to use to mislead the public, create the illusion of mass support, and either render opposition invisible or expose it to targeting…(More)”
How Should a Society Be?
This is another example where AI—in this case, machine-learning methods—intersects with these ethical and civic questions in an ultimately promising and potentially productive way. As a society we have these values in maxim form, like equal opportunity, justice, fairness, and in many ways they’re deliberately vague. This deliberate flexibility and ambiguity are what allows things to be a living document that stays relevant. But here we are in this world where we have to say of some machine-learning model, is this racially fair? We have to define these terms, computationally or numerically.
It’s problematic in the short term because we have no idea what we’re doing; we don’t have a way to approach that problem yet. In the slightly longer term—five or ten years—there’s a profound opportunity to come together as a polis and get precise about what we mean by justice or fairness with respect to certain protected classes. Does that mean it’s got an equal false positive rate? Does that mean it has an equal false negative rate? What is the tradeoff that we’re willing to make? What are the constraints that we want to put on this model-building process? That’s a profound question, and we haven’t needed to address it until now. There’s going to be a civic conversation in the next few years about how to make these concepts explicit….(More) (Video)”