(Open Access) book edited by Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss: “Presenting rigorous and original research, this volume offers key insights into the historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces at play in the creation of world-class ICT innovations in Kenya. Following the arrival of fiber-optic cables in 2009, Digital Kenya examines why the initial entrepreneurial spirit and digital revolution has begun to falter despite support from motivated entrepreneurs, international investors, policy experts and others. Written by engaged scholars and professionals in the field, the book offers 15 eye-opening chapters and 14 one-on-one conversations with entrepreneurs and investors to ask why establishing ICT start-ups on a continental and global scale remains a challenge on the “Silicon Savannah”. The authors present evidence-based recommendations to help Kenya to continue producing globally impactful ICT innovations that improve the lives of those still waiting on the side-lines, and to inspire other nations to do the same….(More)”
Playing politics: exposing the flaws of nudge thinking
Book Review by Pat Kane in The New Scientist: “The cover of this book echoes its core anxiety. A giant foot presses down on a sullen, Michael Jackson-like figure – a besuited citizen coolly holding off its massive weight. This is a sinister image to associate with a volume (and its author, Cass Sunstein) that should be able to proclaim a decade of success in the government’s use of “behavioural science”, or nudge theory. But doubts are brewing about its long-term effectiveness in changing public behaviour – as well as about its selective account of evolved human nature.
Nudging has had a strong and illustrious run at the highest level. Outgoing US President Barack Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron both set up behavioural science units at the heart of their administrations (Sunstein was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012).
Sunstein insists that the powers that be cannot avoid nudging us. Every shop floor plan, every new office design, every commercial marketing campaign, every public information campaign, is an “architecting of choices”. As anyone who ever tried to leave IKEA quickly will suspect, that endless, furniture-strewn path to the exit is no accident.
Nudges “steer people in particular directions, but also allow them to go their own way”. They are entreaties to change our habits, to accept old or new norms, but they presume thatwe are ultimately free to refuse the request.
However, our freedom is easily constrained by “cognitive biases”. Our brains, say the nudgers, are lazy, energy-conserving mechanisms, often overwhelmed by information. So a good way to ensure that people pay into their pensions, for example, is to set payment as a “default” in employment contracts, so the employee has to actively untick the box. Defaults of all kinds exploit our preference for inertia and the status quo in order to increase future security….
Sunstein makes useful distinctions between nudges and the other things governments and enterprises can do. Nudges are not “mandates” (laws, regulations, punishments). A mandate would be, for example, a rigorous and well-administered carbon tax, secured through a democratic or representative process. A “nudge” puts smiley faces on your energy bill, and compares your usage to that of the eco-efficient Joneses next door (nudgers like to game our herd-like social impulses).
In a fascinating survey section, which asks Americans and others what they actually think about being the subjects of the “architecting” of their choices, Sunstein discovers that “if people are told that they are being nudged, they will react adversely and resist”.
This is why nudge thinking may be faltering – its understanding of human nature unnecessarily (and perhaps expediently) downgrades our powers of conscious thought….(More)
See The Ethics of Influence: Government in the age of behavioral science Cass R. Sunstein, Cambridge University Press
Embracing Digital Democracy: A Call for Building an Online Civic Commons
John Gastil and Robert C. Richards Jr. in Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming): “Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them….(More)”
Between Governance of the Past and Technology of the Future
Think Piece by Heather Grabbe for ESPAS 2016 conference: ” In many parts of everyday life, voters are used to a consumer experience where they get instant feedback and personal participation; but party membership, ballot boxes and stump speeches do not offer the same speed, control or personal engagement. The institutions of representative democracy at national and EU level — political parties, elected members, law-making — do not offer the same quality of experience for their ultimate consumers.
This matters because it is causing voters to switch off. Broad participation by most of the population in the practice of democracy is vital for societies to remain open because it ensures pluralism and prevents takeover of power by narrow interests. But in some countries and some elections, turnout is regularly below a third of registered voters, especially in European Parliament elections.
The internet is driving the major trends that create this disconnection and disruption. Here are four vital areas in which politics should adapt, including at EU level:
- Expectation. Voters have a growing sense that political parties and law-making are out of touch, but not that politics is irrelevant. …
- Affiliation. … people are interested in new forms of affiliation, especially through social media and alternative networks. …
- Location. Digital technology allows people to find myriad new ways to express their political views publicly, outside of formal political spaces. …
- Information. The internet has made vast amounts of data and a huge range of information sources across an enormous spectrum of issues available to every human with an internet connection. How is this information overload affecting engagement with politics? ….(More)”
Make Democracy Great Again: Let’s Try Some ‘Design Thinking’
Ken Carbone in the Huffington Post: “Allow me to begin with the truth. I’ve never studied political science, run for public office nor held a position in government. For the last forty years I’ve led a design agency working with enduring brands across the globe. As with any experienced person in my profession, I have used research, deductive reasoning, logic and “design thinking“ to solve complex problems and create opportunities. Great brands that are showing their age turn to our agency to get back on course. In this light, I believe American democracy is a prime target for some retooling….
The present campaign cycle has left many voters wondering how such divisiveness and national embarrassment could be happening in the land of the free and home of the brave. This could be viewed as symptomatic of deeper structural problems in our tradition bound 240 year-old democracy. Great brands operate on a “innovate or die” model to insure success. The continual improvement of how a business operates and adapts to market conditions is a sound and critical practice.
Although the current election frenzy will soon be over, I want to examine three challenges to our election process and propose possible solutions for consideration. I’ll use the same diagnostic thinking I use with major corporations:
Term Limits…
Voting and Voter registration…
Political Campaigns…
In June of this year I attended the annual leadership conference of AIGA, the professional association for design, in Raleigh NC. A provocative question posed to a select group of designers was “What would you do if you were Secretary of Design.” The responses addressed issues concerning positive social change, education and Veteran Affairs. The audience was full of several hundred trained professionals whose everyday problem solving methods encourage divergent thinking to explore many solutions (possible or impossible) and then use convergent thinking to select and realize the best resolution. This is the very definition of “design thinking.” That leads to progress….(More)”.
Is Social Media Killing Democracy?
Phil Howard at Culture Digitally: “This is the big year for computational propaganda—using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits.
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook now provide a structure for our political lives. We’ve always relied on many kinds of sources for our political news and information. Family, friends, news organizations, charismatic politicians certainly predate the internet. But whereas those are sources of information, social media now provides the structure for political conversation. And the problem is that these technologies permit too much fake news, encourage our herding instincts, and aren’t expected to provide public goods.
First, social algorithms allow fake news stories from untrustworthy sources to spread like wildfire over networks of family and friends. …
Second, social media algorithms provide very real structure to what political scientists often call “elective affinity” or “selective exposure”…
The third problem is that technology companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have been given a “moral pass” on the obligations we hold journalists and civil society groups to….
Facebook has run several experiments now, published in scholarly journals, demonstrating that they have the ability to accurately anticipate and measure social trends. Whereas journalists and social scientists feel an obligation to openly analyze and discuss public preferences, we do not expect this of Facebook. The network effects that clearly were unmeasured by pollsters were almost certainly observable to Facebook. When it comes to news and information about politics, or public preferences on important social questions, Facebook has a moral obligation to share data and prevent computational propaganda. The Brexit referendum and US election have taught us that Twitter and Facebook are now media companies. Their engineering decisions are effectively editorial decisions, and we need to expect more openness about how their algorithms work. And we should expect them to deliberate about their editorial decisions.
There are some ways to fix these problems. Opaque software algorithms shape what people find in their news feeds. We’ve all noticed fake news stories, often called clickbait, and while these can be an entertaining part of using the internet, it is bad when they are used to manipulate public opinion. These algorithms work as “bots” on social media platforms like Twitter, where they were used in both the Brexit and US Presidential campaign to aggressively advance the case for leaving Europe and the case for electing Trump. Similar algorithms work behind the scenes on Facebook, where they govern what content from your social networks actually gets your attention.
So the first way to strengthen democratic practices is for academics, journalists, policy makers and the interested public to audit social media algorithms….(More)”.
Transforming government through digitization
Bjarne Corydon, Vidhya Ganesan, and Martin Lundqvist at McKinsey: “By digitizing processes and making organizational changes, governments can enhance services, save money, and improve citizens’ quality of life.
As companies have transformed themselves with digital technologies, people are calling on governments to follow suit. By digitizing, governments can provide services that meet the evolving expectations of citizens and businesses, even in a period of tight budgets and increasingly complex challenges. Our estimates suggest that government digitization, using current technology, could generate over $1 trillion annually worldwide.
Digitizing a government requires attention to two major considerations: the core capabilities for engaging citizens and businesses, and the organizational enablers that support those capabilities (exhibit). These make up a framework for setting digital priorities. In this article, we look at the capabilities and enablers in this framework, along with guidelines and real-world examples to help governments seize the opportunities that digitization offers.
Governments typically center their digitization efforts on four capabilities: services, processes, decisions, and data sharing. For each, we believe there is a natural progression from quick wins to transformative efforts….(More)”
See also: Digital by default: A guide to transforming government (PDF–474KB) and “Never underestimate the importance of good government,” a New at McKinsey blog post with coauthor Bjarne Corydon, director of the McKinsey Center for Government.
The Cost of Cooperating
If you think about the puzzle of cooperation being “why should I incur a personal cost of time or money or effort in order to do something that’s going to benefit other people and not me?” the general answer is that if you can create future consequences for present behavior, that can create an incentive to cooperate. Cooperation requires me to incur some costs now, but if I’m cooperating with someone who I’ll interact with again, it’s worth it for me to pay the cost of cooperating now in order to get the benefit of them cooperating with me in the future, as long as there’s a large enough likelihood that we’ll interact again.
Even if it’s with someone that I’m not going to interact with again, if other people are observing that interaction, then it affects my reputation. It can be worth paying the cost of cooperating in order to earn a good reputation, and to attract new interaction partners.
There’s a lot of evidence to show that this works. There are game theory models and computer simulations showing that if you build these kinds of future consequences, you can get either evolution to lead to cooperative agents dominating populations, and also learning and strategic reasoning leading to people cooperating. There are also lots of behavioral experiments supporting this. These are lab experiments where you bring people into the lab, give them money, and you have them engage in economic cooperation games where they choose whether to keep the money for themselves or to contribute it to a group project that benefits other people. If you make it so that future consequences exist in any of these various ways, it makes people more inclined to cooperate. Typically, it leads to cooperation paying off, and being the best-performing strategy.
In these situations, it’s not altruistic to be cooperative because the interactions are designed in a way that makes cooperating pay off. For example, we have a paper that shows that in the context of repeated interactions, there’s not any relationship between how altruistic people are and how much they cooperate. Basically, everybody cooperates, even the selfish people. Under certain situations, selfish people can even wind up cooperating more because they’re better at identifying that that’s what is going to pay off.
This general class of solutions to the cooperation problem boils down to creating future consequences, and therefore creating a self-interested motivation in the long run to be cooperative. Strategic cooperation is extremely important; it explains a lot of real-world cooperation. From an institution design perspective, it’s important for people to be thinking about how you set up the rules of interaction—interaction structures and incentive structures—in a way that makes working for the greater good a good strategy.
At the same time that this strategic cooperation is important, it’s also clearly the case that people often cooperate even when there’s not a self-interested motive to do so. That willingness to help strangers (or to not exploit them) is a core piece of well-functioning societies. It makes society much more efficient when you don’t constantly have to be watching your back, afraid that people are going to take advantage of you. If you can generally trust that other people are going to do the right thing and you’re going to do the right thing, it makes life much more socially efficient.
Strategic incentives can motivate people to cooperate, but people also keep cooperating even when there are not incentives to do so, at least to some extent. What motivates people to do that? The way behavioral economists and psychologists talk about that is at a proximate psychological level—saying things like, “Well, it feels good to cooperate with other people. You care about others and that’s why you’re willing to pay costs to help them. You have social preferences.” …
Most people, both in the scientific world and among laypeople, are of the former opinion, which is that we are by default selfish—we have to use rational deliberation to make ourselves do the right thing. I try to think about this question from a theoretical principle position and say, what should it be? From a perspective of either evolution or strategic reasoning, which of these two stories makes more sense, and should we expect to observe?
If you think about it that way, the key question is “where do our intuitive defaults come from?” There’s all this work in behavioral economics and psychology on heuristics and biases which suggests that these intuitions are usually rules of thumb for the behavior that typically works well. It makes sense: If you’re going to have something as your default, what should you choose as your default? You should choose the thing that works well in general. In any particular situation, you might stop and ask, “Does my rule of thumb fit this specific situation?” If not, then you can override it….(More)”
Beyond nudging: it’s time for a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy
Katherine Curchin at LSE Blog: “…behavioural scientists are calling for a second generation of behaviourally-informed policy. In some policy areas, nudges simply aren’t enough. Behavioural research shows stronger action is required to attack the underlying cause of problems. For example, many scholars have argued that behavioural insights provide a rationale for regulation to protect consumers from manipulation by private sector companies. But what might a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy look like?
Behavioural insights could provide a justification to change the trajectory of income support policy. Since the 1990s policy attention has focused on the moral character of benefits recipients. Inspired by Lawrence Mead’s paternalist philosophy, governments have tried to increase the resolve of the unemployed to work their way out of poverty. More and more behavioural requirements have been attached to benefits to motivate people to fulfil their obligations to society.
But behavioural research now suggests that these harsh policies are misguided. Behavioural science supports the idea that people often make poor decisions and do things which are not in their long term interests. But the weakness of individuals’ moral constitution isn’t so much the problem as the unequal distribution of opportunities in society. There are circumstances in which humans are unlikely to flourish no matter how motivated they are.
Normal human psychological limitations – our limited cognitive capacity, limited attention and limited self-control – interact with environment to produce the behaviour that advocates of harsh welfare regimes attribute to permissive welfare. In their book Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that the experience of deprivation creates a mindset that makes it harder to process information, pay attention, make good decisions, plan for the future, and resist temptations.
Importantly, behavioural scientists have demonstrated that this mindset can be temporarily created in the laboratory by placing subjects in artificial situations which induce the feeling of not having enough. As a consequence, experimental subjects from middle-class backgrounds suddenly display the short-term thinking and irrational decision making often attributed to a culture of poverty.
Tying inadequate income support to a list of behavioural conditions will most punish those who are suffering most. Empirical studies of welfare conditionality have found that benefit claimants often do not comprehend the complicated rules that apply to them. Some are being punished for lack of understanding rather than deliberate non-compliance.
Behavioural insights can be used to mount a case for a more generous, less punitive approach to income support. The starting point is to acknowledge that some of Mead’s psychological assumptions have turned out to be wrong. The nature of the cognitive machinery humans share imposes limits on how self-disciplined and conscientious we can reasonably expect people living in adverse circumstances to be. We have placed too much emphasis on personal responsibility in recent decades. Why should people internalize the consequences of their behaviour when this behaviour is to a large extent the product of their environment?…(More)”
Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget
Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.
Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.
‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’
Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.
Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.
The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.
On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….
Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.