INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

Want to make your vote really count? Stick a blockchain on it

Curated on September 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Niall Firth at New Scientist: “Bitcoin changed the way we think about money forever. Now a type of political cryptocurrency wants to do the same for votes, reinventing how we participate in democracy.

Sovereign is being unveiled this week by Democracy Earth, a not-for-profit organisation in Palo Alto, California. It combines liquid democracy – which gives individuals more flexibility in how they use their votes – with blockchains, digital ledgers of transactions that keep cryptocurrencies like bitcoin secure. Sovereign’s developers hope it could signal the beginning of a democratic system that transcends national borders.

“There’s an intrinsic incompatibility between the internet and nation states,” says Santiago Siri, one of Democracy Earth’s co-founders. “If we’re going to think about digital governance, we need to think in a borderless, global way.”

The basic concept of liquid democracy is that voters can express their wishes on an issue directly or delegate their vote to someone else they think is better-placed to decide on their behalf. In turn, those delegates can also pass those votes upwards through the chain. Crucially, users can see how their delegate voted and reclaim their vote to use themselves.

It’s an attractive concept, but it hasn’t been without problems. One is that a seemingly unending series of votes saps the motivation of users, so fewer votes are cast over time. Additionally, a few “celebrities” can garner an unhealthy number of delegated votes and wield too much power – an issue Germany’s Pirate Party ran into when experimenting with liquid democracy.

Siri thinks Sovereign can solve both of these problems. It sits on existing blockchain software platforms, such as Ethereum, but instead of producing units of cryptocurrency, Sovereign creates a finite number of tokens called “votes”. These are assigned to registered users who can vote as part of organisations who set themselves up on the network, whether that is a political party, a municipality, a country or even a co-operatively run company.

No knowledge of blockchains is required – voters simply use an app. Votes are then “dripped” into their accounts over time like a universal basic income of votes. Users can debate with each other before deciding which way to vote. A single vote takes just a tap, while more votes can be assigned to a single issue using a slider bar….(More)”

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on September 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

Civic Tech in the Global South

Curated on September 6, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Tiago Peixoto: “Civic Tech in the Global South is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of 23 digital platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery, highlighting citizen uptake and the degree of responsiveness by public service providers. The initiatives are an SMS-based polling platform run by UNICEF in Uganda, a complaints-management system run by the water sector in Kenya, and an internet-based participatory budgeting program in Brazil. Based on these experiences, the authors examine: i) the extent to which technologies have promoted inclusiveness, ii) the effect of these initiatives on public service delivery, and iii) the extent to which these effects can be attributed to technology….(More)”.

Making Sense of Corruption

Curated on September 5, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bo Rothstein and Aiysha Varraich: “Corruption is a serious threat to prosperity, democracy and human well-being, with mounting empirical evidence highlighting its detrimental effects on society. Yet defining this threat has resulted in profound disagreement, producing a multidimensional concept. Tackling this important and provocative topic, the authors provide an accessible and systematic analysis of how our understanding of corruption has evolved. They identify gaps in the research and make connections between related concepts such as clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism, particularism and state capture. A fundamental issue discussed is how the opposite of corruption should be defined. By arguing for the possibility of a universal understanding of corruption, and specifically what corruption is not, an innovative solution to this problem is presented. This book provides an accessible overview of corruption, allowing scholars and students alike to see the far reaching place it has within academic research….(More)”.

Design Thinking Approach to Ethical (Responsible) Technological Innovation

Curated on August 31, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Ganesh Nathan in Responsible Research and Innovation: From Concepts to Practices, (eds.) R. Gianni, J. Pearson and B. Reber, Routledge: “There is growing interest and importance for responsible research and innovation (RRI) among academic scholars and policy makers, especially, in relation to emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. It is also to be noted that, although the design thinking approach has been around since 1960s, there is renewed interest in this approach to innovation with an increasing number of related publications over the last couple of decades. Furthermore, it is currently introduced in a number of schools and community projects. However, there is a gap in bridging design thinking approach to RRI and this chapter attempts to address this need.

This chapter aims to show that design thinking approach is potentially conducive to ethical (responsible) technological innovation especially within emerging and converging technologies, due to its emphasis on human-centered design and other core attributes such as empathy – although it poses many challenges to implement….(More)”.

Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking, Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity

Curated on August 30, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand: “Inaccurate beliefs pose a threat to democracy and fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. Here we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real news (“media truth discernment”). This was true regardless of whether the article’s source was indicated (which, surprisingly, also had no main effect on accuracy judgments). Contrary to the motivated reasoning account, CRT was just as positively correlated with media truth discernment, if not more so, for headlines that aligned with individuals’ political ideology relative to those that were politically discordant. The link between analytic thinking and media truth discernment was driven both by a negative correlation between CRT and perceptions of fake news accuracy (particularly among Hillary Clinton supporters), and a positive correlation between CRT and perceptions of real news accuracy (particularly among Donald Trump supporters). This suggests that factors that undermine the legitimacy of traditional news media may exacerbate the problem of inaccurate political beliefs among Trump supporters, who engaged in less analytic thinking and were overall less able to discern fake from real news (regardless of the news’ political valence). We also found consistent evidence that pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity negatively correlates with perceptions of fake news accuracy; a correlation that is mediated by analytic thinking. Finally, analytic thinking was associated with an unwillingness to share both fake and real news on social media. Our results indicate that the propensity to think analytically plays an important role in the recognition of misinformation, regardless of political valence – a finding that opens up potential avenues for fighting fake news….(More)”.

Bridging Governments’ Borders

Curated on August 17, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Robyn Scott & Lisa Witter at SSIR: “…Our research found that “disconnection” falls into five, negatively reinforcing categories in the public sector; a closer look at these categories may help policy makers see the challenge before them more clearly:

1. Disconnected Governments

There is a truism in politics and government that all policy is local and context-dependent. Whether this was ever an accurate statement is questionable; it is certainly no longer. While all policy must ultimately be customized for local conditions, it absurd to assume there is little or nothing to learn from other countries. Three trends, in fact, indicate that solutions will become increasingly fungible between countries…..

2. Disconnected Issues

What climate change policy can endure without a job-creation strategy? What sensible criminal justice reform does not consider education? Yet even within countries, departments and their employees often remain as foreign to each other as do nations….

3. Disconnected Public Servants

The isolation of governments, and of government departments, is caused by and reinforces the isolation of people working in government, who have few incentives—and plenty of disincentives—to share what they are working on…..

4. Disconnected Citizens

…There are areas of increasingly visible progress in bridging the disconnections of government, citizen engagement being one. We’re still in the early stages, but private sector fashions such as human-centered design and design thinking have become government buzzwords. And platforms enabling new types of citizen engagement—from participatory budgeting to apps that people use to report potholes—are increasingly popping up around the world…..

5. Disconnected Ideas

According to the World Bank’s own data, one third of its reports are never read, even once. Foundations and academia pour tens of millions of dollars into policy research with few targeted channels to reach policymakers; they also tend to produce and deliver information in formats that policymakers don’t find useful. People in government, like everyone else, are frequently on their mobile phones, and short of time….(More)”

Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions

Curated on August 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff in Perspectives on Psychological Science: “In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions….(More)”.

Democratic Resilience for a Populist Age

Curated on August 9, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Helmut K. Anheier at Project Syndicate: “… many democracies are plagued by serious maladies – such as electoral gerrymandering, voter suppression, fraud and corruption, violations of the rule of law, and threats to judicial independence and press freedom – there is little agreement about which solutions should be pursued.

How to make our democracies more resilient, if not altogether immune, to anti-democratic threats is a central question of our time. …

Democratic resilience demands that citizens do more than bemoan deficiencies and passively await constitutional reform. It requires openness to change and innovation. Such changes may occur incrementally, but their aggregate effect can be immense…

Governments and citizens thus have a rich set of options – such as diversity quotas, automatic voter registration, and online referenda – for addressing democratic deficiencies. Moreover, there are measures that can also help citizens mount a defense of democracy against authoritarian assaults.

To that end, organizations can be created to channel protest and dissent into the democratic process, so that certain voices are not driven to the political fringe. And watchdog groups can oversee deliberative assemblies and co-governance efforts – such as participatory budgeting – to give citizens more direct access to decision-making. At the same time, core governance institutions, like central banks and electoral commissions, should be depoliticized, to prevent their capture by populist opportunists.

When properly applied, these measures can encourage consensus building and thwart special interests. Moreover, such policies can boost public trust and give citizens a greater sense of ownership vis-à-vis their government.

Of course, some political innovations that work in one context may cause real damage in another. Referenda, for example, are easily manipulated by demagogues. Assemblies can become gridlocked, and quotas can restrict voters’ choices. Fixing contemporary democracy will inevitably require experimentation and adaptation.

Still, recent research can help us along the way. The Governance Report 2017 has compiled a diverse list of democratic tools that can be applied in different contexts around the globe – by governments, policymakers, civil-society leaders, and citizens.

In his contribution to the report, German sociologist Claus Offe, Professor Emeritus of the Hertie School and Humboldt University identifies two fundamental priorities for all democracies. The first is to secure all citizens’ basic rights and ability to participate in civic life; the second is to provide a just and open society with opportunities for all citizens. As it happens, these two imperatives are linked: democratic government should be “of,” “by,” and for the people….(More)”.