John Morison at Oxford Journal of Legal Studies: “Consultation procedures are used increasingly in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This account looks critically at consultation as presently practised, and suggests that consulters and consultees need to do much more to ensure both the participatory validity and democratic value of such exercises. The possibility of a ‘right to be consulted’ is examined. Some ideas from a governmentality perspective are developed, using the growth of localism as an example, to suggest that consultation is often a very structured interaction: the actual operation of participation mechanisms may not always create a space for an equal exchange between official and participant views. Examples of best practice in consultation are examined, before consideration is given to recent case law from the UK seeking to establish basic ground rules for how consultations should be organised. Finally, the promise of consultation to reinvigorate democracy is evaluated and weighed against the correlative risk of ‘participatory disempowerment’…(More)”.
Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World
Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.
Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.
Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.
Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”
Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?
Shlomo Benartzi, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman et al in Psychological Science: “Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging….(More)”.
Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative Democracy
Paper by Helene Landemore: “Deliberative democracy is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the current crisis of representative democracy. If deliberative democracy is necessarily representative and if representation betrays the true meaning of democracy as rule of, by, and for the people, then how can deliberative democracy retain any validity as a theory of political legitimacy? Any tight connection between deliberative democracy and representative democracy thus risks making deliberative democracy obsolete: a dated paradigm fit for a precrisis order, but maladjusted to the world of Occupy, the Pirate Party, the Zapatistas, and other antirepresentative movements. This essay argues that the problem comes from a particular and historically situated understanding of representative democracy as rule by elected elites. I argue that in order to retain its normative appeal and political relevance, deliberative democracy should dissociate itself from representative democracy thus understood and reinvent itself as the core of a more truly democratic paradigm, which I call “open democracy.” In open democracy, popular rule means the mediated but real exercise of power by ordinary citizens. This new paradigm privileges nonelectoral forms of representation and in it, power is meant to remain constantly inclusive of and accessible–in other words open–to ordinary citizens….(More)”
Handbook of Cyber-Development, Cyber-Democracy, and Cyber-Defense
“Living Reference Work” edited by Elias G. Carayannis, David F. J. Campbell, and Marios Panagiotis Efthymiopoulos: “This volume covers a wide spectrum of issues relating to economic and political development enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Showcasing contributions from researchers, industry leaders and policymakers, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities created by technological innovations that are profoundly affecting the dynamics of economic growth, promotion of democratic principles, and the protection of individual, national, and regional rights. Of particular interest is the influence of ICT on the generation and dissemination of knowledge, which, in turn, empowers citizens and accelerates change across all strata of society. Each essay features literature reviews and key references; definition of critical terms and concepts, case examples; implications for practice, policy and theory; and discussion of future directions. Representing such fields as management, political science, economics, law, psychology and education, the authors cover such timely topics as health care, energy and environmental policy, banking and finance, disaster recovery, investment in research and development, homeland security and diplomacy in the context of ICT and its economic, political and social impact…(More)”
What drives legitimacy in government?
Discussion paper by the Centre for Public Impact (CPI): “…What are the sources of legitimacy, and how can legitimacy be strengthened? By legitimacy we mean the reservoir of support that that allows governments to deliver positive outcomes for people, what we at the CPI call public impact. We are interested in exploring how governments can build constructive relationships with their citizens for the benefit of each of us and society as a whole. This might be at a wholeof-government level or the level of an individual service or policy. We will explore how legitimacy flows between these levels, and how legitimacy can be built both from the top down and from the bottom up.
Occasionally legitimacy is discussed as a black or white concept – with governments labelled as either “legitimate” (meaning rightfully in power) or “illegitimate” (meaning not rightfully in power). We will try to avoid getting mired down in such discussions. The concept of legitimacy is also often used as shorthand for other concepts such as “a democratic mandate”, “fitness to serve” or “honesty”. Our project aims to determine what legitimacy means in reality to people and governments in different parts of the world, providing some shades of grey as well greater rigour and clarity. There will be no easy answers. Building legitimacy requires action in many parts of a complex system, involving multiple institutions and actors. And the sources of legitimacy in one country or in one policy area may not be easily translatable to other countries or other policy areas….(More)”.
The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Democracy
Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review: “Accusations that the Internet and social media sow political division have flown thick and fast since recent contentious elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even pledged to start working on technology that will turn the energy of online interactions into a more positive force (see “We Need More Alternatives to Facebook”).
Tiny, largely self-funded U.S. startup Pol.is has been working on a similar project longer than Zuckerberg and already has some promising results. The company’s interactive, crowdsourced survey tool can be used to generate maps of public opinion that help citizens, governments, and legislators discover the nuances of agreement and disagreement on contentious issues that exist. In 2016, that information helped the government of Taiwan break a six-year deadlock over how to regulate online alcohol sales, caused by entrenched, opposing views among citizens on what rules should apply.
“It allowed different sides to gradually see that they share the same underlying concern despite superficial disagreements,” says Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister. The island’s government now routinely sends out Pol.is surveys using Facebook ads, and to special-interest groups. It has also used the system to help thrash out what rules should apply to Airbnb rentals and mobile ride-hailing services such as Uber.
Pol.is’s open-source software is designed to serve up interactive online surveys around a particular issue. People are shown a series of short statements about aspects of a broader issue—for example, “Uber drivers should need the same licenses cab drivers do”—and asked to click to signal that they agree or disagree. People can contribute new statements of their own for others to respond to. The tangle of crisscrossing responses is used to automatically generate charts that map out different clusters of opinion, making it easy to see the points on which people tend to overlap or disagree.
Alternativet, a progressive Danish political party with nine members of parliament, is piloting Pol.is as a way to give its members a more direct role in formulating policy. Jon Skjerning-Rasmussen, a senior process coordinator with the party, says the way Pol.is visualizations are shared with people as they participate in a survey—letting them see how their opinions compare with those of others—helps people engage with the tool….(More).
How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
the New York Times: “…the biggest problem with Twitter’s place in the news is its role in the production and dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It keeps pushing conspiracy theories — and because lots of people in the media, not to mention many news consumers, don’t quite understand how it works, the precise mechanism is worth digging into….Here’s how.
The guts of the news business.
One way to think of today’s disinformation ecosystem is to picture it as a kind of gastrointestinal tract…. Twitter often acts as the small bowel of digital news. It’s where political messaging and disinformation get digested, packaged and widely picked up for mass distribution to cable, Facebook and the rest of the world.
This role for Twitter has seemed to grow more intense during (and since) the 2016 campaign. Twitter now functions as a clubhouse for much of the news. It’s where journalists pick up stories, meet sources, promote their work, criticize competitors’ work and workshop takes. In a more subtle way, Twitter has become a place where many journalists unconsciously build and gut-check a worldview — where they develop a sense of what’s important and merits coverage, and what doesn’t.
This makes Twitter a prime target for manipulators: If you can get something big on Twitter, you’re almost guaranteed coverage everywhere….
Twitter is clogged with fake people.
For determined media manipulators, getting something big on Twitter isn’t all that difficult. Unlike Facebook, which requires people to use their real names, Twitter offers users essentially full anonymity, and it makes many of its functions accessible to outside programmers, allowing people to automate their actions on the service.
As a result, numerous cheap and easy-to-use online tools let people quickly create thousands of Twitter bots — accounts that look real, but that are controlled by a puppet master.
Twitter’s design also promotes a slavish devotion to metrics: Every tweet comes with a counter of Likes and Retweets, and users come to internalize these metrics as proxies for real-world popularity….
They may ruin democracy.
…. the more I spoke to experts, the more convinced I became that propaganda bots on Twitter might be a growing and terrifying scourge on democracy. Research suggests that bots are ubiquitous on Twitter. Emilio Ferrara and Alessandro Bessi, researchers at the University of Southern California, found that about a fifth of the election-related conversation on Twitter last year was generated by bots. Most users were blind to them; they treated the bots the same way they treated other users….
in a more pernicious way, bots give us an easy way to doubt everything we see online. In the same way that the rise of “fake news” gives the president cover to label everything “fake news,” the rise of bots might soon allow us to dismiss any online enthusiasm as driven by automation. Anyone you don’t like could be a bot; any highly retweeted post could be puffed up by bots….(More)”.
More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it
Paper by Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch: “For several generations, political reform and rhetoric have been entirely one-directional: always more direct democracy, never less. The general belief holds that more public involvement will produce more representative and thus more effective and legitimate governance. But does increasing popular involvement in politics remedy the ills of our government culture; is it the chicken soup of political reforms?
In a new report, “More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it,” Brookings Senior Fellows Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes argue that the best way forward is to rebalance the reform agenda away from direct participation and toward intermediation and institutions. As the authors write, “Neither theory nor practice supports the idea that more participation will produce better policy outcomes, or will improve the public’s approbation of government, or is even attainable in an environment dominated by extreme partisans and narrow interest groups.”
Populism cannot solve our problems, Rauch and Wittes claim, because its core premises and reforms are self-defeating. Research has shown that voters are “irrationally biased and rationally ignorant,” and do not possess the specialized knowledge necessary to make complex policy judgments. Further, elections provide little by way of substantive guidance for policymakers and, even on its own terms, direct democracy is often unrepresentative. In the words of the authors, “By itself, building more direct input from the public into the functions of government is likely to lead to more fragmentation, more stalemate, more flawed policies—and, paradoxically, less effective representation.”
The authors are not advocating complacency about voter participation, much less for restricting or limiting voting: “We are arguing that participation is not enough, and that overinvesting in it neglects other, more promising paths.”
To truly repair American democracy, Rauch and Wittes endorse a resurgence of political institutions, such as political parties, and substantive professionals, such as career politicians and experts. Drawing on examples like the intelligence oversight community, the authors assert that these intermediaries actually make democracy more inclusive and more representative than direct participation can do by itself. “In complex policy spaces,” the authors write, “properly designed intermediary institutions can act more decisively and responsively on behalf of the public than an army of ‘the people’ could do on its own behalf, [and are] less likely to be paralyzed by factional disputes and distorted by special-interest manipulation.”…(More) (Read the full paper here).
Information for the People: Tunisia Embraces Open Government, 2011–2016
Case study by Tristan Dreisback at Innovations for Successful Societies: “In January 2011, mass demonstrations in Tunisia ousted a regime that had tolerated little popular participation, opening the door to a new era of transparency. The protesters demanded an end to the secrecy that had protected elite privilege. Five months later, the president issued a decree that increased citizen access to government data and formed a steering committee to guide changes in information practices, building on small projects already in development. Advocates in the legislature and the public service joined with civil society leaders to support a strong access-to-information policy, to change the culture of public administration, and to secure the necessary financial and technical resources to publish large quantities of data online in user-friendly formats. Several government agencies launched their own open-data websites. External pressure, coupled with growing interest from civil society and legislators, helped keep transparency reforms on the cabinet office agenda despite frequent changes in top leadership. In 2016, Tunisia adopted one of the world’s strongest laws regarding access to information. Although members of the public did not put all of the resources to use immediately, the country moved much closer to having the data needed to improve access to services, enhance government performance, and support the evidence-based deliberation on which a healthy democracy depended…(More)”