Minben 民本 as an alternative to liberal democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Rongxin Li: “Although theorists have proposed non-Western types of democracy, such as Asian Democracy, they have nevertheless actively marginalised these non-Western types. This is partly due to Asian Democracy’s  inextricable link with Confucian traditions – many of which people commonly assume to be anti-democratic. This worry over Confucian values does not, however, detract from the fact that scholars are deliberately ignoring non-Western types of democracy because they do not follow Western narratives. ..

Minben is a paternalistic model of democracy. It does not involve multi-party elections and, unlike in liberal democracy, disorderly public participation is not one of its priorities. Minben relies on a theory of governance that believes carefully selected elites, usually a qualified minority, can use their knowledge and the constant pursuit of virtuous conduct to deliver the common good.

Liberal democracy maintains its legitimacy through periodic and competitive elections. Minben retains its legitimacy through its ‘output’. It is results, or policy implementation, oriented. Some argue that this performance-driven democracy cannot endure because it depends on people buying into it and consistently supporting it. But we could say the same of any democratic regime. Liberal democracy’s legitimacy is not unassailable – nor is it guaranteed.

Indeed, liberal democracy and Minben have more in common than many Western theorists concede. As Yu Keping underlined, stability is paramount in Chinese Communist Party ideology. John Keane, for example, once likened government and its legitimacy to a slippery egg. The greater the social instability, which may be driven by displeasure over the performance of ruling elites, the slipperier the egg becomes for the elites in question. Both liberal democratic regimes and Minben regimes face the same problem of dealing with social turmoil. Both look to serving the people as a means to staying atop the egg…

Minben – and this may surprise certain Western theorists – does not exclude public participation and deliberation. These instruments convey public voices and concerns to the selected technocrats tasked with deciding for the people. There is representation based on consultation here. Technocrats seek to make good decisions based on full consultation and analysis of public preferences…(More)”.

Solving Social Dilemmas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Roger Congleton: “… provides an explanation for the rise of prosperous commercial societies. Congleton argues that an endless series of social, economic, and political dilemmas have to be solved or ameliorated to sustain social and economic progress and suggests that the most plausible solutions involve internalized rules of conduct. Previous foundational texts suggest that institutions often emerge to address social dilemmas, but Congleton focuses on a solution that is arguably prior to formal institutions: the internalization of principles and rules of conduct that directly affect individual behavior and thereby group outcomes.

Supported by an intellectual and analytical history of the emergence of commercial societies in the West, the book uses elementary game theory to review a few dozen social, economic, and political dilemmas that need to be solved if prosperous societies are to emerge. It shows that ethical dispositions are likely to play important roles in solutions to all the problems examined-and arguably many more. Congleton does not claim that commercial networks result from ethical as opposed to unethical behavior, but that some ethical systems include rules that support the development of extended market networks, specialization, and innovation. As evidence the book traces how the increasing support of commerce in ethical theories in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries helped launch “the great acceleration” and the emergence of the first truly commercial societies….(More)”.

Realistic Reasons to be Bullish on Nudging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Ed Bradon: “Nudges are a valuable, modestly resourced and, as we shall see, dramatically underused way of improving people’s lives. Abandoning them now would be like discovering aspirin then immediately shutting down production because it doesn’t cure cancer.

Nudging’s value stems from its modest but unusual success in solving two hard problems. One is changing people’s behavior, in a sustainable way, in challenging contexts such as health, crime, and education, in the messiness of the real world. The second is getting stuff done in large organizations, particularly government. Most attempts at either one of these fail: over 80 percent of social projects and programs don’t work; big reform efforts are generally stymied, or backfire.

By contrast, nudges do get implemented—albeit with a lot of hard work behind the scenes—and when they are they tend to do some good. Looking at trials from two nudge units, Stefano DellaVigna and Elizabeth Linos find that a sample of low-cost, light-touch nudges do better than their control groups by 8 percent on average. In a landscape littered with failures and overclaiming, small robust improvements that affect thousands of people are worth having…

But might we still be overinvesting in nudges? Perhaps they have proven so popular that the best opportunities have been exhausted, making it time to redeploy resources elsewhere?

Unfortunately, the opposite is true: we haven’t picked even the lowest hanging fruit. A back-of-the-envelope calculation for central governments can illustrate this opportunity. A typical government might have 10 large departments of state (a department for education, for example), each with 10 directorates (such as the organization in charge of apprenticeships and technical education). And each of these could easily have 20 nudge-able systems (a system through which young people can sign up for apprenticeships, say). Each system can accommodate multiple nudges: you could try boosting sign-ups by pre-filling parts of the form, for example, while also reminding students at a timely moment. One government × ten departments × ten directorates × twenty systems × three nudges each gets us a total of 6,000 possible nudges….(More)”.

Digital Constitutionalism: The Role of Internet Bills of Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edoardo Celeste: “Investigating the impact of digital technology on contemporary constitutionalism, this book offers an overview of the transformations that are currently occurring at constitutional level, highlighting their link with ongoing societal changes. It reconstructs the multiple ways in which constitutional law is reacting to these challenges and explores the role of one original response to this phenomenon: the emergence of Internet bills of rights.

Over the past few years, a significant number of Internet bills of rights have emerged around the world. These documents represent non-legally binding declarations promoted mostly by individuals and civil society groups that articulate rights and principles for the digital society. This book argues that these initiatives reflect a change in the constitutional ecosystem. The transformations prompted by the digital revolution in our society ferment under a vault of constitutional norms shaped for ‘analogue’ communities. Constitutional law struggles to address all the challenges of the digital environment. In this context, Internet bills of rights, by emerging outside traditional institutional processes, represent a unique response to suggest new constitutional solutions for the digital age.

Explaining how constitutional law is reacting to the advent of the digital revolution and analysing the constitutional function of Internet Bills of Rights in this context, this book offers a global comparative investigation of the latest transformations that digital technology is generating in the constitutional ecosystem and highlights the plural and multilevel process that is contributing to shape constitutional norms for the Internet age…(More)”.

E-Government Survey 2022

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN Report: “The United Nations E-Government Survey 2022 is the 12th edition of the United Nations’ assessment of the digital government landscape across all 193 Member States. The E-Government Survey is informed by over two decades of longitudinal research, with a ranking of countries based on the United Nations E-Government Development Index (EGDI), a combination of primary data (collected and owned by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and secondary data from other UN agencies

This edition of the Survey includes data analysis in global and regional contexts, a study of local e-government development based on the United Nations Local Online Service Index (LOSI), consideration of inclusion in the hybrid digital society, and a concluding chapter that outlines the trends and developments related to the future of digital government. As wish all editions, it features extensive annexes on its data, methodology and related pilot study initiatives…(More)”.

Why Funders Should Go Meta

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stuart Buck & Anna Harvey: “We don’t mean the former Facebook. Rather, philanthropies should prefer to fund meta-issues—i.e., research and evaluation, along with efforts to improve research quality. In many cases, it would be far more impactful than what they are doing now.

This is true at two levels.

First, suppose you want to support a certain cause–economic development in Africa, or criminal justice reform in the US, etc. You could spend millions or even billions on that cause.

But let’s go meta: a force multiplier would be funding high-quality research on what works on those issues. If you invest significantly in social and behavioral science research, you might find innumerable ways to improve on the existing status quo of donations.

Instead of only helping the existing nonprofits who seek to address economic development or criminal justice reform, you’d be helping to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The result could be a much better set of investments for all donors.

Perhaps some of your initial ideas end up not working, when exhaustively researched. At worst, that’s a temporary embarrassment, but it’s actually all for the better—now you and others know to avoid wasting more money on those ideas. Perhaps some of your favored policies are indeed good ideas (e.g., vaccination), but don’t have anywhere near enough take-up by the affected populations. Social and behavioral science research (as in the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project) could help find cost-effective ways to solve that problem…(More)”.

All Democracy Is Global

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Larry Diamond: “The world is mired in a deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession. According to Freedom House, 2021 was the 16th consecutive year in which more countries declined in freedom than gained. Tunisia, the sole democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring protests that began in 2010, is morphing into a dictatorship. In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary, and Turkey, elections have long ceased to be democratic. Autocrats in Algeria, Belarus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe have clung to power despite mounting public demands for democratization. In Africa, seven democracies have slid back into autocracy since 2015, including Benin and Burkina Faso.

Democracy is looking shaky even in countries that hold free and fair elections. In emerging-market behemoths such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, democratic institutions and norms are under attack. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made threats of an autogolpe (self-coup) and a possible return to military rule if he does not win reelection in October. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has steadily chipped away at press freedoms, minority rights, judicial independence, the integrity of the civil service, and the autonomy of civil society. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has attempted to silence critics and remove democratic checks and balances.

Democratic prospects have risen and fallen in decades past, but they now confront a formidable new problem: democracy is at risk in the very country that has traditionally been its most ardent champion. Over the past dozen years, the United States has experienced one of the biggest declines in political rights and civil liberties of any country measured by the Freedom House annual survey. The Economist now ranks the United States as a “flawed democracy” behind Spain, Costa Rica, and Chile. U.S. President Donald Trump deserves much of the blame: he abused presidential power on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history and, after being voted out of office, propagated the “Big Lie” of election fraud and incited the violent rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. But American democracy was in peril before Trump assumed office, with rising polarization exposing acute flaws in American democratic institutions. The Electoral College, the representational structure of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, the brazen gerrymandering of House districts, and lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court have all made it possible for a political minority to exert prolonged outsize influence.

Can a country in the throes of its own democratic decay do anything to arrest the broader global decline? For many, the answer is no…(More)”.

The case for lotteries as a tiebreaker of quality in research funding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial at Nature: “Earlier this month, the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for humanities and social sciences, introduced an innovative process for awarding small research grants. The academy will use the equivalent of a lottery to decide between funding applications that its grant-review panels consider to be equal on other criteria, such as the quality of research methodology and study design.

Using randomization to decide between grant applications is relatively new, and the British Academy is in a small group of funders to trial it, led by the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany, the Austrian Science Fund and the Health Research Council of New Zealand. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has arguably gone the furthest: it decided in late 2021 to use randomization in all tiebreaker cases across its entire grant portfolio of around 880 million Swiss francs (US$910 million).

Other funders should consider whether they should now follow in these footsteps. That’s because it is becoming clear that randomization is a fairer way to allocate grants when applications are too close to call, as a study from the Research on Research Institute in London shows (see go.nature.com/3s54tgw). Doing so would go some way to assuage concerns, especially in early-career researchers and those from historically marginalized communities, about the lack of fairness when grants are allocated using peer review.

The British Academy/Leverhulme small-grants scheme distributes around £1.5 million (US$1.7 million) each year in grants of up to £10,000 each. These are valuable despite their relatively small size, especially for researchers starting out. The academy’s grants can be used only for direct research expenses, but small grants are also typically used to fund conference travel or to purchase computer equipment or software. Funders also use them to spot promising research talent for future (or larger) schemes. For these reasons and more, small grants are competitive — the British Academy says it is able to fund only 20–30% of applications in each funding round…(More)”.

What competencies do public sector officials need to enhance national digital transformations?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development: “The Broadband Commission Working Group on AI Capacity Building has leveraged a multi-stakeholder leadership model to assess the critical capacity needs for public sector digital transformation, including from a developing country perspective. From interviews with policymakers, global and regional expert consultations and evaluation of current international practices, the Working Group has developed three competency domains and nine recommendations. The output is a competency framework for civil servants, spelling out the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation Competencies needed today…(More)”

Innovation in the Public Sector: Smarter States, Services and Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Fatih Demir: “The book discusses smart governments and innovation in the public sector. In hopes of arriving at a clear definition of innovation in the field of public administration, the volume provides a wide survey of global policies and practices, especially those aimed at reducing bureaucracy and using information-communication technologies in public service delivery. Chapters look at current applications across countries and multiple levels of government, from public innovation labs in the UK to AI in South Korea. Providing concrete examples of innovation culture at work in public institutions, this volume will be of use to researchers and students studying new public management, public service delivery, and innovation as well as practitioners and professionals working in various public agencies…(More)”.