Paper by Jenny Lindholm and Janne Berg: “Democratic innovations are brought forward by political scientists as a response to worrying democratic deficits. This paper aims to evaluate the design, process, and outcome of digital democratic innovations. We study a mobile application for following local politics. Data is collected using three online surveys with different groups, and a workshop with young citizens. The results show that the app did not fully meet the democratic ideal of inclusiveness at the process stage, especially in reaching young people. However, the user groups that had used the app reported positive democratic effects…(More)”.
The Autocrat in Your iPhone
Article by Ronald J. Deibert: “In the summer of 2020, a Rwandan plot to capture exiled opposition leader Paul Rusesabagina drew international headlines. Rusesabagina is best known as the human rights defender and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who sheltered more than 1,200 Hutus and Tutsis in a hotel during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But in the decades after the genocide, he also became a prominent U.S.-based critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. In August 2020, during a layover in Dubai, Rusesabagina was lured under false pretenses into boarding a plane bound for Kigali, the Rwandan capital, where government authorities immediately arrested him for his affiliation with an opposition group. The following year, a Rwandan court sentenced him to 25 years in prison, drawing the condemnation of international human rights groups, the European Parliament, and the U.S. Congress.
Less noted at the time, however, was that this brazen cross-border operation may also have employed highly sophisticated digital surveillance. After Rusesabagina’s sentencing, Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a digital security research group I founded and direct, discovered that smartphones belonging to several of Rusesabagina’s family members who also lived abroad had been hacked by an advanced spyware program called Pegasus. Produced by the Israel-based NSO Group, Pegasus gives an operator near-total access to a target’s personal data. Forensic analysis revealed that the phone belonging to Rusesabagina’s daughter Carine Kanimba had been infected by the spyware around the time her father was kidnapped and again when she was trying to secure his release and was meeting with high-level officials in Europe and the U.S. State Department, including the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs. NSO Group does not publicly identify its government clients and the Rwandan government has denied using Pegasus, but strong circumstantial evidence points to the Kagame regime.
In fact, the incident is only one of dozens of cases in which Pegasus or other similar spyware technology has been found on the digital devices of prominent political opposition figures, journalists, and human rights activists in many countries. Providing the ability to clandestinely infiltrate even the most up-to-date smartphones—the latest “zero click” version of the spyware can penetrate a device without any action by the user—Pegasus has become the digital surveillance tool of choice for repressive regimes around the world. It has been used against government critics in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and pro-democracy protesters in Thailand. It has been deployed by Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary…(More)”.
2023 Edelman Trust Barometer
Press Release: “The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that business is now viewed as the only global institution to be both competent and ethical. Business now holds a staggering 53-point lead over government in competence and is 30 points ahead on ethics. Its treatment of workers during the pandemic and return to work, along with the swift and decisive action of over 1,000 businesses to exit Russia after its invasion of Ukraine helped fuel a 20-point jump on ethics over the past three years. Business (62 percent) remains the most and only trusted institution globally. …
Other key findings from the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer include:
- Personal economic fears such as job loss (89 percent) and inflation (74 percent) are on par with urgent societal fears like climate change (76 percent), nuclear war (72 percent) and food shortages (67 percent).
- CEOs are expected to use resources to hold divisive forces accountable: 72 percent believe CEOs are obligated to defend facts and expose questionable science being used to justify bad social policy; 71 percent believe CEOs are obligated to pull advertising money out of media platforms that spread misinformation; and 64 percent, on average, say companies can help increase civility and strengthen the social fabric by supporting politicians and media outlets that build consensus and cooperation.
- Government (51 percent) is now distrusted in 16 of the 28 countries surveyed including the U.S. (42 percent), the UK (37 percent), Japan (33 percent), and Argentina (20 percent). Media (50 percent) is distrusted in 15 of 28 countries including Germany (47 percent), the U.S. (43 percent), Australia (38 percent), and South Korea (27 percent). ‘My employer’ (77 percent) is the most trusted institution and is trusted in every country surveyed aside from South Korea (54 percent).
- Government leaders (41 percent), journalists (47 percent) and CEOs (48 percent) are the least trusted institutional leaders. Scientists (76 percent), my coworkers (73 percent among employees) and my CEO (64 percent among employees) are most trusted.
- Technology (75 percent) was once again the most trusted sector trailed by education (71 percent), food & beverage (71 percent) and healthcare (70 percent). Social media (44 percent) remained the least trusted sector.
- Canada (67 percent) and Germany (63 percent) remained the two most trusted foreign brands, followed by Japan (61 percent) and the UK (59 percent). India (34 percent) and China (32 percent) remain the least trusted..(More)”.
Nudge and Nudging in Public Policy
Paper by Sanchayan Banerjee and Peter John: “Nudging has been used to make public policies widely, in various fields such as personal finance, health, education, environment/climate, privacy, law, and human well-being. Nonetheless, with an increase in the applications of nudging, the toolkit of nudges also expanded massively, which ultimately led to multiple different conceptualisations and definitions of the nudge. In this entry, we review developments to nudge and nudging in public policy. First, we briefly discuss the political philosophy and psychological paradigm behind the conventional nudge, and examples of economically modelling nudge applications. Then, we highlight the role of nudges in behavioural public policy, an emerging subdiscipline of public policy which uses insights from behavioural sciences to develop new policies. We review the many definitions of nudge and introduce alternative toolkits of behaviours change, such as thinks, boosts, nudge+. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations of nudging in public policy and future research in behavioural public policy….(More)”.
Experiments of Living Constitutionalism
Paper by Cass R. Sunstein: “Experiments of Living Constitutionalism urges that the Constitution should be interpreted so as to allow both individuals and groups to experiment with different ways of living, whether we are speaking of religious practices, family arrangements, political associations, civic associations, child-rearing, schooling, romance, or work. Experiments of Living Constitutionalism prizes diversity and plurality; it gives pride of place to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and free exercise of religion (which it would protect against the imposition of secular values); it cherishes federalism; it opposes authoritarianism in all its forms. While Experiments of Living Constitutionalism has considerable appeal, my purpose in naming it is not to endorse or defend it, but as a thought experiment and to contrast it to Common Good Constitutionalism, with the aim of specifying the criteria on which one might embrace or defend any approach to constitutional law. My central conclusion is that we cannot know whether to accept or reject Experiments of Living Constitutionalism, Common Good Constitutionalism, Common Law Constitutionalism, democracy-reinforcing approaches, moral readings, originalism, or any other proposed approach without a concrete sense of what it entails – of what kind of constitutional order it would likely bring about or produce. No approach to constitutional interpretation can be evaluated without asking how it fits with the evaluator’s “fixed points,” which operate at multiple levels of generality. The search for reflective equilibrium is essential in deciding whether to accept a theory of constitutional interpretation…(More)”.
Recentring the demos in the measurement of democracy
Article by Seema Shah: “Rethinking how we measure and evaluate democratic performance is vital to reversing a longstanding negative trend in global democracy. We must confront the past, including democracy’s counter-intuitively intrinsic inequality. This is key to revitalising institutions in a way that allows democratic practice to live up to its potential…
In the global democracy assessment space, teams like the one I lead at International IDEA compete to provide the most rigorous, far-reaching and understandable set of democracy measurements in the world. Alexander Hudson explains how critical these indicators are, providing important benchmarks for democratic growth and decline to policymakers, governments, international organisations, and journalists.
Yet in so many ways, the core of what these datasets measure and help assess are largely the same. This redundancy is no doubt at least partially a product of wealthy donors’ prioritisation of liberal democracy as an ideal. It is compounded by how the measures are calculated. As Adam Przeworksi recently stated, reliance on expert coders runs the risk of measuring little other than those experts’ biases.
But if that is the case, and quantitative measurements continue to be necessary for democracy assessment, shouldn’t we rethink exactly what we are measuring and how we are measuring it?..
Democracy assessment indices do not typically measure ordinary people’s evaluations of the state of democracy. Instead, other specialised ‘barometers’ often take on this task. See, for example, Afrobarometer, Eurobarometer, Asian Barometer, and Latinobarometro. Surveys of public perceptions on a range of issues also exist, including, but not limited to democracy. The problem is, however, that these do not systematically make it into overall democracy assessments or onto policymakers’ desks. This means that policymakers and others do not consistently prioritise or consider lived experiences as they make decisions about democracy and human rights-related funding and interventions…(More)”.
How games can make behavioural science better
Article by Bria Long et al: “When US cognitive scientist Joshua Hartshorne was investigating how people around the world learn English, he needed to get tens of thousands of people to take a language test. He designed ‘Which English?’, a grammar game that presented a series of tough word problems and then guessed where in the world the player learnt the language. Participants shared their results — whether accurate or not — on social media, creating a snowball effect for recruitment. The findings, based on data from almost 670,000 people, revealed that there is a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning that extends into adolescence.
This sort of ‘gamification’ is becoming a powerful research tool across fields that study humans, including psychology, neuroscience, economics and behavioural economics. By making research fun, the approach can help experiments to reach thousands or millions of participants. For instance, experiments embedded in a video game demonstrated that the layout of the city where a child lives shapes their future navigational ability. Data from a digital word search showed that people who are skilled at the game do not necessarily give better advice to those trying to learn it. And a dilemma game involving millions of people revealed that most individuals have reliable moral intuition.
Gamification can help to avoid the pitfalls of conventional laboratory-based experiments by allowing researchers to study diverse populations, to conduct more-sophisticated experiments and to observe human behaviour in naturalistic environments. It can improve statistical power and reproducibility, making research more robust. Technical advances are making gamification cheaper and more straightforward, and the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many labs to move their human experiments online. But despite these changes, most have not yet embraced the opportunities gamification affords.
To reach the full potential of this approach, researchers must dispel misconceptions, develop new gamification technologies, improve access to existing ones and apply the methods to productive research questions. We are researchers in psychology, linguistics, developmental science, data science and music who have run our own gamified experiments. We think it’s time for science to get serious about games…(More)”.
Open Government and Climate Change
Paper by the World Bank: “The world needs more urgent and ambitious action to address climate change. Seventy-one countries have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Nevertheless, achieving decarbonization and adapting to climate change will require fundamental changes in the production of goods and services by firms and the consumption patterns and behavior of citizens. Climate change poses difficult challenges for policy makers, and three particular challenges make the open government principles of transparency, participation, and accountability especially important. First, countries often face the political challenge of credibly committing to climate action over the long term, in that they must commit to action over multiple electoral cycles if the private sector, households, communities, and public entities are to adopt new technologies and change behavior. Second, climate change requires coordination between government and nongovernment actors, as there will be winners and losers along the way and governments will need to work toward consensus to balance the outcomes. Third, governments have to translate promises into climate action. The principles of open government can be especially useful in tackling all three challenges by harnessing and ensuring citizen trust in government and in the legitimacy of climate-directed policy decisions. This note will show how the use of open government principles and mechanisms can make a notable contribution to climate change action. It provides examples of such measures as well as an inventory of existing good practices and tools, which can serve as a source of inspiration for policy makers and citizens alike…(More)”.
The World Needs Many More Public Servants
Article by Ngaire Woods: “The private sector alone cannot make the massive investments required to achieve a carbon-neutral future and hold societies together through the twenty-first century’s economic, political, and climate-related crises. To enable governments to do so, policymakers must avoid austerity measures and recruit high-quality personnel….Policymakers around the world will need to address a confluence of economic, political, and climate-related shocks in 2023. While governments cannot solve these crises alone, deft political leadership will be crucial to holding societies together and enabling communities and businesses to step up and do their part. What the world desperately needs is public servants and politicians who are willing and able to innovate…
In an ideal world, the magnitude of humanity’s current challenges would attract some of the most creative and highly motivated citizens to public service. In many countries, however, public-sector pay has sunk to levels that make it increasingly difficult to attract top talent. In the United Kingdom, as the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf notes, while overall real private-sector pay has increased by 5.5% since 2010, public-sector wages have fallen by 5.9%, with much of that decline happening in the last two years. The result is a personnel deficit at every level. Recent data from the National Health Service in England show a huge nurse shortfall. Other data show that teacher recruitments are well below target.
Too often, the public sector falls into a vicious cycle of cost-cutting and resignations. Nurses in the UK are overworked and many will likely succumb to exhaustion soon, leaving their remaining colleagues even more overburdened and demoralized. Another austerity wave will make it even harder to retain quality workers…(More)”.
Digital Transition Framework: An action plan for public-private collaboration
WEF Report: “The accelerated digital transition is unlocking economic and technology innovation, boosting growth, and enabling new forms of social engagement across the globe. Yet, the benefits from digital transformation have not been fully realized; compounded with macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds that are forcing public-private leaders to make digital technology investment trade-offs. The Digital Transition Framework: An Action Plan for Public-Private Collaboration sets out concrete actions and leading examples to support governments achieve their digital transition goals in the face of uncertainty…(More)”.