Book edited by Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund: “…llustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media—Twitter and Facebook in particular—has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great... (More >)
Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective
Book by Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton: “Participatory Budgeting continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative democratic program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often adapt PB’s basic program design to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and... (More >)
Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies
Flanigan et al in Nature: “Globally, there has been a recent surge in ‘citizens’ assemblies’1, which are a form of civic participation in which a panel of randomly selected constituents contributes to questions of policy. The random process for selecting this panel should satisfy two properties. First, it must produce a panel that is representative of the population. Second, in the spirit of democratic equality, individuals would ideally be selected to serve on this panel with equal probability. However, in practice these desiderata are in tension owing to differential participation rates across subpopulations Here we apply ideas from fair... (More >)
How to predict citizen engagement in urban innovation projects?
Blogpost by Julien Carbonnell: “Citizen engagement in decision-making has proven to be a key factor for success in a smart city project and a must-have of contemporary democratic regimes. While inhabitants are all daily internet users, they widely inform themselves about their political electives’ achievements during the mandate, interact with each other on social networks, and by word-of-mouth on messaging apps or phone calls to form an opinion. Unfortunately, most of the smart cities’ rankings lack resources to evaluate the citizen engagement dynamic around the urban innovations deployed. Indeed this data can’t be found on official open data portals,... (More >)
Foreign Policy by Canadians: a unique national experiment
Blogpost by James Fishkin: “…Foreign Policy by Canadians was a national field experiment (with a control group that was not invited to deliberate, but which answered the same questions before and after.) The participants and the control group matched up almost perfectly before deliberation, but after deliberation, the participants had reached their considered judgments (while the control group had hardly changed at all). YouGov recruited and surveyed an excellent sample of deliberators, nationally representative in demographics and attitudes (as judged by comparison to the control groups). The project was an attempt to use social science to give an informed... (More >)
Why don’t they ask us? The role of communities in levelling up
Report by the Institute of Community Studies: “We are delighted to unveil a landmark research report, Why don’t they ask us? The role of communities in levelling up. The new report reveals that current approaches to regeneration and economic transformation are not working for the majority of local communities and their economies. Its key findings are that: Interventions have consistently failed to address the most deprived communities, contributing to a 0% average change in the relative spatial deprivation of the most deprived local authorities areas;The majority of ‘macro funds’ and economic interventions over the last two decades have not... (More >)
Text Your Government: Participatory Cell Phone Technology in Ghana
Article by Emily DiMatteo: “Direct citizen engagement can be transformed with innovative technological tools. As communities search for new ways to connect citizens to democratic processes, using existing technological devices such as cell phones can reach a number of citizens—including those typically excluded from policy processes. This occurred in Ghana when a technology startup and social enterprise called VOTO Mobile (now Viamo) created polling and information sharing software that uses mobile phone SMS texts and voice calls. Since its founding in 2010, the Ghana-based company has worked to use mobile technology to advance democratic engagement and good governance through... (More >)
Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics
Paper by Ramon van der Does and Vincent Jacquet: “Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of... (More >)
Public Administration and Democracy: The Virtue and Limit of Participatory Democracy as a Democratic Innovation
Paper by Sirvan karimi: “The expansion of public bureaucracy has been one of the most significant developments that has marked societies particularly, Western liberal democratic societies. Growing political apathy, citizen disgruntlement and the ensuing decline in electoral participation reflects the political nature of governance failures. Public bureaucracy, which has historically been saddled with derogatory and pejorative connotations, has encountered fierce assaults from multiple fronts. Out of theses sharp criticisms of public bureaucracy that have emanated from both sides of the ideological spectrum, attempts have been made to popularize and advance citizen participation in both policy formulation and policy implementation... (More >)
Engaging with the public about algorithmic transparency in the public sector
Blog by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (UK): “To move the recommendation that we made in our review into bias in algorithmic decision-making forward, we have been working with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and BritainThinks to scope what a transparency obligation could look like in practice, and in particular, which transparency measures would be most effective at increasing public understanding about the use of algorithms in the public sector. Due to the low levels of awareness about the use of algorithms in the public sector (CDEI polling in July 2020 found that 38% of... (More >)
