Participatory democracy in the EU should be strengthened with a Standing Citizens’ Assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by James Mackay and Kalypso Nicolaïdis: “EU citizens have multiple participatory instruments at their disposal, from the right to petition the European Parliament (EP) to the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI), from the European Commission’s public online consultation and Citizens’ Dialogues to the role of the European Ombudsman as an advocate for the public vis-à-vis the EU institutions.

While these mechanisms are broadly welcome they have – unfortunately – remained too timid and largely ineffective in bolstering bottom-up participation. They tend to involve experts and organised interest groups rather than ordinary citizens. They don’t encourage debates on non-experts’ policy preferences and are executed too often at the discretion of the political elites to  justify pre-existing policy decisions.

In short, they feel more like consultative mechanisms than significant democratic innovations. That’s why the EU should be bold and demonstrate its democratic leadership by institutionalising its newly-created Citizens’ Panels into a Standing Citizens’ Assembly with rotating membership chosen by lot and renewed on a regular basis…(More)”.

Digitalisation and citizen engagement: comparing participatory budgeting in Rome and Barcelona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book chapter by Giorgia Mattei, Valentina Santolamazza and Martina Manzo: “The digitalisation of participatory budgeting (PB) is an increasing phenomenon in that digital tools could help achieve greater citizen engagement. However, comparing two similar cases – i.e. Rome and Barcelona – some differences appear during the integration of digital tools into the PB processes. The present study describes how digital tools have positively influenced PB throughout different phases, making communication more transparent, involving a wider audience, empowering people and, consequently, making citizens’ engagement more effective. Nevertheless, the research dwells on the different elements adopted to overcome the digitalisation limits and shows various approaches and results…(More)”.

Influencers: Looking beyond the consensus of the crowd.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wilfred M. McClay: “Those of us who take a loving interest in words—their etymological forebears, their many layers of meaning, their often-surprising histories—have a tendency to resist change. Not that we think playfulness should be proscribed—such pedantry would be a cure worse than any disease. It’s just that we are also drawn, like doting parents, into wanting to protect the language, and thus become suspicious of mysterious strangers, of the introduction of new words, and of new meanings for familiar ones.

When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?

But there are times when the older language seems inadequate, and in fact may mislead us into thinking that the world has not changed. New signifiers may sometimes be necessary, in order to describe new things.

Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created…(More)”.

To Design Cities Right, We Need to Focus on People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tim Keane: “Our work in the U.S. to make better neighborhoods, towns and cities is a hapless and obdurate mess. If you’ve attended a planning meeting anywhere, you have probably witnessed the miserable process in action—unrestrainedly selfish fighting about false choices and seemingly inane procedures. Rather than designing places for people, we see cities as a collection of mechanical problems with technical and legal solutions. We distract ourselves with the latest rebranded ideas about places—smart growth, resilient cities, complete streets, just cities, 15-minute cities, happy cities—rather than getting down to the actual work of designing the physical place. This lacks a fundamental vision. And it’s not succeeding.

Our flawed approach to city planning started a century ago. The first modern city plan was produced for Cincinnati in 1925 by the Technical Advisory Corporation, founded in 1913 by George Burdett Ford and E.P. Goodrich in New York City. New York adopted the country’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, an effort Ford led. Not coincidentally, the advent of zoning, and then comprehensive planning, corresponded directly with the great migration of six million Black people from the South to Northern, Midwestern and Western cities. New city planning practices were a technical means to discriminate and exclude.

This first comprehensive plan also ushered in another type of dehumanization: city planning by formula. To justify widening downtown streets by cutting into sidewalks, engineers used a calculation that reflected the cost to operate an automobile in a congested area—including the cost of a human life, because crashes killed people. Engineers also calculated the value of a sidewalk through a formula based on how many people the elevators in adjoining buildings could deliver at peak times. In the end, Cincinnati’s planners recommended widening the streets for cars, which were becoming more common, by shrinking sidewalks. City planning became an engineering equation, and one focused on separating people and spreading the city out to the maximum extent possible…(More)”.

Six ways to democratise city planning 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by DemocracyNext: “To live in thriving and healthy cities, we propose six possible ways to instigate systemic changes that can democratise the governance of urban planning decisions through Citizens’ Assemblies. Depending on a city’s current starting point, at least one, if not multiple, of these options can be seen as an initial ‘way in’ to begin making systemic changes to urban planning decision making. The six ways are outlined as different entry points on the following page…(More)”.

Does information about citizen participation initiatives increase political trust?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin Ardanaz,  Susana Otálvaro-Ramírez, and Carlos Scartascini: “Participatory programs can reduce the informational and power asymmetries that engender mistrust. These programs, however, cannot include every citizen. Hence, it is important to evaluate if providing information about those programs could affect trust among those who do not participate. We assess the effect of an informational campaign about these programs in the context of a survey experiment conducted in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Results show that providing detailed information about citizen involvement and outputs of a participatory budget initiative marginally shapes voters’ assessments of government performance and political trust. In particular, it increases voters’ perceptions about the benevolence and honesty of the government. Effects are larger for individuals with ex ante more negative views about the local government’s quality and they differ according to the respondents’ interpersonal trust and their beliefs about the ability of their communities to solve the type of collective-action problems that the program seeks to address. This article complements the literature that has examined the effects of participatory interventions on trust, and the literature that evaluates the role of information. The results in the article suggest that participatory budget programs could directly affect budget allocations and trust for those who participate, and those that are well-disseminated could also affect trust in the broader population. Because mistrustful individuals tend to shy away from demanding the government public goods that increase overall welfare, well-disseminated participatory budget programs could affect budget allocations directly and through their effect on trust…(More)”.

Developing skills for digital government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD “review of good practices across OECD governments”: “Digital technologies are having a profound impact on economies, labour markets and societies. They also have the potential to transform government, by enabling the implementation of more accessible and effective services. To support a shift towards digital government, investment is needed in developing the skills of civil servants. This paper reviews good practices across OECD countries to foster skills for digital government. It presents different approaches in public administration to organising training activities as well as opportunities for informal learning. It also provides insights into how relevant skills can be identified through competence frameworks, how they can be assessed, and how learning opportunities can be evaluated….(More)”

Revolutionizing Governance: AI-Driven Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Komal Goyal: “Government-citizen engagement has come a long way over the past decade, with governments increasingly adopting AI-powered analytics, automated processes and chatbots to engage with citizens and gain insights into their concerns. A 2023 Stanford University report found that the federal government spent $3.3 billion on AI in the fiscal year 2022, highlighting the remarkable upswing in AI adoption across various government sectors.

As the demands of a digitally empowered and information-savvy society constantly evolve, it is becoming imperative for government agencies to revolutionize how they interact with their constituents. I’ll discuss how AI can help achieve this and pave the way for a more responsive, inclusive and effective form of governance…(More)”.

Will governments ever learn? A study of current provision and the key gaps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Geoff Mulgan: “The paper describes the history of training from ancient China onwards and the main forms it now takes. It suggests 10 areas where change may be needed and goes onto discuss how skills are learned, suggesting the need for more continuous learning and new approaches to capacity.

I hope anyone interested in this field will at least find it stimulating. I couldn’t find an overview of this kind available and so tried to fill the gap, if only with a personal view. This topic is particularly important for the UK which allowed its training system to collapse over the last decade. But the issues are relevant everywhere since the capacity of governments arguably has more impact on human wellbeing than anything else…(More)”.

Don’t Talk to People Like They’re Chatbots

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Albert Fox Cahn and Bruce Schneier: “For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you wanted results, you needed to learn the computer’s language.

This is beginning to change. Large language models—the technology undergirding modern chatbots—allow users to interact with computers through natural conversation, an innovation that introduces some baggage from human-to-human exchanges. Early on in our respective explorations of ChatGPT, the two of us found ourselves typing a word that we’d never said to a computer before: “Please.” The syntax of civility has crept into nearly every aspect of our encounters; we speak to this algebraic assemblage as if it were a person—even when we know that it’s not.

Right now, this sort of interaction is a novelty. But as chatbots become a ubiquitous element of modern life and permeate many of our human-computer interactions, they have the potential to subtly reshape how we think about both computers and our fellow human beings.

One direction that these chatbots may lead us in is toward a society where we ascribe humanity to AI systems, whether abstract chatbots or more physical robots. Just as we are biologically primed to see faces in objects, we imagine intelligence in anything that can hold a conversation. (This isn’t new: People projected intelligence and empathy onto the very primitive 1960s chatbot, Eliza.) We say “please” to LLMs because it feels wrong not to…(More)”.