Paper by Simone Chambers & Mark E. Warren: “The field of deliberative democracy now generally recognizes the co-dependence of deliberation and voting. The field tends to emphasize what deliberation accomplishes for vote-based decisions. In this paper, we reverse this now common view to ask: In what ways does voting benefit deliberation? We discuss seven ways voting can complement and sometimes enhance deliberation. First, voting furnishes deliberation with a feasible and fair closure mechanism. Second, the power to vote implies equal recognition and status, both morally and strategically, which is a condition of democratic deliberation. Third, voting politicizes deliberation by injecting the strategic features of politics into deliberation—effectively internalizing conflict into deliberative processes, without which they can become detached from their political environments. Fourth, anticipation of voting may induce authenticity by revealing preferences, as what one says will count. Fifth, voting preserves expressions of dissent, helping to push back against socially induced pressures for consensus. Sixth, voting defines the issues, such that deliberation is focused, and thus more likely to be effective. And, seventh, within contexts where votes are public—as in representative contexts, voting can induce accountability, particularly for one’s claims. We then use these points to discuss four general types of institutions—general elections, legislatures, minipublics, and minipublics embedded in referendum processes—that combine talking and voting, with the aim of identifying designs that do a better or worse job of capitalizing upon the strengths of each…(More)”.
Connectedness, Resilience and Empowerment
Book edited by Daniel Muia, and Rhonda Phillips: “This book discusses how aspects of connectedness, resilience and empowerment are intertwined in community development processes. It explicitly brings together these elements in the context of community development and well-being, helping foster an understanding of how each influences the other. With chapters contributed by scholars from around the globe, this volume provides insights into how these elements of community influence and support the quality of life of communities. While several of the chapters address the foundational and theoretical bases of community development as well as community well-being, others address topical and emergent areas of interest in community development practice and scholarship. Underscoring the chapters is an awareness of the importance of the community spirit, which is the voice and agency of people coming together to encourage social transformation. A key element of the book is also to help foster change for the better in communities. This book is of interest to researchers and professionals working in the area of community engagement and development, particularly those in resource-poor countries…(More)”.
Citizens’ Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
Article by Ariel Procaccia: “…Taken together, these assemblies have demonstrated an impressive capacity to uncover the will of the people and build consensus.
The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Have you ever noticed how politicians grow a spine the moment they decide not to run for reelection? Well, a citizens’ assembly is a bit like a legislature whose members make a pact barring them from seeking another term in office. The randomly selected members are not beholden to party machinations or outside interests; they are free to speak their mind and vote their conscience.
What’s more, unlike elected bodies, these assemblies are chosen to mirror the population, a property that political theorists refer to as descriptive representation. For example, a typical citizens’ assembly has a roughly equal number of men and women (some also ensure nonbinary participation), whereas the average proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments worldwide was 26 percent in 2021—a marked increase from 12 percent in 1997 but still far from gender balance. Descriptive representation, in turn, lends legitimacy to the assembly: citizens seem to find decisions more acceptable when they are made by people like themselves.
As attractive as descriptive representation is, there are practical obstacles to realizing it while adhering to the principle of random selection. Overcoming these hurdles has been a passion of mine for the past few years. Using tools from mathematics and computer science, my collaborators and I developed an algorithm for the selection of citizens’ assemblies that many practitioners around the world are using. Its story provides a glimpse into the future of democracy—and it begins a long time ago…(More)”.
Lessons from the Past to Govern for the Future
Article by Claudette Salinas Leyva et al: “Many of our institutions are focused on the short term. Whether corporations, government bodies, or even nonprofits, they tend to prioritize immediate returns and discount long-term value and sustainability. This myopia is behind planetary crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss and contributes to decision-making that harms the wellbeing of communities.
Policymakers worldwide are beginning to recognize the importance of governing for the long term. The United Nations is currently developing a Declaration on Future Generations to codify this approach. This collection of case studies profiles community-level institutions rooted in Indigenous traditions that focus on governing for the long term and preserving the interests of future generations…(More)”.
What if We Could All Control A.I.?
Kevin Roose at The New York Times: “One of the fiercest debates in Silicon Valley right now is about who should control A.I., and who should make the rules that powerful artificial intelligence systems must follow.
Should A.I. be governed by a handful of companies that try their best to make their systems as safe and harmless as possible? Should regulators and politicians step in and build their own guardrails? Or should A.I. models be made open-source and given away freely, so users and developers can choose their own rules?
A new experiment by Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, offers a quirky middle path: What if an A.I. company let a group of ordinary citizens write some rules, and trained a chatbot to follow them?
The experiment, known as “Collective Constitutional A.I.,” builds on Anthropic’s earlier work on Constitutional A.I., a way of training large language models that relies on a written set of principles. It is meant to give a chatbot clear instructions for how to handle sensitive requests, what topics are off-limits and how to act in line with human values.
If Collective Constitutional A.I. works — and Anthropic’s researchers believe there are signs that it might — it could inspire other experiments in A.I. governance, and give A.I. companies more ideas for how to invite outsiders to take part in their rule-making processes.
That would be a good thing. Right now, the rules for powerful A.I. systems are set by a tiny group of industry insiders, who decide how their models should behave based on some combination of their personal ethics, commercial incentives and external pressure. There are no checks on that power, and there is no way for ordinary users to weigh in.
Opening up A.I. governance could increase society’s comfort with these tools, and give regulators more confidence that they’re being skillfully steered. It could also prevent some of the problems of the social media boom of the 2010s, when a handful of Silicon Valley titans ended up controlling vast swaths of online speech.
In a nutshell, Constitutional A.I. works by using a written set of rules (a “constitution”) to police the behavior of an A.I. model. The first version of Claude’s constitution borrowed rules from other authoritative documents, including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s terms of service…(More)”.
The contested role of AI ethics boards in smart societies: a step towards improvement based on board composition by sortition
Paper by Ludovico Giacomo Conti & Peter Seele: “The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy…(More)”.
Ranking Nations. The Value of Indicators and Indices?
Book by Stephen Morse: “This engaging book assesses the statistical need for using particular ranking systems to compare the status of nations. With an overarching focus on human development, environmental performance and corruption, it carefully maps out some of the main processes associated with the ranking of countries.
Centrally, Stephen Morse explores challenges associated with using index-based rankings for countries. Examining international ranking systems such as the Human Development Index and Corruption Perception Index, the book considers what they tell us about the world and whether there may be alternatives to these ranking techniques. It provides an important contemporary view on ranking systems by analysing not only how they are reported by traditional sources of media, but also by social media.
Ranking Nations will be a significant read for economics, development studies and human geography researchers and academics. Its accessible written style will also benefit policy actors and decision makers that make use of index-based rankings…(More)”.
To redesign democracy, the U.S. should borrow an idea from Dublin
Article by Claudia Chwalisz and Zia Khan: “…Let’s start with some of the mechanics: The typical citizens’ assembly convenes community members from all walks of life to study, deliberate, and provide recommendations to policy questions on behalf of the larger public. Crucially, these representatives are randomly selected through a lottery (also known as sortition) and serve temporarily, as with jury duty.The idea is to reach beyond the typical folks who show up at a school board meeting or that run for office but instead engage a true cross-section of the community. Assemblies make every citizen a potential representative of the people, not just a vote to be turned out.
While citizen’s assemblies were eclipsed as a tool of governance as elections came to define democracy, the idea actually dates back to ancient Athens and shaped early democratic institutions in America, like the jury system. Now, as the United States grapples with its own challenges of division and discord and the 2024 elections loom, this old idea points us toward new ways of giving people real voice and power.
Assemblies can create good conditions for people to have honest conversations, grapple with tradeoffs, and understand different points of view. As shown in other equally diverse and large countries, citizens’ assemblies can be instrumental in addressing issues that have proven particularly divisive or have been susceptible to political stagnation, such as homelessness, climate change, land use, safety and policing, abortion, transgender rights, migration, and others.
In most places, assemblies have been only advisory thus far—but the moral authority of speaking on behalf of the people and hard-won consensus can be powerful. In Ireland and many other places, they’ve been organized by public authorities as a way to supplement input from elected officials…(More)”.
Understanding the policy impact of Citizens’ Assemblies: a dispatch from Gdansk
Article by Adela Gąsiorowska: “Whilst Citizens’ Assemblies are spreading in practice, significant doubts remain about the extent to which they and similar processes actually influence public policies. My research investigates Poland’s first Citizens’ Assemblies, finding that although on the surface, they seemed to achieve a high level of policy impact, a closer look reveals a less clear-cut picture, and reasons to be cautious about the claims we can make about them.
The Gdansk Citizens Assemblies in 2016-17 were the first Citizens’ Assemblies organised in Poland and they led to popularisation of this participatory tool in other Polish cities. After Gdansk, nine more Citizens’ Assemblies were organised in seven different Polish municipalities. The Gdansk Assemblies are an interesting case study to analyse policy impact for two reasons. Firstly, sufficient time has elapsed to allow us to track the implementation of policy recommendations. Secondly, the president of the city claimed that the recommendations would be treated as binding.
Such a declaration could suggest that policy impact of the Gdansk Assemblies would be stronger than in case of other, non-binding assemblies. However, my research suggests that the general impact of these processes was in fact, limited for several reasons. In particular, not all their recommendations influenced public policies to the same extent, and the process was perceived by some of its participants as a tool for legitimating the decisions made by public officials…(More)”.
Hopes over fears: Can democratic deliberation increase positive emotions concerning the future?
Paper by S. Ahvenharju, M. Minkkinen, and F. Lalot: “Deliberative mini-publics have often been considered to be a potential way to promote future-oriented thinking. Still, thinking about the future can be hard as it can evoke negative emotions such as stress and anxiety. This article establishes why a more positive outlook towards the future can benefit long-term decision-making. Then, it explores whether and to what extent deliberative mini-publics can facilitate thinking about the future by moderating negative emotions and encouraging positive emotions. We analyzed an online mini-public held in the region of Satakunta, Finland, organized to involve the public in the drafting process of a regional plan extending until the year 2050. In addition to the standard practices related to mini-publics, the Citizens’ Assembly included an imaginary time travel exercise, Future Design, carried out with half of the participants. Our analysis makes use of both survey and qualitative data. We found that democratic deliberation can promote positive emotions, like hopefulness and compassion, and lessen negative emotions, such as fear and confusion, related to the future. There were, however, differences in how emotions developed in the various small groups. Interviews with participants shed further light onto how participants felt during the event and how their sentiments concerning the future changed…(More)”.