Government Capacity, Societal Trust or Party Preferences? What Accounts for the Variety of National Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Europe?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dimiter Toshkov, Kutsal Yesilkagit and Brendan Carroll: “European states responded to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a variety of public policy measures. Governments across the continent acted more or less swiftly to close down schools, restrict arrival into their countries and travel within their territories, ban public meetings, impose local and national lockdowns, declare states of emergency and pass other emergency measures. Importantly, both the mix of policy tools as well as the speed with which they were enacted differed significantly even within the member states of the European Union.

In this article we ask what can account for this variation in policy responses, and we identify a number of factors related to institutions, general governance and specific health-sector related capacities, societal trust, government type, and party preferences as possible determinants. Using multivariate regression and survival analysis, we model the speed with which school closures, national lockdowns and states of emergency were announced. The models suggest a number of significant and often counterintuitive relationships: we find that more centralized countries with lower government effectiveness, freedom and societal trust, but with separate ministries of health and health ministers with medical background acted faster and more decisively. These results are important in light of the large positive effects early policy responses likely had on managing the impact of the pandemic….(More)”.

Social Distancing and Social Capital: Why U.S. Counties Respond Differently to Covid-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NBER Paper by Wenzhi Ding et al: Since social distancing is the primary strategy for slowing the spread of many diseases, understanding why U.S. counties respond differently to COVID-19 is critical for designing effective public policies. Using daily data from about 45 million mobile phones to measure social distancing we examine how counties responded to both local COVID-19 cases and statewide shelter-in-place orders. We find that social distancing increases more in response to cases and official orders in counties where individuals historically (1) engaged less in community activities and (2) demonstrated greater willingness to incur individual costs to contribute to social objectives. Our work highlights the importance of these two features of social capital—community engagement and individual commitment to societal institutions—in formulating public health policies….(More)”

Trusted Smart Statistics: How new data will change official statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Discussion Paper by Fabio Ricciato, Albrecht Wirthmann and Martina Hahn: “In this discussion paper, we outline the motivations and the main principles of the Trusted Smart Statistics (TSS) concept that is under development in the European Statistical System. TSS represents the evolution of official statistics in response to the challenges posed by the new datafied society. Taking stock from the availability of new digital data sources, new technologies, and new behaviors, statistical offices are called nowadays to rethink the way they operate in order to reassert their role in modern democratic society. The issue at stake is considerably broader and deeper than merely adapting existing processes to embrace so-called Big Data. In several aspects, such evolution entails a fundamental paradigm shift with respect to the legacy model of official statistics production based on traditional data sources, for example, in the relation between data and computation, between data collection and analysis, between methodological development and statistical production, and of course in the roles of the various stakeholders and their mutual relationships. Such complex evolution must be guided by a comprehensive system-level view based on clearly spelled design principles. In this paper, we aim at providing a general account of the TSS concept reflecting the current state of the discussion within the European Statistical System….(More)”

Gender gaps in urban mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Laetitia Gauvin, Michele Tizzoni, Simone Piaggesi, Andrew Young, Natalia Adler, Stefaan Verhulst, Leo Ferres & Ciro Cattuto in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: “Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile.

We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations. Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policymakers and urban planners….(More)”.

Rethinking the digital democratic affordance and its impact on political representation: Toward a new framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marco Deseriis: “This article advances a new theory of the digital democratic affordance, a concept first introduced by Lincoln Dahlberg to devise a taxonomy of the democratic capacities of digital media applications. Whereas Dahlberg classifies digital media affordances on the basis of preexisting democratic positions, the article argues that the primary affordance of digital media is to abate the costs of political participation.

This cost-reducing logic of digital media has diverging effects on political participation. On an institutional level, digital democracy applications allow elected representatives to monitor and consult their constituents, closing some gaps in the circuits of representation. On a societal level, digital media allow constituents to organize and represent their own interests directly. In the former case, digital affordances work instrumentally in the service of representative democracy; in the latter, digital democratic affordances provide a mobilized public with emerging tools that put pressure on the autonomy of representatives….(More)”.

Open Data from Authoritarian Regimes: New Opportunities, New Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruth D. Carlitz and Rachael McLellan: “Data availability has long been a challenge for scholars of authoritarian politics. However, the promotion of open government data—through voluntary initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and soft conditionalities tied to foreign aid—has motivated many of the world’s more closed regimes to produce and publish fine-grained data on public goods provision, taxation, and more. While this has been a boon to scholars of autocracies, we argue that the politics of data production and dissemination in these countries create new challenges.

Systematically missing or biased data may jeopardize research integrity and lead to false inferences. We provide evidence of such risks from Tanzania. The example also shows how data manipulation fits into the broader set of strategies that authoritarian leaders use to legitimate and prolong their rule. Comparing data released to the public on local tax revenues with verified internal figures, we find that the public data appear to significantly underestimate opposition performance. This can bias studies on local government capacity and risk parroting the party line in data form. We conclude by providing a framework that researchers can use to anticipate and detect manipulation in newly available data….(More)”.

Fear of a Black and Brown Internet: Policing Online Activism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sahar F. Aziz and Khaled A. Beydoun: “Virtual surveillance is the modern extension of established policing models that tie dissident Muslim advocacy to terror suspicion and Black activism to political subversion. Countering Violent Extremism (“CVE”) and Black Identity Extremism (“BIE”) programs that specifically target Muslim and Black populations are shifting from on the ground to online.

Law enforcement exploits social media platforms — where activism and advocacy is robust — to monitor and crack down on activists. In short, the new policing is the old policing, but it is stealthily morphing and moving onto virtual platforms where activism is fluidly unfolding in real time. This Article examines how the law’s failure to keep up with technological advancements in social media poses serious risks to the ability of minority communities to mobilize against racial and religious injustice….(More)”.

Sector-Specific (Data-) Access Regimes of Competitors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jörg Hoffmann: “The expected economic and social benefits of data access and sharing are enormous. And yet, particularly in the B2B context, data sharing of privately held data between companies has not taken off at efficient scale. This already led to the adoption of sector specific data governance and access regimes. Two of these regimes are enshrined in the PSD2 that introduced an access to account and a data portability rule for specific account information for third party payment providers.

This paper analyses these sector-specific access and portability regimes and identifies regulatory shortcomings that should be addressed and can serve as further guidance for further data access regulation. It first develops regulatory guidelines that build around the multiple regulatory dimensions of data and the potential adverse effects that may be created by too broad data access regimes.

In this regard the paper assesses the role of factual data exclusivity for data driven innovation incentives for undertakings, the role of industrial policy driven market regulation within the principle of a free market economy, the impact of data sharing on consumer sovereignty and choice, and ultimately data induced-distortions of competition. It develops the findings by taking recourse to basic IP and information economics and the EU competition law case law pertaining refusal to supply cases, the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and to current competition policy considerations with regard to the envisioned preventive competition control regime tackling data rich ‘undertakings of paramount importance for competition across markets’ in Germany. This is then followed by an analysis of the PSD2 access and portability regimes in light of the regulatory principles….(More)”.

Using Algorithms to Address Trade-Offs Inherent in Predicting Recidivism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jennifer L. Skeem and Christopher Lowenkamp: “Although risk assessment has increasingly been used as a tool to help reform the criminal justice system, some stakeholders are adamantly opposed to using algorithms. The principal concern is that any benefits achieved by safely reducing rates of incarceration will be offset by costs to racial justice claimed to be inherent in the algorithms themselves. But fairness tradeoffs are inherent to the task of predicting recidivism, whether the prediction is made by an algorithm or human.

Based on a matched sample of 67,784 Black and White federal supervisees assessed with the Post Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA), we compare how three alternative strategies for “debiasing” algorithms affect these tradeoffs, using arrest for a violent crime as the criterion. These candidate algorithms all strongly predict violent re-offending (AUCs=.71-72), but vary in their association with race (r= .00-.21) and shift tradeoffs between balance in positive predictive value and false positive rates. Providing algorithms with access to race (rather than omitting race or ‘blinding’ its effects) can maximize calibration and minimize imbalanced error rates. Implications for policymakers with value preferences for efficiency vs. equity are discussed…(More)”.

Individualism During Crises: Big Data Analytics of Collective Actions amid COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bo Bian et al: “Collective actions, such as charitable crowdfunding and social distancing, are useful for alleviating the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, engagements in these actions across the U.S. are “consistently inconsistent” and are frequently linked to individualism in the press. We present the first evidence on how individualism shapes online and offline collective actions during a crisis through big data analytics. Following economic historical studies, we leverage GIS techniques to construct a U.S. county-level individualism measure that traces the time each county spent on the American frontier between 1790 and 1890. We then use high-dimensional fixed-effect models, text mining, geo-distributed big data computing and a novel identification strategy based on migrations to analyze GoFundMe fundraising activities as well as county- and individual-level social distancing compliance.

Our analysis uncovers several insights. First, higher individualism reduces both online donations and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. An interquartile increase in individualism reduces COVID-related charitable campaigns and funding by 48% and offsets the effect of state lockdown orders on social distancing by 41%. Second, government interventions, such as stimulus checks, can potentially mitigate the negative effect of individualism on charitable crowdfunding. Third, the individualism effect may be partly driven by a failure to internalize the externality of collective actions: we find stronger results in counties where social distancing generates higher externalities (those with higher population densities or more seniors). Our research is the first to uncover the potential downsides of individualism during crises. It also highlights the importance of big data-driven, culture-aware policymaking….(More)”.