Paper by Jonathan Gray: “The past decade has seen the rise of “data portals” as online devices for making data public. They have been accorded a prominent status in political speeches, policy documents, and official communications as sites of innovation, transparency, accountability, and participation. Drawing on research on data portals around the world, data portal software, and associated infrastructures, this paper explores three approaches for studying the social life of data portals as technopolitical devices: (a) interface analysis, (b) software analysis, and (c) metadata analysis. These three approaches contribute to the study of the social lives of data portals as dynamic, heterogeneous, and contested sites of public sector datafication. They are intended to contribute to critically assessing how participation around public sector datafication is invited and organized with portals, as well as to rethinking and recomposing them…(More)”.
Evidence Gap Maps as Critical Information Communication Devices for Evidence-based Public Policy
Paper by Esteban Villa-Turek et al: “The public policy cycle requires increasingly the use of evidence by policy makers. Evidence Gap Maps (EGMs) are a relatively new methodology that helps identify, process, and visualize the vast amounts of studies representing a rich source of evidence for better policy making. This document performs a methodological review of EGMs and presents the development of a working integrated system that automates several critical steps of EGM creation by means of applied computational and statistical methods. Above all, the proposed system encompasses all major steps of EGM creation in one place, namely inclusion criteria determination, processing of information, analysis, and user-friendly communication of synthesized relevant evidence. This tool represents a critical milestone in the efforts of implementing cutting-edge computational methods in usable systems. The contribution of the document is two-fold. First, it presents the critical importance of EGMs in the public policy cycle; second, it justifies and explains the development of a usable tool that encompasses the methodological phases of creation of EGMs, while automating most time-consuming stages of the process. The overarching goal is the better and faster information communication to relevant actors like policy makers, thus promoting well-being through better and more efficient interventions based on more evidence-driven policy making…(More)”.
The People and the Experts
Paper by William D. Nordhaus & Douglas Rivers: “Are speculators driving up oil prices? Should we raise energy prices to slow global warming? The present study takes a small number of such questions and compares the views of economic experts with those of the public. This comparison uses a panel of more than 2000 respondents from YouGov with the views of the panel of experts from the Initiative on Global Markets at the Chicago Booth School. We found that most of the US population is at best modestly informed about major economic questions and policies. The low level of knowledge is generally associated with the intrusion of ideological, political, and religious views that challenge or deny the current economic consensus. The intruding factors are highly heterogeneous across questions and sub-populations and are much more diverse than the narrowness of public political discourse would suggest. Many of these findings have been established for scientific subjects, but they appear to be equally important for economic views…(More)”.
Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets
Paper by Guadalupe Bedoya, Jishnu Das & Amy Dolinger: “We report results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities in three Kenyan counties were classified into 273 markets, and the markets were then randomly allocated to treatment and control groups. Government inspectors visited health facilities and, depending on the results of their inspection, recommended closure or a timeline for improvements. The intervention increased compliance with patient safety measures in both public and private facilities (more so in the latter) and reallocated patients from private to public facilities without increasing out-of-pocket payments or decreasing facility use. In treated markets, improvements were equally marked throughout the quality distribution, consistent with a simple model of vertical differentiation in oligopolies. Our paper thus establishes the use of experimental techniques to study regulatory reforms and, in doing so, shows that minimum standards can improve quality across the board without adversely affecting utilization…(More)”.
Mapping the discourse on evidence-based policy, artificial intelligence, and the ethical practice of policy analysis
Paper by Joshua Newman and Michael Mintrom: “Scholarship on evidence-based policy, a subset of the policy analysis literature, largely assumes information is produced and consumed by humans. However, due to the expansion of artificial intelligence in the public sector, debates no longer capture the full range concerns. Here, we derive a typology of arguments on evidence-based policy that performs two functions: taken separately, the categories serve as directions in which debates may proceed, in light of advances in technology; taken together, the categories act as a set of frames through which the use of evidence in policy making might be understood. Using a case of welfare fraud detection in the Netherlands, we show how the acknowledgement of divergent frames can enable a holistic analysis of evidence use in policy making that considers the ethical issues inherent in automated data processing. We argue that such an analysis will enhance the real-world relevance of the evidence-based policy paradigm….(More)”
Spatial data trusts: an emerging governance framework for sharing spatial data
Paper by Nenad Radosevic et al: “Data Trusts are an important emerging approach to enabling the much wider sharing of data from many different sources and for many different purposes, backed by the confidence of clear and unambiguous data governance. Data Trusts combine the technical infrastructure for sharing data with the governance framework of a legal trust. The concept of a data Trust applied specifically to spatial data offers significant opportunities for new and future applications, addressing some longstanding barriers to data sharing, such as location privacy and data sovereignty. This paper introduces and explores the concept of a ‘spatial data Trust’ by identifying and explaining the key functions and characteristics required to underpin a data Trust for spatial data. The work identifies five key features of spatial data Trusts that demand specific attention and connects these features to a history of relevant work in the field, including spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), location privacy, and spatial data quality. The conclusions identify several key strands of research for the future development of this rapidly emerging framework for spatial data sharing…(More)”.
The Many Forms of Decentralization and Citizen Trust in Government
Paper by Michael A. Nelson: “This paper contributes to the literature on the nexus between decentralization and citizen trust in government through the use of a comprehensive set of decentralization measures that have been recently developed. Using measures of autonomy at both the regional and local (municipal) levels of government, and responses from five recent waves of the World Values Survey on citizen trust/confidence in their national government, the civil service, and the police, several interesting insights emerged from the analysis. First, giving regional governments a voice in policy making for the country as a whole promotes trust in government at the national level and in the civil service. Second, deconcentration – central government offices at the regional level as opposed to autonomous regional governments –appears to be an effective strategy to generate greater confidence in government activities. Third, affording regional and local governments complete autonomy in the delivery of government services without at least some oversight by higher levels of government is not found to be trust promoting. Finally, giving local governments authority to levy at least one major tax is associated with greater government trust, a finding that is consistent with others who have found tax decentralization to be linked with better outcomes in the public sector. Overall, the analysis suggests that the caution researchers sometimes give when using one-dimensional measures of the authority/autonomy measures of subnational governments such a fiscal decentralization is warranted…(More)”.
An Audit Framework for Adopting AI-Nudging on Children
Paper by Marianna Ganapini, and Enrico Panai: “This is an audit framework for AI-nudging. Unlike the static form of nudging usually discussed in the literature, we focus here on a type of nudging that uses large amounts of data to provide personalized, dynamic feedback and interfaces. We call this AI-nudging (Lanzing, 2019, p. 549; Yeung, 2017). The ultimate goal of the audit outlined here is to ensure that an AI system that uses nudges will maintain a level of moral inertia and neutrality by complying with the recommendations, requirements, or suggestions of the audit (in other words, the criteria of the audit). In the case of unintended negative consequences, the audit suggests risk mitigation mechanisms that can be put in place. In the case of unintended positive consequences, it suggests some reinforcement mechanisms. Sponsored by the IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab…(More)”.
Deliberating Like a State: Locating Public Administration Within the Deliberative System
Paper by Rikki Dean: “Public administration is the largest part of the democratic state and a key consideration in understanding its legitimacy. Despite this, democratic theory is notoriously quiet about public administration. One exception is deliberative systems theories, which have recognized the importance of public administration and attempted to incorporate it within their orbit. This article examines how deliberative systems approaches have represented (a) the actors and institutions of public administration, (b) its mode of coordination, (c) its key legitimacy functions, (d) its legitimacy relationships, and (e) the possibilities for deliberative intervention. It argues that constructing public administration through the pre-existing conceptual categories of deliberative democracy, largely developed to explain the legitimacy of law-making, has led to some significant omissions and misunderstandings. The article redresses these issues by providing an expanded conceptualization of public administration, connected to the core concerns of deliberative and other democratic theories with democratic legitimacy and democratic reform…(More)”.
Operationalizing digital self-determination
Paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “A proliferation of data-generating devices, sensors, and applications has led to unprecedented amounts of digital data. We live in an era of datafication, one in which life is increasingly quantified and transformed into intelligence for private or public benefit. When used responsibly, this offers new opportunities for public good. The potential of data is evident in the possibilities offered by open data and data collaboratives—both instances of how wider access to data can lead to positive and often dramatic social transformation. However, three key forms of asymmetry currently limit this potential, especially for already vulnerable and marginalized groups: data asymmetries, information asymmetries, and agency asymmetries. These asymmetries limit human potential, both in a practical and psychological sense, leading to feelings of disempowerment and eroding public trust in technology. Existing methods to limit asymmetries (such as open data or consent) as well as some alternatives under consideration (data ownership, collective ownership, personal information management systems) have limitations to adequately address the challenges at hand. A new principle and practice of digital self-determination (DSD) is therefore required. The study and practice of DSD remain in its infancy. The characteristics we have outlined here are only exploratory, and much work remains to be done so as to better understand what works and what does not. We suggest the need for a new research framework or agenda to explore DSD and how it can address the asymmetries, imbalances, and inequalities—both in data and society more generally—that are emerging as key public policy challenges of our era…(More)”.