Paper by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom & Davide Furceri: “We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector autoregressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints…(More)”.
Algorithm vs. Algorithm
Paper by Cary Coglianese and Alicia Lai: “Critics raise alarm bells about governmental use of digital algorithms, charging that they are too complex, inscrutable, and prone to bias. A realistic assessment of digital algorithms, though, must acknowledge that government is already driven by algorithms of arguably greater complexity and potential for abuse: the algorithms implicit in human decision-making. The human brain operates algorithmically through complex neural networks. And when humans make collective decisions, they operate via algorithms too—those reflected in legislative, judicial, and administrative processes. Yet these human algorithms undeniably fail and are far from transparent.
On an individual level, human decision-making suffers from memory limitations, fatigue, cognitive biases, and racial prejudices, among other problems. On an organizational level, humans succumb to groupthink and free-riding, along with other collective dysfunctionalities. As a result, human decisions will in some cases prove far more problematic than their digital counterparts. Digital algorithms, such as machine learning, can improve governmental performance by facilitating outcomes that are more accurate, timely, and consistent. Still, when deciding whether to deploy digital algorithms to perform tasks currently completed by humans, public officials should proceed with care on a case-by-case basis. They should consider both whether a particular use would satisfy the basic preconditions for successful machine learning and whether it would in fact lead to demonstrable improvements over the status quo. The question about the future of public administration is not whether digital algorithms are perfect. Rather, it is a question about what will work better: human algorithms or digital ones….(More)”.
The committeefication of collective action in Africa
Paper by Caroline Archambault and David Ehrhardt: “Over the last century, Africa has witnessed considerable committeefication, a process by which committees have become increasingly important to organise collective action. Throughout the continent, committees have come to preside over everything from natural resource management to cultural life, and from peacebuilding to community consultation. What has been the impact of this dramatic institutional change on the nature and quality of collective action? Drawing on decades of anthropological research and development work in East Africa – studying, working with and working in committees of various kinds – this article presents an approach to addressing this question.
We show how committees have surface features as well as deep functions, and that the impact of committeefication depends not only on their features and functions but also on the pathways through which they proliferate. On the surface, committees aim for inclusive and deliberative decision making, even if they vary in the specifics of their missions, membership, decision-making rules, and level of autonomy. But their deep functions can be quite different: a façade for accessing recognition or resources; a classroom for learning leadership skills; or a club for elites to pursue their shared interests. The impact of these features and functions depends on the pathways through which they grow: autonomous from existing forms of collective action; in synergistic cooperation; or in competition, possibly weakening or even destroying existing local institutions.
Community-based development interventions often rely heavily on committeefied collective action. This paper identifies the benefits that this strategy can have, but also shows its potential to weaken or even destroy existing forms of collective action. On that basis, we suggest that it is imperative to turn more systematic analytical attention to committees, and assess the extent to which they are delivering development or crippling collective action in the guise of democracy and deliberation…(More)”.
Shared Measures: Collective Performance Data Use in Collaborations
Paper by Alexander Kroll: “Traditionally, performance metrics and data have been used to hold organizations accountable. But public service provision is not merely hierarchical anymore. Increasingly, we see partnerships among government agencies, private or nonprofit organizations, and civil society groups. Such collaborations may also use goals, measures, and data to manage group efforts, however, the application of performance practices here will likely follow a different logic. This Element introduces the concepts of “shared measures” and “collective data use” to add collaborative, relational elements to existing performance management theory. It draws on a case study of collaboratives in North Carolina that were established to develop community responses to the opioid epidemic. To explain the use of shared performance measures and data within these collaboratives, this Element studies the role of factors such as group composition, participatory structures, social relationships, distributed leadership, group culture, and value congruence…(More)”.
Relational Artificial Intelligence
Paper by Virginia Dignum: “The impact of Artificial Intelligence does not depend only on fundamental research and technological developments, but for a large part on how these systems are introduced into society and used in everyday situations. Even though AI is traditionally associated with rational decision-making, understanding and shaping the societal impact of AI in all its facets requires a relational perspective. A rational approach to AI, where computational algorithms drive decision-making independent of human intervention, insights and emotions, has shown to result in bias and exclusion, laying bare societal vulnerabilities and insecurities. A relational approach, that focus on the relational nature of things, is needed to deal with the ethical, legal, societal, cultural, and environmental implications of AI. A relational approach to AI recognises that objective and rational reasoning cannot does not always result in the ‘right’ way to proceed because what is ‘right’ depends on the dynamics of the situation in which the decision is taken, and that rather than solving ethical problems the focus of design and use of AI must be on asking the ethical question. In this position paper, I start with a general discussion of current conceptualisations of AI followed by an overview of existing approaches to governance and responsible development and use of AI. Then, I reflect over what should be the bases of a social paradigm for AI and how this should be embedded in relational, feminist and non-Western philosophies, in particular the Ubuntu philosophy….(More)”.
Public bodies’ access to private sector data: The perspectives of twelve European local administrations
Article by Marina Micheli: “Public bodies’ access to private sector data of public interest (also referred to as business-to-government (B2G) data sharing) is still an emerging and sporadic practice. The article discusses the findings of a qualitative research that examined B2G data sharing in European local administrations. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with managers and project leaders of twelve municipalities, the study contextualizes access to private sector data in the perspectives of those working in the field. The findings examine the four operational models to access data that featured more prominently in the interviews: data donorship, public procurement of data, data partnerships and pools, and data sharing obligations. The analysis highlights the power unbalances embedded in B2G data sharing as perceived by representatives of local administrations. In particular, the findings address the gap between municipalities in the opportunities to access private sector data of public interest, the lack of negotiating power of local administrations vis-à-vis private sector data holders and the strategies envisioned to foster more inclusive forms of data governance…(More)”.
A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies
Paper by Katherine L. Milkman et al: “Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested increased pharmacy vaccination rates by an average of 2.0 percentage points, or 6.8%, over a 3-mo follow-up period. The most-effective messages reminded patients that a flu shot was waiting for them and delivered reminders on multiple days. The top-performing intervention included two texts delivered 3 d apart and communicated to patients that a vaccine was “waiting for you.” Neither experts nor lay people anticipated that this would be the best-performing treatment, underscoring the value of simultaneously testing many different nudges in a highly powered megastudy….(More)”.
Still Muted: The Limited Participatory Democracy of Zoom Public Meetings
Paper by Katherine Levine Einstein: “Recent research has demonstrated that participants in public meetings are unrepresentative of their broader communities. Some suggest that reducing barriers to meeting attendance can improve participation, while others believe doing so will produce minimal changes. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted public meetings online, potentially reducing the time costs associated with participating. We match participants at online public meetings with administrative data to learn whether: (1) online participants are representative of their broader communities and (2) representativeness improves relative to in-person meetings. We find that participants in online forums are quite similar to those in in-person ones. They are similarly unrepresentative of residents in their broader communities and similarly overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing. These results suggest important limitations to public meeting reform. Future research should continue to unpack whether reforms might prove more effective at redressing inequalities in an improved economic and public health context…(More)”.
Data Federalism
Article by Bridget A. Fahey: “Private markets for individual data have received significant and sustained attention in recent years. But data markets are not for the private sector alone. In the public sector, the federal government, states, and cities gather data no less intimate and on a scale no less profound. And our governments have realized what corporations have: It is often easier to obtain data about their constituents from one another than to collect it directly. As in the private sector, these exchanges have multiplied the data available to every level of government for a wide range of purposes, complicated data governance, and created a new source of power, leverage, and currency between governments.
This Article provides an account of this vast and rapidly expanding intergovernmental marketplace in individual data. In areas ranging from policing and national security to immigration and public benefits to election management and public health, our governments exchange data both by engaging in individual transactions and by establishing “data pools” to aggregate the information they each have and diffuse access across governments. Understanding the breadth of this distinctly modern practice of data federalism has descriptive, doctrinal, and normative implications.
In contrast to conventional cooperative federalism programs, Congress has largely declined to structure and regulate intergovernmental data exchange. And in Congress’s absence, our governments have developed unorthodox cross-governmental administrative institutions to manage data flows and oversee data pools, and these sprawling, unwieldy institutions are as important as the usual cooperative initiatives to which federalism scholarship typically attends.
Data exchanges can also go wrong, and courts are not prepared to navigate the ways that data is both at risk of being commandeered and ripe for use as coercive leverage. I argue that these constitutional doctrines can and should be adapted to police the exchange of data. I finally place data federalism in normative frame and argue that data is a form of governmental power so unlike the paradigmatic ones our federalism is believed to distribute that it has the potential to unsettle federalism in both function and theory…(More)”.
Direct democracy and equality: a global perspective
Paper by Anna Krämling et al: “Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality….(More)”.