When considering sustainability, scalability and the transformative impact of citizen participation, it becomes strategic the promotion and articulation of a global participation ecosystem that shares the same values, vision and objectives. This model of participation, in addition to being shared, must be effective and efficient, which is why one would consider necessary that it also has a globally shared set of infrastructures in the field of participation. These infrastructures are, among others, an Administration coordinated at all levels so that it can optimize the available resources, a business sector that shares the participation model and collaborates in its improvement, consensus methodologies, technologies that incorporate these values ??in their design and methodologies and, finally, a network of training actors that share frameworks of skills, concepts and learning resources.
Public facilities network within an ecosystem of citizen participation
The Administration (taken as a whole) has several networks of public facilities —telecentres, libraries, civic centers, centers for young and old people, etc. An ecosystem of citizen participation can collaborate with the Administration’s networks of public facilities by superimposing a (new) layer of democratic innovation on the existing equipment networks. It is, then, not about creating a new network of facilities, but rather offering the existing ones a portfolio of services related to citizen participation, democratic quality and social innovation in politics and democracy, so that they enrich and complement what they currently offer to the citizen.
At the same time, it is about contributing to the transformation of public facilities that has already begun: from facilities that provide services to facilities that become citizen infrastructure.
The entry into the Information Society, as well as the advances in all areas of the social sciences, mean that the mission and organization of these facilities are in the process of being redefined. Among others, there are some aspects of this redefinition process that we want to highlight:
The evolution towards more citizen-centered models, where assistance and accompaniment also give way to empowerment strategies.
The equipment governance model as an important factor in achieving its mission, the organizational design and the services it offers.
The inclusion of elements of social innovation for the co-design and co-management of the centers.
The incorporation of ethical and integrity codes, as well as democratic quality both in the operation and in the intrinsic values ??of the services.
We here propose a set of strategic and operational goals that could lead the development of a network of public facilities within an ecosystem of citizen participation.
Goals of the network of public facilities within an ecosystem of citizen participation
Strategic goals
Convert civic facilities into reference spaces in the municipality in terms of citizen participation.
Raise citizens’ awareness about democratic quality, citizen participation and innovation in political and democratic processes.
Support local administrations in projects of citizen participation and social innovation in political and democratic processes.
Support citizens in citizen participation processes, increase their participation and open up the sociodemographic range of the participants.
Promote social innovation projects in the field of civic action, politics and democracy.
Operational goals: participation processes
Train the facilitators of public facilities in Open Government: transparency, open data and participation.
Creation of a digital mediation protocol on citizen participation for public facilities in the Administration, with the aim of supporting citizens with less digital competence in online participation processes.
Support citizens who have more difficulties to participate in citizen participation processes on digital platforms.
Involve citizens who are experts in digital participation platforms to support citizens who are less knowledgeable about the platforms or who have greater difficulties using them.
Operational goals: social innovation in politics and democracy
Train the facilitators of public facilities to be agents promoting the creation of democratic innovation projects.
Help citizens define, pilot, replicate and scale social innovation projects in the field of civic action, politics and democracy.
Promote and support the development of democratic innovation projects within the logic of social innovation.
Articulate networks of social innovation in democracy at the local level.
Standardize and enable replicability and scalability of democratic innovation pilots.
Draft Opinion “Local and Regional Authorities in the permanent dialogue with citizens”
On 9 December 2019, the Catalan Government presented a working document at the 26th CIVEX commission meeting of the European Committee of the Regions.
The aim of the working document was to spark a debate for an upcoming Opinion on the “Local and Regional Authorities in the permanent dialogue with citizens”. The working document had the following scheme:
Bridging the gap between what leaders see vs. what citizens see
Lack of identification of EU issues with daily-life issues
An ecosystem of infrastructures of participation
Engaged citizens in a technopolitical paradigm
Transforming the administration(s)
Now, a draft for that opinion has just been published for its discussion during the 2nd CIVEX commission meeting. As it happened with the working document, my colleague Mireia Borrell, Secretary for External Action and the European Union of the Government of Catalonia, acts as a rapporteur, while I am appointed as an expert to draft the opinion.
A preliminary abstract of that opinion is as follow:
Proposes the setting-up of a Network of Open Participatory Governments, made up by regions and cities, with the purpose to translate upwards and downwards diagnoses, perceptions and proposals on European issues and decision-making;
Proposes that the Committee of the Regions designs, implements and coordinates such a network in collaboration with all other European institutions;
Expects that the Network of Open Participatory Governments can succeed in granularizing European policies and principles and breaking them into smaller, more understandable bits, thus contributing to bring them closer to the citizen, so that they can better draw the line that weaves macro-, meso- and micro-levels of policies;
Suggests that the Network of Open Participatory Governments is piloted during the Conference on the Future of Europe to enlarge, extend, intensify and enhance the dialogue between European institutions and citizens through local and regional authorities, contributing to translate upwards and downwards the deliberations taking place at different levels;
Wants to raise awareness on the fact that more and more citizens are moving towards a new paradigm of political engagement – technopolitics – which is characterized by horizontal relationships, distributed power and networks of collaboration, enabled and enhanced by digital technologies and open data, taking place in informal spaces and out of institutional circuits;
Believes that there are new ways of listening to citizens, new ways of enabling citizens to engage and participate in policy-making, and that a new ecosystem to coordinate the proposals of citizens and the responses of a multi-level administration undoubtedly require a thorough transformation of the culture of administration(s).
Our proposal of the functioning of the Network of Open Participatory Governments is summarized in the following figure:
Three years ago, I published Open Government: A simplified scheme as a way of presenting the three tiers of open government in a practical, reality-based way:
Transparency.
Participation.
Collaboration.
Two years later, in Open government: where to begin with? A showcase I suggested some ways to initiate the road towards open government, especially at the local level. In that case, I combined the former three tiers of open government with five stages of decision making:
My experience during the last year is that these initiatives can work, but sooner or later they need to be mainstreamed into the very structure of the organization. That is, that the Department of Open Government becomes the Department of Public Administration and the Department of Public Administration becomes the Department of Open Government. Otherwise, while the Open Government Department only deals with open government stuff, it will hardly prevail and/or hardly have any impact. In fact, open government strategies will find themselves at odds with public administration strategies, especially in those fields where tradition or inertia is strong and people’s mindsets do not embrace (or are against) change and new values — not to speak about specific personal or party interests.
These conflicting strategies between open government and public administration rely on the fact that they talk about very different spheres. On the one hand, open government deals about how, while public administration deals about what to do, which can be summarised as:
Planning and monitoring: what do we want to do.
Staff and organization: what are the resources that we got.
Relations with citizens: what is our relationship with citizens depending on what they need.
How to put implement an Open Government Department that takes into consideration the principles of open government while it adheres to the needs of public administration organization? Let us try and combine the three tiers of open government (transparency, participation, collaboration) and the three tiers of public administration (planning, resources, citizens).
The image above highlights the nine sectors resulting from intersecting open government with public administration. What follows is a list of functions to be performed by an open government department. These functions can be performed by a single body or several ones, not necessarily coinciding with the list of functions. Indeed, some of them can be performed by the same body, while others will be split or developed across different bodies, some of them not even being part of the public administration:
Data: (public) decision-making should be based on evidence. Caring for the gathering and production of evidence begins with caring for the gathering and production of (public) data. Data protection, open data and official statistics should have a common strategy, including creating protocols for anyone producing data at the public sector: hence, data governance.
Planning: strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation and assessment should have the concurrence of all relevant actors. Participation in policy-making should begin at the design level, which at its turn begins with a good diagnosis where everyone can name and frame the issue at stake.
Evaluation and assessment: there is a part of evaluation and (especially) assessment that necessarily needs to be performed outside of the Administration. It can take the form of an independent evaluation agency or not, but at least the Administration should open and facilitate external evaluation from relevant stakeholders and, when possible, establish binding relationships with such external evaluations. Some Administrations already have an independent body for such tasks.
Ethics and accountability: ethics is to public servants (especially top executives) what planning is to policy-making. One should plan how their teams will be, and that plan is ethics. Transparency is how one tells the citizen how policies were designed, executed and evaluated. Accountability is how people did that, which brings us back to ethics. Transparency in open government can only come after a deep commitment with ethics at the people level and vice-versa.
People (and their tools): this is probably the core of implementing an open government department. It is unlikely that any kind of open government strategy takes place without a transformation of how public servants work. For open government to settle and mainstream it is essential to adapt the way people is recruited, the way people work (do their own work and work with others), they way incentives are drawn or the kind of tools people and teams use (including procedures, protocols, a culture of work, etc.). And, of course, nothing of this will happen without the appropriate training and professional development. Open government begins with internal participation by the public servants themselves.
Capacity enhancing:
Public procurement: when talent and tools cannot be found inside the organization, they have to be sought outside of it. This can be accepted as an unavoidable externalization, or as an opportunity to establish public-social-private partnerships/networks of collaboration. The kind of ethics applied to these relationships will determine the balance between a mere client-contractor agreement or a real partnership.
A skilled pool of public servants: Seems like a good idea that someone, outside the Administration (or just besides it) tries to keep up with the upfront of public administration theory (and practice) through research and training. A School of Public Administration could be such someone.
Talking with the citizen: talking to and talking with the citizen are different things. The second approach requires a lot more empathy. That is what an open government culture should bring. Open Government seen as putting much more mere information in the hands of the citizen is probably not open government, but sheer fulfilment of one’s duty.
Listening to the citizen: we’re told, from our earliest days, that one should listen before speaking. Well, that’s it with participation in open government. It is easier said than done. That is why it should become transversal to all policy-making. That is way it should be mainstreamed in everything public administration does.
Working with the citizen: the last tier of open government, collaboration (co-design of public policies, co-management of initiatives, a devolution of sovereignty, etc.) is hardly possible without the former advancements or transformations in how public administration works. It is about the Administration stepping back from the arena and instead of leading it, facilitating it, making collective decisions possible among citizens without interfering but enriching them.
This list of functions had in mind mainstreaming open government across a whole public administration. And it had in mind how most public administrations are structured nowadays: with a whole department devoted to the internal organization of the Administration (receiving names like department of Interior, of Public Administration, of Governance, of Interior and many other denominations, even Presidency). The goal of this proposal was to put together the values of open government within the usual tasks of an actual department managing public affairs such as strategic planning, personnel and citizens.
But, to achieve total mainstreaming, the managing offices of all other departments should, to some extension, mimic the same structure. As there is a department that manages the budget (Treasury, Public Economics, Public Finance, etc.) and an office in each department to manage their budget, same should happen when it comes to open government: each managing office of each department should take into account planning and monitoring, staff and organization, and relations with the citizen. And do it with the transversal values of open government as it has been explained above in a coordinated and consistent way with the proposed Open Government Department.
This is a personal position about the state of Internet voting and what could be done to implement it in the medium term in a thorough way. It does only reflect my own views and not necessarily represents those of my employer.
Besides the desire to deploy new normative related to parliamentary elections, there also is a growing need to provide robust technologies for e-participation platforms. A good example of this is the recent tender issued by the City Council of Barcelona to provide the deliberative participation platform Decidim with appropriate e-voting (i-voting) technology. This technology would be used not only to vote for a specific citizen proposal, but also to sign citizen petitions.
Last, but not least, scattered —but relevant enough— initiatives raise in the civil society to implement i-voting for several purposes: elections in chambers of commerce, in school councils, in trade unions, in primaries in political parties, etc. are being held more and more frequently and are thus pushing forward the issue into the public agenda. How should a government be present in such a debate is becoming a major issue. Should it provide legal coverage? Provide methodology? A state-wide infrastructure?
This policy brief necessarily comes in a very executive format. Many statements should be consequently be better and extensively substantiated, and much more brought to detail if there were to be accepted as a working policy departing point. Thus, the only goal of this humble reflection is to briefly list where we are at and peak at some of the hypothetical options ahead.
Internet voting in the world
The technology is mature. Although zero risk can not be guaranteed —and this is the main objection to i-vote at the moment— the number of countries and regions adopting it is growing: technology, not being perfect, does already provide more guarantees than other modalities such as the vote by mail, allows much more flexibility and has a hugely scales in costs.
Auditing the process is mandatory. It is, right now, the only way to ensure the same guarantees as face-to-face voting. Auditing should be extended, if possible, to the design of the software and not only to the implementation and vote scrutiny.
Awareness is essential for the success of electronic voting, both with citizens and with politicians. The main detractors of electronic voting, other than technologists (see more about this in the technology section), are citizens who also distrust the institutions and the political system in general. Confidence in the vote must therefore work in itself but also at the level of the democratic system.
A broad ecosystem of e-services and, above all, a simple user-friendly e-identity is a requisite so that electronic voting can be adopted massively. Digital capacity, infrastructure and awareness are inadequate without a habit of interaction between citizens and technology. This ecosystem must evolve in parallel in all areas.
Electronic voting has returns of scale. Returns in efficiency and efficacy happen not only at the economic level, but at the sociopolitical one: electronic voting allows citizens to consult more often, encourages citizen participation and approaches decision-making to the society, improving the perception on policy-making and accountability in general.
Main opportunities and challenges of Internet Voting implementation
Technology and the infrastructure network are easily accessible. There are national and international providers that can provide technology and services, and the infrastructure network of most developed countries is fully prepared for e-voting.
Audits are totally feasible. There are experts worldwide capable of performing e-voting audits and the costs are quite fair. In addition, it would be socially very much welcome and would provide guarantees and confidence.
More awareness should be raised about the advantages and disadvantages of electronic voting, as well as the risks of taking it forward. There still is not a solid consensus around the issue, which is much needed for its successful implementation.
Electronic identification systems are still not adopted by the majority of citizens and their use is still cumbersome. Paradoxically, citizens use electronic identity devices to carry out other transactions on a virtual basis, from banking and electronic commerce to social networking sites. It is, therefore, a problem of technological model and habit, not of lack of digital skills or lack of confidence in technology.
Regarding the performances of scale, implementing electronic voting only for parliamentary elections would be slow and expensive, since while voting on paper remains an option, e-voting is an added a cost and not a minor one. Instead, implementing electronic voting in processes of citizen participation, internal voting processes in the administrations, as well as mixed bodies —or even in the private sphere— would return undeniable advantages, both economic and sociopolitical.
Potential benefits
There are three broad areas where theory and experience identify possible benefits of introducing electronic voting in legislative elections. Due to the Catalan case, our reflections are the following:
Increase in the turnout / reduction of abstention. International experience is not conclusive on this issue. In most cases, it depends a lot on the social, cultural and political context of each moment. In most cases, the requirement of having to register for voting (especially when being abroad) as well as the multiple difficulties that accompany voting by mail suggest that voting would be positive in terms of increasing participation both in advance voting and voting abroad. On the other hand, if a single census was created —necessary requirement for Internet voting— electronic ballot boxes could be enabled for early voting outside polling stations such as civic centers or supermarkets. The convenience of this vote could also be a factor to increase participation. Finally, given the penetration of mobile telephony, Internet voting could be fostered with an awareness raising campaign and appropriate advertising, to try to increase young vote, although, as mentioned, previous experience is not conclusive in this regard. In short, significant growth in the vote abroad could be expected (more or less significant in relation to the current foreign vote in many places, but probably small in relationship to the global turnout), but not too relevant in the vote as a whole. It is worth noting, though, that if good voting systems have no clear effects on turnout, bad voting systems do have negative effects on the probability of voting, which goes from discouraging voting to directly not allowing it effectively. Electronic voting, thus, can have positive effects where the alternatives are perceived as (or simply they are) not effective for voting.
Reduction of costs. Internet voting is significantly cheaper than face-to-face voting, and especially on paper. However, total costs are only reduced if one modality is replaced by the other one. If the traditional voting system is combined with Internet voting, costs actually increase as the voting modes are expanded and, therefore, a new infrastructure and organization is added.
Transparency and accessibility. The clearest advantage of i-voting is the increased accessibility of voting. This should not be understood only as removing barriers for the disabled, but also to information and cognitive barriers that go with any type of electoral process. The efforts that accompany the deployment of electronic voting have a positive impact on trust in the system, opening the black box of the functioning of institutions, and by establishing new channels of communication between the citizen and the Administration.
These three aspects, by themselves, are probably insufficient to initiate a strategy for the introduction of electronic voting and/or Internet voting, especially in parliamentary elections. Although it is generally a good idea making things easy for the voter —and the Internet voting undoubtedly does— the benefits in terms of electoral participation are doubtful, there are high implementation costs, and remaining doubts about electronic voting could be counterproductive.
However, the combination of the three aspects has, in our opinion, great potential. We believe that the international debate about Internet voting is no longer about whether but about when it is going to take place. Once it has been implemented for a given election, it is relatively easy to extrapolate methodology and technology to many other elections where the impact on increased participation and cost reduction can be enormous. It is in this scenario that we have to place ourselves and where a community can have huge returns on investment:
Increase of the citizen participation in the whole set of the different electoral calls as well as increase of the number of electoral processes of diverse nature.
Exponential reduction of the costs of electoral processes, again taken as a whole.
Improved knowledge of the functioning of public and private institutions where collective decisions are taken and/or representatives are chosen.
Consequently, a proposal of implementation strategy for Internet voting would be:
Use the electronic vote to increase the legitimacy of the democratic system as a whole, both at the institutional level and in civil society, based on facilitating electoral processes in all areas and encouraging participation. This includes:
Parliamentary elections.
Processes of citizen participation
Electoral processes of civil society
Implement an electronic voting system understood as a public infrastructure. This infrastructure must be involved in its design, open to the use of any user and democratic in its governance model.
Making steps forward: social and political levels
The nature, context and possible fields of deployment of an electronic voting project in a given administration exceeds, in our opinion, the scope strictly circumscribed to elections to its chamber of representatives.
In the same way, the strong technological component of this project also goes beyond the usual single-handed implementation of the typical technological application.
Thus, at the political level, one would propose:
Create a multi-stakeholder task force to define and foster a project for Internet voting as a public infrastructure.
Make a detailed inventory of the type of processes where Internet voting could be applied.
Elections to the chamber(s) of representatives.
Processes of citizen participation and citizen councils.
Citizen petitions and citizen polling of all kinds and at all levels of the Administration.
Electoral processes of bodies of the civil society (chambers of commerce, school councils, professional colleges, labour unions, political parties, etc.)
On the other hand, we believe that the level of knowledge and acceptance of Internet voting is still not optimal among many citizens. Moreover, we feel that, in some circles, there might be a need for a thorough debate on the benefits and possible risks of this modality in an open, broad and well-founded way, beyond academic environments or scattered appearances in the media.
This knowledge and acceptance, however, will hardly come only through awareness and dissemination campaigns: Estonia’s reality suggests that only through practice and habit comes the familiarity and necessary confidence to achieve high levels of legitimacy in the use of Internet voting.
One would, thus, propose at the citizen level:
The deployment of campaigns of dissemination and awareness raising about the potentials and risks of electronic voting to engage in a deep and grounded debate.
The celebration of academic and sector discussion conferences to define a consensual strategy of Internet voting as a public infrastructure.
The progressive and practical implementation of Internet voting in all kind of elections and voting processes: elections of public representatives, citizen polls, citizen petitions, professional chambers, school councils and university boards, labor union elections, primaries in political parties, etc.
Making steps forward: economic and technological levels
There are two key considerations when it comes to deploying an Internet voting strategy at the technical level: the resources that will need to be spent on it and the resulting technological model.
We propose, at an economic level:
To calculate the cost of implementing Internet voting according to the various scenarios, depending on the inventory of potential uses of Internet voting.
Implementation only in the parliamentary elections.
Implementation in all the electoral areas and of citizen participation with direct or indirect involvement of the Administration.
Implementation for the civil society at large as a public infrastructure, for free or under a given structure of fees.
Calculate the benefits of replacing the current voting modalities for scenarios with electronic voting, based on the previous calculations.
Depending on the technological model: commercial solution for rent, commercial solution in property, free software solution.
Depending on the coexistence or substitution of modalities, absolute or progressive.
Depending on the expected increase in participation, especially in areas where it is extremely low: collegiate bodies, civil society, etc.
Beyond the economic issue, the technological model also has an impact on the confidence in the system as well as its flexibility. Although we have stated that the technology is mature and that auditing guarantees almost full confidence on Internet voting, it is no less true that this audit, to be fully comprehensive, must have total access to the code of the software, which is not always possible and, in any case, easy to do.
In the long term scenario —electronic voting as a public infrastructure applied to multiple areas of the Administration and civil society— we believe that the best option in terms of economic costs and trust in the system is free software. Only this option makes the economic returns to be highly growing with the number of votes and gives total confidence to the various stakeholders —not to mention the administrative simplification for the disappearance of the public procurement of electronic voting services.
We would propose, at the technological level:
An inventory and analysis of the current free Internet voting software solutions: reliability, scalability, flexibility, total cost of ownership, existence of a community of developers and users, etc.
Evaluate the institutional possibility (resources, political capacity, etc.) to create a consortium/community around a new free software tool that can become the de facto standard in the field of electronic voting.
These technological considerations are for the medium term and, in no case, they should suppose an impediment to the initiatives of Internet voting that could arise in the short term, that would have to execute with the concurrence of the market.
Regarding the consortium or community around a free software tool, it would be advisable that it be composed, at least initially, by a group of governments of an international nature (states, regions) with the triple objective of collecting all the sensitivities/needs a tool of this type, increase its legitimacy and distribute the development costs.
Acknowledgements
Administration
Priit Vinkel, head of the State Electoral Office, Government of Estonia
Casper Wrede, Elections administrator, Government Offices, Government of Åland
André Fecteau, Policy Analyst, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Government of Canada
Researchers
Jordi Barrat. Professor, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Josep Maria Reniu, Professor, Universitat de Barcelona
David Dueñas-Cid, Assistant Professor, Kozminski University Researcher, Tallinn University of Technology
Robert Krimmer, Professor, Tallinn University of Technology
Guillem Clapés, Analyst and political advisor
Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez, PhD student, Universitat Rovira i Virgili Analyst, Scytl
Mihkel Solvak, Researcher, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies
Martin Möller, Researcher, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies
e-Voting private sector
Liisa Past, Expert in cybersecurity, McCain Institute
Peter van der Veldt MSc., Sales Director Europe, Smartmatic
Jordi Puiggalí, CSO and SVP Research & Development, Scytl
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Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Cortier, V., Goré, R., Hapsara, M., Serdült, U. & Dueñas-Cid, D. (Eds.) (2018). Electronic Voting. Third International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2018, Bregenz, Austria, October 2-5, 2018, Proceedings. Cham: Springer.
Krimmer, R., Dueñas-Cid, D., Krivonosova, I., Vinkel, P. & Koitmae, P. (2018). “How Much Does an e-Vote Cost? Cost Comparison per Vote in Multichannel Elections in Estonia”. In Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Cortier, V., Goré, R., Hapsara, M., Serdült, U. & Dueñas-Cid, D. (Eds.), Electronic Voting, 117-131. Third International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2018, Bregenz, Austria, October 2-5, 2018, Proceedings. Cham: Springer.
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Devaux, A., Faulí, C., Stewart, K., Porcu, F., Taylor, J., Theben, A., Baruch, B., Folkvord, F. & Nederveen, F. (forthcoming). Study on the Benefits and Drawbacks of Remote Voting. Brussels: European Commission.
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Devaux, A., Faulí, C., Stewart, K., Porcu, F., Taylor, J., Theben, A., Baruch, B., Folkvord, F. & Nederveen, F. (forthcoming). Study on the Benefits and Drawbacks of Remote Voting. Technical Appendices. Brussels: European Commission.
Reniu i Vilamala, J.M. (2014). “Demasiados talones para un solo Aquiles. Los riesgos del voto electrónico.”. In Cotarelo, R. & Olmeda, J.A. (Eds.), La democracia del siglo XXI. Política, medios de comunicación, internet y redes sociales, Capítulo 4, 81-105. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales.
Citizen participation is entering a new era: the era of technopolitics. New forms of organization, of coordination, of civic action boosted by a new ethics and new methodologies, and all this made possible by new tools, spaces and actors.
However, this new era of citizen empowerment continues to require –probably more than ever– democratic institutions that are especially responsive to the changes that are taking place on the streets. Institutions that adapt, that innovate and that, ultimately, transform themselves to keep on being a chain of transmission between the will of citizens and collective decision-making.
This volume analyses how the City Council of Barcelona has faced and planned this transformation, and the impacts that the new strategy may imply on meanings, norms and power in the Administration-citizen relationship. It assumes a new game board, although the final outcome of the game is still uncertain.
The Spanish local elections in 2015 brought to many Spanish cities what has been labelled as “city councils of change”: city councils whose mayors and governing representatives come from parties emerging from the 15M Spanish Indignados Movement. Many of them, led by Madrid and Barcelona, tried to bring into office the same technopolitical practices that proved so useful to articulate a broadly supported movement when out in the streets.
But not only practices were put to work in decision-making at the local level. Also the ethos and values attached to them led, in many ways, with more or less success, the relationship between the local government and the citizenry. These values spin around citizen empowerment, participation, engagement and, in its most ambitious expression, devolution of sovereignty from the government to the citizen.
This book focuses on the socio-political environment where this phenomenon takes place, specifically in Madrid and Barcelona, the two major cities of the state and featuring these so-called city councils of change, and how it was deployed in Barcelona in the first months of 2016 during the definition of the strategic plan of the city. Using Anthony Giddens Structuration Theory, we will be able to assess if not the final outcomes and impact of this technopolitical turn in decision-making – surely too soon for such an assessment to be performed –, at least the main shifts in meaning, norms and power which, as tipping points, can shed a light on the main social trends that these political movements might be unleashing.
In Part I we draw a Policy Brief – Increasing the quality of democracy through sovereignty devolution – were we present the main drivers of change, the essentials of the several shifts brought by the new ethos, and the keys and aspects to be considered to understand the qualitative changes in our opinion already in play in the current political scenario.
Part II – ICT-mediated citizen participation in Spain: a state of the art – revisits e-participation since the beginnings of the XXIst century onwards and most especially in the aftermath of the 15M Spanish Indignados Movement, proposing that recent ICT-based participation initiatives in such municipalities could be far from just polling the citizens and be, instead, the spearhead of a technopolitics-aimed network of cities. We critically explore the role of ICTs in reconstructing politics in Spain and which led to Spain’s new experiments in participatory democracy such as Decide Madrid, launched in the city of Madrid to enable strategic participatory planning for the municipality, and decidim.barcelona another participatory process launched in Barcelona initially based in the former.
This part provides an overview of the normative and institutional state of art of ICT-mediated citizen participation in Spain. The first section depicts the political and civic liberties framework in Spain. In the second section the landscape of ICT mediated citizen engagement is mapped. In the third section, we engage with implications of technology mediations for deliberative democracy and transformative citizenship.
Part III – The case of decidim.barcelona: Using a Structuration Framework Towards a Theory of ICT-mediated Citizen Engagement – analyses the participatory making of the Barcelona Strategic Plan (PAM) 2016-2019 for the whole term in office. The first section revisits the general context of the city in terms of ICT-mediated politics and explains the design and general functioning of the new strategic plan and its participatory process. The second section explains the methodology used for the analysis, which is carried on in the third section.
Notes from the seminar Elections in Estonia and the current parliamentary elections: presentations by election administrators and experts, organized by the Government of Estonia as part of the 2019 Parliamentary Elections International Visitors Program and held in Tallinn, Estonia, on 2 March 2019.More notes on this event: valimised2019
Mihkel Solvak, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies i-Voting and reliability
(note: we are using i-voting for Internet voting, and not e-voting as electronic voting also covers on-site electronic voting with e-voting polling machines)
Share of people who trusts i-voting has ranged from 53 to 77% since 2005 and now seems steady at 70%.
Surprisingly, people that trust less i-voting do not vote less electronically than those who do — although those who trust i-voting are much more likely to use it than those who don’t.
But the distribution of trust on i-voting is not a normal one: a majority totally trust the system, a minority totally distrusts it, and the rest are distributed evenly in between.
What we also see is that trust increases along time, and more people are thus shifting to i-voting. But even people that only vote on paper see their trust increased. There are two reasons for that: a precondition (one was also convinced about trust and that is why one shifted to i-voting) and a usage effect (after having switched to i-voting and having had a good experience, this increased one’s trust on i-voting). Trust is mostly a precondition, user experience adds very little. People with high pre-existing trust self-select into i-voting.
Higher rates of trust make the system more resilient, especially to reputation attacks. But we also need criticism to improve the system or not to forget about cyber-security.
It is worth noting that trust in i-voting positively correlates with trust in paper voting and trust in institutions in general. And there does not seem to be a negative correlation with higher levels of digital literacy (the hypothesis being that the more you know computers, the less you trust them).
People that shift to i-voting usually never shift back. But for those who do not vote, they can shift to paper voting and back to non voting.
Martin Möller, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies Landscape of political parties in Estonia: past and present
We witness an increasing stability in the Estonia political arena. But not only in terms of how many parties, or whether there are new parties entering the arena, but also between the manifestos of the different parties. Parties are becoming more similar between them.
Of course there are some differences in the left-right dimension and the liberal-conservative dimension.
Future of (Estonian) elections
Speakers: Priit Vinkel, Liisa Past, Robert Krimmer, Mihkel Solvak, Martin Möller.
Although society is moving towards a paper-less world, paper voting probably will not disappear. But, as new technologies appear, it is probable that new channels (including new electronic channels) will appear and will be used for voting.
Liisa Past: we have to move from a technocratic debate on voting to a democratic debate, to a debate about rights. This includes mobility, convenience.
Liisa Past: we have to confront supply chain management of elections. This is were the risks are, and this is beyond technology. What is more scary: a single firm controlling the whole process as a black box, or the Estate providing all technology and everything?
