Notes from the conference Democracy and Media in the Digital Era, organized by the Digital Enlightenment Forum and the Delegation to the European Union of the Government of Catalonia, and held in Brussels, Belgium, on 14 November 2019. More notes on this event: digenlight2019
Andrey Keen How to fix Democracy
Are we treating the mob as elevated citizens? Can we do that? How can we?
How to marry expertise and democracy?
How can we avoid the role of technocracy, the role of the expert?
We thought that the digital revolution would democratise media, would democratise the ability to start a business, that more information in the hands of everyone would work just great. Is that true?
The truth is that we are witnessing the growth of new huge monopolies, that we are not more savvy, that we have a fragmentation of communities, filter bubbles, echo chambers, a culture of narcissism.
What we are witnessing is not the growth of the common good, but the growth of individualism, of using ICTs to create bigger individualities and individual-centered realities.
The core of democracy is not speaking, is listening.
We need to improve Western Democracies, especially after the ‘Russian face’ and ‘Chinese technocracy’. But technology will not solve the problems of democracy.
Citizens’ assemblies are great because they force people to listen.
Citizens’ assemblies are great because they bring in experts, to explain complex issues. Experts matter. We have to find ways to reintroduce the role of the expert.
Analogue is where the added value is when digital has commoditised everything.
We need leaders, we need political leadership, we need unashamed experts, people that can tell the truth, take risks, and explain why we should take them.
What is scarce today is trust.
People have to be accountable. We spoiled the mob by giving them all kind of free stuff, and they became the product.
Identity has to be brought back to the arena. Anonymity brings in all kinds of trouble as people are not accountable. When you are, many evils of disinformation are dismantled. Anonymity is destroying democracy, because people are no more accountable for what they do, undermining civil rights and political freedom.
Discussion
Q: why do we separate the ‘experts’ from ‘the people’? Are not experts part of the people? Isn’t it plain wrong to think that people are not knowledgeable at all? Isn’t it a problem that elites behaved against people’s will? Keen: elites need to be more responsible, elites need to reinvent themselves. But we still need them, or we will fall into anarchism.
Keen: most movements burst out and channel people’s energy, which is good, but they vanish out if there is no organisation behind or created after the movement. We have to gather and bottle enthusiasm and bring it inside political parties — and yes, political parties have to be reinvented too.
Notes from the conference Democracy and Media in the Digital Era, organized by the Digital Enlightenment Forum and the Delegation to the European Union of the Government of Catalonia, and held in Brussels, Belgium, on 14 November 2019. More notes on this event: digenlight2019
Democracy Organisation Chair: Jacques Bus, DigEnlight
In various places activities are ongoing or have been done to analyse and strengthen
involvement of citizens in political decision making. This session presents some and gives
the lessons learned.
Marc Esteve del Valle (Univ Groningen, NL) Platform Politics: Party Organization in the Network Society
Weakening of traditional partisan attachment (ideology)
Fall of party membership
Increase volatility of the electorate
The organizational response: Stratarchy (Eldersveld, 1964): different organizations within the party are hierarchically ranked, but can follow their logic, with a certain degree of independence.
The technological response: development of internal computer-mediated communication networks (Margetts, The cyber-party)
Platform politics: new digital intermediaries into the structure of political parties, to facilitate internal communication, engage in political decision-making, organize political action, and transform the overall experience of participation in political parties (Lioy et al., 2019). They vary depending on who owns the platforms: open or closed platforms. Platform politics ranges from traditional mass-politics parties to movement parties.
General observations:
Lack of internet proficiency (PD)
Limited participation on the membership base in online votes (M5S)
Centralization of the voting processes (Podemos)
Technological challenges (PSOE)
How do we measure the impact of such practices? Are we reaching more people? Are we getting more voters?
What is a citizens’ assembly? People randomly selected to reflect gender, age, education, socio-economic status. It is a deliberative body to learn, discuss and decide.
We the citizens. Speak up for Ireland, 7 regional meetings, with 100 randomly selected citizens, 1 weekend of deliberation (June 2011). It worked particularly to reform programs.
Convention on the Constitution 2012-2014, 66 citizens, 33 political representatives. They looked at 8 topics relevant at the constitutional level. Met for 9 weekends. Historical outcome making legal same-sex marriage, after a popular referendum that came from the assembly.
Citizens’ Assembly, 2016-2018. 99 citizens, 5 topics (abortion, ageing, climate change, fixed term parliaments, Ireland’s referendum process. 1 referendum to amendment the constitution. Oireachats Joint Committee on Climate Action, all government Climate Action Plan.
Challenges:
Recruitment and attendance: age, affluence and education correlate positively with participation.
Government responsiveness.
Ad hoc process.
Successes
Referendums as a result.
Enhanced democratic decision making.
Input & throughput legitimacy.
Wider and public knowledge and acceptance.
Cato Léonard (GlassRoots, BE) G1000 Belgian Citizens’summit
Cato Lonard was the Campaing leader of the G1000 Belgian Citizens’summit
In Elections, everybody votes, but nobody speaks. There is a lack of knowledge amongst citizens on the details.
In Polls, we ask people what they know, but not what they do not know.
Can we use another instrument — citizens’ assemblies— to listen, to learn what we do not know and to speak up? Can we organize the shouting into something productive? Can we achieve consensus through debate?
750 citizens:
Take aways:
Diversity of participants is key.
Participation charter: what will be done with the result? How will you measure success?
Let citizens and stakeholders decide on the subjects to be discussed.
Have experts to provide insight and specific information.
Be transparent on the whole process.
Digital tools are excellent to accompany the process, but cannot replace face to face confrontation between opponents.
Ostbelgien model: several citizens’ assemblies, coordinated by a citizen council, and proposals are sent to the Parliament.
Erika Widegren (Re-Imagine Europe)
ICTs have revolutionized how communications take place.
The whole political system is designed to create a divisive society. There are no incentives to create deliberation spaces or instruments. How can we address this?
Parties are trying to change values of people across the world, not only practices. And this is something that is spreading quickly due to social networking sites.
We have built a system that is giving all the attention to the ones that manage to get it, to the ones that game the system to get it, and it is not the ones that have more deep thoughts or ideas on the common good.
Discussion
Q: how does one recruit people for citizens’ assemblies? Harris: it is made by polling professionals to avoid biases. Léonard: first, you define your target, then you recruit based on demographics, and then you try and “fill in the voids” of the underepresented people, with the help of the organizations that represent them.
Q: do does one remove the incentives of polarizing, if one knows that it will give more votes? Marc Esteve: we have to avoid echo chambers, and we have to raise awareness of the existence of such echo chambers, and we do that by increasing digital and media literacy.
Q: how do you ensure that you do not include a bias when informing/educating participants in citizens’ assemblies? Harris: there always is an advisory group working with experts to make information accessible, as neutral as possible, to provide context to all statements when they are partial, etc.
Q: how do we ensure a healthy debate? Marc Esteve: deliberation requires moderation. Citizen spaces do not need to be “horses without reigns” but should have rules as we find in institutional spaces.
Notes from the conference Democracy and Media in the Digital Era, organized by the Digital Enlightenment Forum and the Delegation to the European Union of the Government of Catalonia, and held in Brussels, Belgium, on 14 November 2019. More notes on this event: digenlight2019
Anna Asimakopoulou, Member EU Parliament. Democracy and Media in the Digital Era
Disinformation has become a global-highly visible phenomenon in the digital age.
There is a need to improve detection, collaborate to eradicate it, work with the industry and raise awareness about the issue.
The European Union is putting ahead some “defensive” strategies to protect institutions and citizens from disinformation and manipulation.
But something else should be done to improve democracy in its very essence, before the damage is done or is attempted.
Awareness raising campaigns about the importance to vote in the European Parliament elections.
Online platforms should be something more than just a place where to get information. They should be agoras for debate, for deliberation.
There is an increasing number of interesting initiatives about e-democracy and online deliberation.
Discussion
Q: what is the role of digital literacy? Are citizens trained or capable enough to maintain high-level discussions about politics or policies?
Q: what happens when online discussions go wrong and boost populism?
Q: is ‘collective intelligence’ something really useful? Can it be nurtured? Can it interact from the bottom with “upper” institutions?
Anna Asimakopoulou: digital literacy is most probably a highest priority no only for online democracy, but in all areas. There is a fine line between humour and libel, but we sure can agree on what populism is and how to fight it —or, most especially, how not to legitimise it.
When people get involved, when they have the opportunity to engage, then there is a reconciliation between citizens and political institutions.
Open government data in new digital states: which libraries for which citizens?
I just published a short article on the future of libraries.
As the Information Society advances, the need of a dire transformation in what libraries do and their mission —among may other institutions— is becoming more and more urgent. My point in the article is that libraries need to transform themselves to help other institutions in their own transformation. Governments, Administrations and, all in all, all democratic institutions need to rethink themselves almost from scratch. And they will not be able to do it unless they find an active citizenry also rethinking its role as full citizens.
My line of thought, thus, in the article is how libraries can help citizens to become more active and empowered and, at their turn, these active citizens can help democratic institutions to become central in society again.
Quite often, we tend to think about citizen participation as discrete processes that are created ad hoc for a given purpose, and are finished/shut down once the purpose has been achieved.
There are, nevertheless, two big objections to this way of thinking about citizen participation:
On the one hand, it may reduce its effectiveness. Most participatory processes —if not all— are embedded in bigger decision- or policy-making initiatives. These initiatives usually require some follow-up just like monitoring and evaluation and assessment, as it is drawn in Figure 1. If citizen participation is not guaranteed to last until the real closing of the policy cycle, it may well happen that only minor goals are achieved, or that the major goals are simply not achieved.
On the other hand, it may reduce its efficiency. If we look again at Figure 1, we will see that the resources devoted to the participatory instrument itself are but a part of the total. Indeed, having a good diagnosis and creating the information materials to raise awareness about it, map the different actors that should be called to participation, measure outputs and outcomes, etc. are the lion’s share of the total efforts. But many of these efforts are done just once. Making participation structural instead of a one-time project would contribute to pay back the investments, especially when it comes to mapping actors, raise awareness and build trust. That is: the effort to institutionalise social conflict.
A first change of approach would be to take the whole value chain of citizen participation processes (Figure 2) and include in it how it can (and in our opinion should) contribute to transform the Administration. This transformation should come in three fronts:
Reflect on the procedures and internal organisation of the Administration and see where there is a room for improvement with the concurrence of citizens —an improvement which should become structural once the organisational architecture is changed.
Open the infraestructures of decision- and policy- making so that they can be appropriated by the citizens and be used by them in their own collective processes.
Map all the relevant actors, especially those actors that are more difficult to identify and/or reach because they operate in the outskirts of the system, in informal spaces and extra-institutional environments. Map them and engage them “permanently” by means of open infrastructures.
The thing is that to drive a thorough and deep change in the Administration, these three fronts are not enough. On the one hand, the impulse cannot only come from citizen participation, but as a comprehensive approach such as the one that could come from an implementation of an Open Government Department transversal all across the Administration.
On the other hand, the Administration will not be transformed unless all administrations are. This is where the idea of a citizen participation ecosystem becomes especially relevant. If we said before that participation has to become structural and move away from one-off initiatives, participation also has to become cross-cutting in all departments and at all levels of the public system.
For a transformation of the Administration where the citizen is put at the centre, and the citizen is empowered to contribute in making collective decisions, citizen participation must be capillary and pervasive:
First of all, efforts have to be put in place so that there is a coordination both “horizontally” (within the same Administration) and “vertically”, along the different levels of the Administration, from the (supra)national level to the local level.
This coordination has to be explicit, and thus be built a governance device of the whole citizen participation ecosystem.
What does this governance device coordinates? At least four different aspects:
What are the methodologies that are going to be fostered. Of course, methodologies is plural: citizen participation can be put forward by means of a good bunch of political instruments and ideological approaches. Hence, it is a good idea to speak about methodologies and about a toolbox or a toolset, instead of trying to find a one-size-fits-all kind of policy.
How are people going to receive training on these methodologies. That is, what kind of training, capacity building, communities of practice and many other instruments are going to be put in place to share and transfer knowledge, and how is going the underlying ideology to be shared or agreed among peers.
What kind of citizen participation instruments are going to embody this ideology and methodologies. We are talking about what kind of procedures and protocols, of activities, of pieces of information, of facilitation and intervention processes, etc. are going to be applied in order to make the best of the citizens’ wisdom.
Last, which technologies are going to support the aforementioned methodologies and instruments. This is especially relevant because when one enters the digital realm, technologies become new intermediaries and also new pathways through which information and communication happens at top speed, having a non-negligible augmentation and multiplier effect.
Among the necessary “accomplices” in a citizen participation ecosystem, the/a school of public administration plays a major role in standardising methodologies and making the different training instruments consistent among themselves. It also contributes to formalise tacit knowledge and encapsule it so that it is easier to transfer.
Open data —and all other open government instruments such as transparency and accountability— are crucial to feed the ecosystem. There is no significant and meaningful participation without proper data and information.
Last, all other institutions of representative democracy have to be involved in the citizen participation ecosystem. It makes poor sense to confine participation in a single department or even the whole government but without the concurrence of other institutions like parliaments, political parties, labour unions or civil society organizations.
Among these other institutions, a healthy and networked professional sector —understood in very broad terms, both for profit and non-profit— is essential to be able to reach each and every corner, especially new intermediaries in citizen engagement.
Summing up, for a strategy on citizen participation to be comprehensive and transformative at the core-level of the Administration it has to unfold the whole potential of all the pieces in the value chain of the citizen participation process, especially infrastructures, actors and spaces and all the knowledge gathered. Then, this potential has to be driven towards the Administration itself, to change its habits and its culture. To achieve this change of culture, citizen participation has to be applied at all levels and all departments in a coherent, consistent and comprehensive way, including all surrounding actors of the public system, thus conforming a whole ecosystem of citizen participation.
The shift towards a technopolitical paradigm has brought a new set of actors with a new set of spaces and instruments into the political arena.
In his book The Rise of Nerd Politics, John Postill defines a new breed of citizens that engage in politics neither by joining democratic institutions (political parties, unions, civil society organizations, etc.) nor by hacking these institutions, but by “clamping”, that is, by using a new set of skills consisting on a mix of computer science, law, arts and culture, media and journalism, and formal politics.
These citizens are a global democracy buffer that is not happy with being a “passive victim” of politics gone wrong. The produce public knowledge at the very heart of the civil society operating in the intersection of technology and politics and caring a lot about the fate of democracy. These political nerds usually work in small groups and often partner with non-nerds for their political actions establishing ‘strategic part-NERDships’. Not all of them are libertarians, but anti-authoritarian, an anti-authoritarianism that comes in different kinds and from many different backgrounds. notwithstanding, they are not cyber-utopians, but look for short-term political impact. On the other hand, they are not rooted on cyberspace, but on local communities strongly linked with other movements at the international level. Nerd politics usually operate in four different but connected fields: data activism, digital rights, social protest, and formal politics.
There have been some other authors that have identified new actors, new spaces and new instruments of political engagement. And, for better or for worse, these new actors, spaces and instruments are increasing in number and in influence. And, I would add, in general they are a positive influence: some of them might just seize the power, but most of them genuinely aim for the power to be applied upon them in a fairer way. That is, they want to improve democracy and its quality.
In my theory of change of citizen participation I included a whole section or “program” devoted to these new intermediaries, as I believe that if their contribution is good, society (and especially governments) should promote them and their activities — as they usually do with other institutionalized actors of liberal democracies.
But defining and promoting are two completely different things. To define something (or someone, or someone’s actions) you focus on the how. To promote them, you need to focus on the why, because this is what you are actually promoting: a cause — and, indirectly, its consequences.
So, what is exactly what one would like to promote by fostering new intermediaries in citizen engagement?
In my opinion, what follows is what make new intermediaries interesting and, thus, worth promoting:
They work with informal and non-formal instruments and spaces. That is, they work extra-institutionally, meaning that they are not institutionalized (e.g. a political party) and most of the times they do not work or even circumvent institutions in their activities.
They work for the common good. That is, they pursue the benefit of the whole community, not individual benefit — not to speak about individual profit. Obvious of this may sound, it leaves aside some lobbies that work for a specific collective, which is not the whole society. E.g. working for cleaner air is not the same as working for bike riders, even if the latter still is a non-profit aspiration. So, we are looking for people with the whole society in their minds.
They increase or improve the commons. This is a precision of the former statement. There are many ways to work for the common good, as advocacy, for instance. But in my opinion one of the main strengths — and differences from former political approaches — of technopolitics is that it creates democratic infrastructure. Of course, infrastructure does not necessarily means a new parliament or a new civic equipment. Citizen democratic infraestructures, in a broad sense, can of course be spaces (physical or virtual) but other devices that can be used and appropriated by citizens to engage politically — with institutions or among themselves: digital platforms and software for deliberation and voting, handbooks and guides, toolkits and procedures… but also other knowledge-intensive devices such as facilitation services, open data, training, visibility or public diffusion, conceptual frameworks, de facto standards and protocols, etc.
They work for the improvement of governance. That is, the purpose of these infrastructures is specifically to better rule our collective goals, including a better definition of needs or diagnosis, a better deliberation for an improvement of the political instruments, more inclusive policies by not leaving any actor out, better assessment of impacts and evaluation of outcomes.
Summing up, what we are looking to promote is actors that fly under the radar of institutions (and are, thus, invisible to them), but that pursue they very same goals (the benefit of the whole society), and do it creating things (for the commons) that any citizen can use to improve the way we make collective decisions (governance).
I think this is an operational and functional approach to the new phenomenon of intermediaries and how to publicly contribute to unfold their potential to collectively leverage their work.
