One of the conceptual issues I face is tying down the precise characteristics of these participatory initiatives as they are all so different and are inevitably implemented in different ways.
For a broad typology I draw on Graham Smith’s excellent Power Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World – a report he produced for the Power Inquiry. You can download it here.
Almost anything that starts with Graham Smith’s work is on the right track. Beyond the Ballot is great reading. Read the full post at the Localopolis Blog.
In On Revolution and other writings, Arendt advocates the form of political organization known as the council system. This aspect of her thought has been sharply criticized or — more often — simply ignored. How, both sympathizers and detractors wonder, could Arendt in all earnest propose the council system as an alternative to parliamentary democracy? The aim of the present paper is to defend Arendt’s position. I argue that her enthusiasm for the council system is an integral element of her thought and defend it against the criticisms it has provoked. Furthermore, I highlight the relevance of her arguments for the current debate about the idea of deliberative democracy. Her thesis that (top-down) party politics and (bottom-up) deliberative politics are antithetical and hence cannot coexist poses a serious challenge to the idea that parliamentary democracy can be made more deliberative while leaving its basic framework intact.
Totschnig, Wolfhart, How to Reconcile Participation and Representation: A Defense of Arendt’s Argument for the Council System (2012). APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2105081
Whereas studies of electoral participation abound, little attention has been paid to non-electoral and non-contentious participation. Latin American countries have recently promoted participatory institutions and become ideal contexts to probe participation questions. Since the mid 1990s, Bolivia has been at the forefront of institutional creation for participation. We analyze the determinants of local community participation through individual survey data spanning from 1998 to 2010. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we ask whether Bolivia’s new participatory regime reproduces the socioeconomic biases prevalent in developed societies. We find no evidence of a high social-class bias in Bolivia’s participatory regime. Second, we analyze whether Bolivia’s left turn has produced changes in the levels or predictors of participation, as expected in the “left turn” literature. Contrary to expectations, the levels of local community participation have not changed, albeit the participants are slightly younger, more indigenous, and rural than before the left turn.
Davies, Emmerich and Falleti, Tulia, Who Participates? Local Community Participation and the Left Turn in Bolivia (2012). APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2104703
(NB: overly descriptive post with links to initiatives websites / case studies)
Participatory budgeting has been a source of innovation in itself with regards to the use of technologies.
Over two decades ago the city of Porto Alegre started to use the Internet as a means to facilitate citizen monitoring of its budget execution. In 1997, the medium-sized city of Ipatinga [pdf] started to provide online geo-referenced information about its budgetary allocation and status of public works. Noteworthy, both initiatives anticipated practices that years later would become so popular: the use of Internet to foster budget transparency and the mapping of government spending.
In 2001 the use of ICT in participatory budgeting towards increasing citizen participation is put forward, with the municipalities of Ipatinga and Porto Alegre enabling their citizens to submit their demands for budget allocation via the Internet. Although embryonic, these initiatives can be situated at the origin of an entire new field of ICT mediated participation. Since then, the use of ICT to facilitate participatory budgeting processes has gone beyond the Brazilian context, offering a wealth of innovative practices to be explored.
In Europe, for instance, the issue has gained significant traction in the recent years. In Germany, since 2005 Berlin-Lichtenberg combines face-to-face citizen assemblies with online participation. An online platform enables citizens to discuss and elaborate budgetary proposals to, subsequently, prioritize them. In 2008 the city of Freiburg combined online deliberation with the use of a budget simulator, enabling citizens to better assess the impacts of their choices. The results of this deliberative process were then collaboratively aggregated in a wiki and edited by the participants of the process themselves. Similar initiatives have been also conducted in the cities of Bergheim, Cologne, Hamburg and Leipzig.
In Italy, developing upon the combination of online and offline methods adopted earlier on in Brazil, in 2006 the city of Modena allowed its citizens to send by e-mail proposals to be discussed by the PB assemblies. Modena citizens could also watch live video streaming of the PB meetings and be updated about the process via SMS. The use of SMS as a means to reach a broader and younger audience, pioneered by the Brazilian city of Ipatinga in 2004, has also been identified in other Italian PB processes, such as those of Rome, Bergamo and Reggio Emilia. The ability to vote via the Internet for the public works in Italy can be illustrated by the experience of the cities of Vimercate and Parma. For example, through the Parmesan website votes can be case once ID number is provided, allowing the system to identify the eligible participants, that is, Parma residents. Finally, the website provides geo-referenced information, allowing citizens to visualize the location of the projects and to access further information about each of them.
In Spain, I have identified the use of the Internet to support citizens’ participation in the cities of Albacete, Cordoba, Getafe, Jun, Petrer, Malaga and Jerez. For instance, in the city of Getafe in 2008, in one of the districts of the city, citizens were allowed to watch live video streaming of the PB meeting and to cast their vote online. Through the Getafe’s PB website citizens are able to submit individually or collectively proposals for the PB process. In the municipality of Malaga citizens can submit proposals online and subscribe to SMS updates that inform them on the status of public works selected in the. In Lisbon, Portugal, through the Internet citizens can submit proposals for public works online. Once the municipal services analyze the technical feasibility of the public works and estimate their costs, eligible public works are resubmitted online to be voted for by the public.
The use of ICT in PB processes has not been confined to Brazil and Europe however. In Africa, more precisely in the South-Kivu region in the Democratic Republic of Congo, mobile phones have been used to mobilize citizens to attend PB meetings, to vote on budgetary priorities and to update citizens on the status of public works selected.
The website of the municipality of Miraflores, Peru, apart from providing citizens with in-depth information about the process (e.g. training modules, meeting minutes), also enables citizen to remotely cast their votes for the prioritization of public works.
In the district of Buk-Gu, Korea, citizens provide feedback on the PB process through the Internet since 2004. In 2006, the district launched the “e-Budget Portal”, to provide citizens with detailed budget information and enabling enhanced interactivity amongst the participants in the process.
In Pune, India, citizens submit their priorities for the allocation of budget through the e-Budgeting application, available on the municipality’s website. In Solo, Indonesia, with the support of geographic information systems, an online platform provides residents with interactive and downloadable maps for each of the neighborhoods in the city. The resulting maps and visualizations, geo-referencing and highlighting relevant issues to the population (e.g. health, poverty), are printed and used to inform the PB’s deliberative process.
Needless to say, the cases described above vary amongst themselves in terms of objectives, impacts, prospects and limits. Nevertheless, they are illustrative of the richness of initiatives that are currently taking place in which ICTs are used to support citizens’ participation in the budget allocation process. You can find more about it here.
This paper [pdf] addresses the impact new media tools have on different segments of the electoral process in the United States. Specifically, it looks at the impact new media has by providing information, influencing the news cycle and setting agendas, shaping public opinion, providing more fundraising opportunities, increasing political participation and youth voter turnout, and changing election results. This paper does so by drawing on systematic studies, data from the Pew Research Center, and case studies, specifically that of the 2008 Presidential Election. This analysis is unique in that it uses very current information, focusing on the 2008 election, as this was the first election in which new media was fully integrated into campaign strategies. It is also unique in that it analyzes several types of new media including social networks, blogging, campaign websites, and Internet fundraising. These findings suggest that new media does influence and shape the course of the electoral process in the United States through the six aspects of the electoral process presented in this paper.
Aronson, Elise D. (2012) “Cyber-Politics: How New Media has Revolutionized Electoral Politics in the United States,” Colgate Academic Review: Vol. 9, Article 7.
Participation is purposeful; it is intended to make a difference – to the participant, or to the world around them. People who take part in voluntary and community action are looking to fulfill this need. But local democracy has lost its sense of purpose. Politicians are seen as self-serving, local elections written off as a foregone conclusion and engagement is considered a cynical exercise in legitimising decisions already made.
It would be nice to think that social media could solve this problem, but I’m far from convinced. I do not dispute that it can be an excellent tool for engaging with certain groups, and making the business of government more open and transparent. But when people do not trust the messenger or the message, changing the medium is unlikely to make much difference.
Great discussion at the Guardian. Couldn’t agree more with the quote above.
Would sortition rule out government by the “best”? This question, too, can scarcely be considered with a straight face. We all know what Mark Twain said about Congressmen, and matters have not notably improved since. Besides, as Callenbach and Phillips write, “pure intelligence — if there is such a thing — is certainly not directly related to political wisdom. The only reasonable assumption is that both are broadly distributed through the population.
Great text by George Scialabba at the LA Review of Books. Personally, I’m a strong sympathiser of government by lot.
SurveyMonkey is inviting survey respondents to help predict the results of the next presidential elections in the US. Looks like an oversimplified version of prediction markets (pdf) for elections. For those who don’t know it, Marquis de Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, over 200 years old, was the starting point for all of this.
For those interested in the use of ICT tools in budget monitoring (a component of the PB process) I would like to draw your attention to the United Nations e-Government Survey document, which has just been released: “Leveraging e-Government at a Time of Financial and Economic Crisis”
In chapter 1 “Stimulus Funds, Transparency and Trust”, of which I am the author, I try to present some cases and analysis of ICT usage in the allocation of crisis response funds around the world during the economic downturn.
Chapter 1: Stimulus funds, transparency and public trust 9
1.1 Crisis response websites 10
1.2 From transparency to participation 14
1.3 Data access and civil society 16
1.4 Conclusions 19
I also make a quick mention to some interesting e-PB initiatives.
DemocracySpot 