A few years ago, Tom Steinberg and I discussed the potential risks posed by AI bots in influencing citizen engagement processes and manipulating public consultations. With the rapid advancement of AI technology, these risks have only intensified. This escalating concern has even elicited an official response from the White House.
A recent executive order has tasked the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at the White House with considering the implementation of guidance or tools to address mass comments, computer-generated remarks, and falsely attributed comments. This directive comes in response to growing concerns about the impact of AI on the regulatory process, including the potential for generative chatbots to lead mass campaigns or flood the federal agency rule-making process with spam comments.
The threat of manipulation becomes even more pronounced when content generated by bots is viewed by policymakers as being on par with human-created content. There’s evidence to suggest that this may be already occurring in certain scenarios. For example, a recent experiment was designed to measure the impact of language models on effective communication with members of Congress. The goal was to determine if these models could divert legislative attention by generating a constant stream of unique emails directed at congressional members. Both human writers and GPT-3 were employed in the study. Emails were randomly sent to over 7,000 state representatives throughout the country, after which response rates were compared. The results showed a mere 2% difference in response rates, and for some of the policy topics studied, the response rates remained consistent.
Now, the real trouble begins when governments jump on the bot bandwagon and start using their own bots to respond, and we, the humans, are left out of the conversation entirely. It’s like being the third wheel on a digital date that we didn’t even know was happening. That’s a gloomy scenario.
For proponents of deliberative democracy, the last couple of years could not have been better. Propelled by the recent diffusion of citizens’ assemblies, deliberative democracy has definitely gained popularity beyond small circles of scholars and advocates. From CNN to the New York Times, the Hindustan Times (India), Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), and Expresso (Portugal), it is now almost difficult to keep up with all the interest in democratic models that promote the random selection of participants who engage in informed deliberation. A new “deliberative wave” is definitely here.
But with popularity comes scrutiny. And whether the deliberative wave will power new energy or crash onto the beach, is an open question. As is the case with any democratic innovation (institutions designed to improve or deepen our existing democratic systems), critically examining assumptions is what allows for management of expectations and, most importantly, gradual improvements.
Proponents of citizens’ assemblies put representativeness at the core of their definition. In fact, it is one of their main selling points. For example, a comprehensive report highlights that an advantage of citizens’ assemblies, compared to other mechanisms of participatory democracy, is their typical combination of random selection and stratification to form a public body that is “representative of the public.” This general argument resonates with the media and the wider public. A recent illustration is an article by The Guardian, which depicts citizens’ assemblies as “a group of people who are randomly selected and reflect the demographics of the population as a whole”
It should be noted that claims of representativeness vary in their assertiveness. For instance, some may refer to citizens’ assemblies as “representative deliberative democracy,” while others may use more cautious language, referring to assemblies’ participants as being “broadly representative” of the population (e.g. by gender, age, education, attitudes). This variation in terms used to describe representativeness should prompt an attentive observer to ask basic questions such as: “Are existing practices of deliberative democracy representative?” “If they are ‘broadly’ representative, how representative are they?” “What criteria, if any, are used to assess whether a deliberative democracy practice is more or less representative of the population?” “Can their representativeness be improved, and if so, how?” These are basic questions that, surprisingly, have been given little attention in recent debates surrounding deliberative democracy. The purpose of this article is to bring attention to these basic questions and to provide initial answers and potential avenues for future research and practice.
Citizens Assemblies and three challenges of random sampling
Before discussing the subject of representativeness, it is important to provide some conceptual clarity. From an academic perspective, citizens’ assemblies are a variant of what political scientists normally refer to as “mini-publics.” These are processes in which participants: 1) are randomly selected (often combined with some form of stratification), 2) participate in informed deliberation on a specific topic, and 3) reach a public judgment and provide recommendations on that topic. Thus, in this text, mini-publics serves as a general term for a variety of practices such as consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, planning cells, and citizens’ assemblies themselves.
In this discussion, we will focus on what we consider to be the three main challenges of random sampling. First, we will examine the issue of sample size and the limitations of stratification in addressing this challenge. Second, we will focus on sampling error, which is the error that occurs when observing a sample rather than the entire population. Third, we will examine the issue of non-response, and how the typically small sample size of citizens’ assemblies exacerbates this problem. We conclude by offering alternatives to approach the trade-offs associated with mini-publics’ representativeness dilemma.
Minimal sample size, and why stratification does not help reducing sample size requirements in complex populations
Most mini-publics that we know of have a sample size of around 70 participants or less, with a few cases having more than 200 participants. However, even with a sample size of 200 people, representing a population accurately is quite difficult. This may be the reason why political scientist Robert Dahl, who first proposed the use of mini-publics over three decades ago, suggested a sample size of 1000 participants. This is also the reason why most surveys that attempt to represent a complex national population have a sample size of over 1000 people.
To understand why representing a population accurately is difficult, consider that a sample size of approximately 370 individuals is enough to estimate a parameter of a population of 20,000 with a 5% error margin and 95% confidence level (for example, estimating the proportion of the population that answers “yes” to a question). However, if the desired error margin is reduced to 2%, the sample size increases to over 2,000, and for a more realistic population of over 1 million, a sample size of over 16,000 is required to achieve a 1% error margin with 99% confidence. Although the size of the sample required to estimate simple parameters in surveys does not increase significantly with the size of the population, it still increases beyond the sample sizes currently used in most mini-publics. Sample size calculators are available online to demonstrate these examples without requiring any statistical knowledge.
Stratification is a strategy that can help reduce the error margin and achieve better precision with a fixed sample size. However, stratification alone cannot justify the very small sample sizes that are currently used in most mini-publics (70 or less).
To understand why, let’s consider that we want to create a sample that represents the five important strata of the population and includes all their intersections, such as ethnicity, age, income, geographical location, and gender. For simplicity, let’s assume that the first four categories have five equal groups in society, and gender is composed of two equal groups. The minimal sample required to include the intersections of all the strata and represent this population is equal to 5^4×2=1250. Note that we have maintained the somewhat unlikely assumption that all categories have equal size. If one stratum, such as ethnicity, includes a minority that is 1/10 of the population, then our multiplier would be 10 instead of 5, requiring a sample size of 5^3x10x2=2500.
The latter is independent of the number of categories within the strata, so even if the strata have only two categories, one comprising 90% (9/10) of the population and one comprising 10% (1/10) of the population, the multiplier would still be 10. When we want to represent a minority of 1% (1/100) of the population, the multiplier becomes 100. Note that this minimal sample size would include the intersection of all the strata in such a population, but such a small sample will not be representative of each stratum. To achieve stratum-level representation, we need to increase the number of people for each stratum following the same mathematical rules we used for simple sampling, as described at the beginning of this section, generating a required sample size in the order of hundreds of thousand of people (in our example above 370×2500=925000).
This is without even entering into the discussion of what should be the ideal set of strata to be used in order to achieve legitimacy. Should we also include attitudes such as liberal vs conservative? Opinions on the topic of the assembly? Metrics of type of personality? Education? Income? Previous level of engagement in politics? In sum, the more complex the population is, the larger the sample required to represent it.
Sampling error due to a lack of a clear population list
When evaluating sampling methods, it is important to consider that creating a random sample of a population requires a starting population to draw from. In some fields, the total population is well-defined and data is readily available (e.g. students in a school, members of parliament), but in other cases such as a city or country, it becomes more complicated.
The literature on surveys contains multiple publications on sampling issues, but for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that without a police state or similar means of collecting an unprecedented amount of information on citizens, creating a complete list of people in a country to draw our sample from is impossible. All existing lists (e.g. electoral lists, telephone lists, addresses, social security numbers) are incomplete and biased.
This is why survey companies charge significant amounts of money to allow customers to use their model of the population, which is a combination of multiple subsamples that have been optimized over time to answer specific questions. For example, a survey company that specializes in election forecasting will have a sampling model optimized to minimize errors in estimating parameters of the population that might be relevant for electoral studies, while a company that specializes in retail marketing will have a model optimized to minimize forecasting errors in predicting sales of different types of goods. Each model will draw from different samples, applying different weights according to complex algorithms that are optimized against past performance. However, each model will still be an imperfect representation of the population.
Therefore, even the best possible sampling method will have an inherent error. It is difficult, if not impossible, to perfectly capture the entire population, so our samples will be drawn from a subpopulation that carries biases. This problem is further accentuated for low-cost mini-publics that cannot afford expensive survey companies or do not have access to large public lists like electoral or census lists. These mini-publics may have a very narrow and biased initial subpopulation, such as only targeting members of an online community, which brings its own set of biases.
Non-response
A third factor, well-known among practitioners and community organizers, is the fact that receiving an invitation to participate does not mean a person will take part in the process. Thus, any invitation procedure has issues of non-participation. This is probably the most obvious factor that prevents one from creating representative samples of the population. In mini-publics with large samples of participants, such as Citizens’ Assemblies, the conversion rate is often quite low, sometimes less than 10%. By conversion rate, we mean the percentage of the people contacted that say that they are willing to participate and enter the recruitment pool. Simpler mini-publics of shorter duration (e.g. one weekend) often achieve higher engagement. A dataset on conversion rates of mini-publics does not exist, but our own experience in organizing Citizens Assemblies, Deliberative Polls, and clones tell us that it is possible to achieve more than 20% conversion when the topic is very controversial. For example, in the UK’s Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit in 2017, 1,155 people agreed to enter the recruitment pool out of the 5,000 contacted, generating a conversion rate of 23.1%, as illustrated below.[1]
Figure 1: Contact and recruitment numbers UK’s Citizens Assembly on Brexit (Renwick et al. 2017)
We do not pretend to know all the existing cases, and so this data should be taken with caution. Maybe there have been cases with 80% conversion, given it is possible to achieve such rates in surveys. But even in such hypothetical best practices, we would have failed to engage 20% of the population. More realistically, with 10 to 30% engagement, we are just engaging a very narrow subset of the population.
Frequent asked questions, and why we should not abandon sortition
It is clear from the points above that the assertion that the current generation of relatively small mini-publics is representative of the population from which it is drawn is questionable. Not surprisingly, the fact that participants of mini-publics differ from the population they are supposed to represent has already been documented over a decade ago.[2] However, in our experience, when confronted with these facts, practitioners and advocates of mini-publics often raise various questions. Below, we address five frequently asked questions and provide answers for them.
“But people use random sampling for surveys and then claim that the results are representative, what is the difference for mini-publics?”
The first difference we already discussed between surveys and mini-publics is that surveys that aim to represent a large population use larger samples.
The second difference, less obvious, is that a mini-public is not a system that aggregates fixed opinions. Rather, one of the core principles of mini-publics is that participants deliberate and their opinions may change as a result of the group process and composition. Our sampling procedures, however, are based on the task of estimating population parameters, not generating input for legitimate decision making. While a 5% error margin with 95% confidence level may be acceptable in a survey investigating the proportion of people who prefer one policy over another, this same measure cannot be applied to a mini-public because participants may change their opinions through the deliberation process. A mini-public is not an estimate derived from a simple mathematical formula, but rather a complex process of group deliberation that may transform input preferences into output preferences and potentially lead to important decisions. Christina Lafont has used a similar argument to criticize even an ideal sample that achieves perfect input representativeness.[3]
“But we use random assignment for experiments and then claim that the results are representative, what is the difference for mini-publics?”
Mini-publics can be thought of as experiments, similar to clinical trials testing the impact of a vaccine. This approach allows us to evaluate the impact of a mini-public on a subset of the population, providing insight into what would happen if a similar subset of the population were to deliberate. Continuing this metaphor, if the mini-public participants co-design a new policy solution and support its implementation, any similar subsets of the population going through an identical mini-public process should generate a similar output.
However, clinical trials require that the vaccine and a placebo be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. This approach is only valid if the participants are drawn from a representative sample and cannot self-select into each experimental arm.
Unfortunately, few mini-publics compare the decisions made by members to those who were not selected, and this is not considered a key element for claiming representativeness or legitimacy. Furthermore, while random assignment of treatment and control is crucial for internal validity, it does not guarantee external validity. That is, the results may not be representative of the larger population, and the estimate of the treatment effect only applies to the specific sample used in the experiment.
While the metaphor of the experiment as a model to interpret mini-publics is preferable to the metaphor of the survey, it does not solve the issue of working with non-representative samples in practice. Therefore, we must continue to explore ways to improve the representativeness of mini-publics and take into account the limitations of the experimental metaphor when designing and interpreting their results.
“Ok, mini-publics may not be perfect, but are they not clearly better than other mechanisms?”
Thus far, we have provided evidence that the claim of mini-publics as representative of the population is problematic. But what about more cautious claims, such as mini-publics being more inclusive than other participatory processes (e.g., participatory budgeting, e-petitions) that do not employ randomization? Many would agree that traditional forms of consultation tend to attract “usual suspects” – citizens who have a higher interest in politics, more spare time, higher education, enjoy talking in public, and sometimes enjoy any opportunity to criticize. In the US, for instance, these citizens are often older white males, or as put by a practitioner once, “the male, pale and stale.” A typical mini-public instead manages to engage a more diverse set of participants than traditional consultations. While this is an obvious reality, the engagement strategies of mini-publics compared to traditional consultations based on self-selection have very different levels of sophistication and costs. Mini-publics tend to invest more resources in engagement, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, and thus we cannot exclude that existing results in terms of inclusion are purely due to better outreach techniques, such as mass recruitment campaigns and stipends for the participants.
Therefore, it is not fair to compare traditional consultations to mini-publics. As it is not fair to compare mini-publics that are not specifically designed to include marginalized populations to open-to-all processes that are specifically designed for this purpose. The classic critique of feminist, intersectional and social movement scholars that mini-publics design does not consider existing inequalities, and thus is inferior to dedicated processes of minority engagement is valid in that case. This is because the amount dedicated to engagement is positively correlated with inclusion. For instance, processes specifically designed for immigrants and native populations will have more inclusive results than a general random selection strategy that does not have specific quotas for these groups and engagement strategies for them.
We talk past one another when we try to rank processes with respect to their supposed inclusion performance without considering the impact of the resources dedicated to engagement or their intended effects (e.g. redistribution, collective action).
It is also difficult to determine which approach is more inclusive without a significant amount of research comparing different participatory methods with similar outreach and resources. As far as we know, the only study that compares two similar processes – one using random engagement and the other using an open-to-all invitation – found little difference in inclusiveness.[4] It also highlighted the importance of other factors such as the design of the process, potential political impact, and the topic of discussion. Many practitioners do not take these factors into account, and instead focus solely on recruitment strategies. While one study is not enough to make a conclusive judgment, it does suggest that the assumption that mini-publics using randomly selected participants are automatically more inclusive than open-to-all processes is problematic.
“But what about the ergonomics of the process and deliberative quality? Small mini-publics are undeniably superior to large open-to-all meetings.”
One of the frequently advertised advantages of small mini-publics is their capacity to support high-quality deliberation and include all members of the sample in the discussion. This is a very clear advantage; however, it has nothing to do with random sampling. It is not difficult to imagine a system in which an open-to-all meeting is called and then such a meeting selects a smaller number of representatives that will proceed to discuss using high-quality deliberative procedures. The selection rule could include quotas so that the selected members respect criteria of diversity of interest (even though, as we argued before, that would not be representative of the entire group). The ergonomics and inclusion advantages are purely linked with the size of the assembly and the process used to support deliberation.
“So, are you saying we should abandon sortition?”
We hope that it is now clearer why we contend that it is conceptually erroneous to defend the application of sortition in mini-publics based on their statistical representation of the population. So, should sortition be abandoned? Our position is that it should not, and for one less obvious and counterintuitive argument in favor of random sampling: it offers a fair way to exclude certain groups from the mini-public. This is particularly so because, in certain cases, participatory mechanisms based on self-selection may be captured by organized minorities to the detriment of disengaged majorities.
Consider, for instance, one of President Obama’s first attempts to engage citizens at large-scale, the White House’s online town-hall. Through a platform named “open for questions,” citizens were able to submit questions to Obama and vote for which questions they would like to be answered by him. Over 92,000 people posted questions, and about 3.6 million votes were cast for and against those questions. Under the section “budget” of the questions, seven of the ten most popular queries were about legalizing marijuana, many of which were about taxing it. The popularity of this issue was attributed to a campaign led by NORML, an organization advocating for pot legalization. While the cause and ideas may be laudable, it is fair to assume that this was hardly the biggest budgetary concern of Americans in the aftermath of an economic downturn.
(Picture by Pete Souza, Wikimedia Commons)
In a case like the White House’s town-hall, the randomization of people to participate would be a fair and effective way to avoid the capture of the dialogue by organized groups. Randomization does not completely exclude the possibility of capture of a deliberative space, but it does increase the costs of doing so. The probability that members of an organized minority are randomly sampled to participate in a mini-public is minor, therefore the odds of their presence in the mini-public will be minor. Thus, even if we had a technological solution capable of organizing large-scale deliberation in the millions, a randomization strategy could still be an effective means to protect deliberation from the capture by organized minorities. A legitimate method of exclusion will remain an asset – at least until we have another legitimate way to mitigate the ability of small, organized minorities to bias deliberation.
The way forward for mini-publics: go big or go home?
There is clearly a case for increasing the size of mini-publics to improve their ability to represent the population. But there is also a trade-off between the size of the assembly and the cost required to sustain high-quality deliberation. With sizes approaching 1000 people, hundreds of moderators will be required and much of the exchange of information will occur not through synchronous exchanges in small groups, but through asynchronous transmission mechanisms across the groups. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it will have the typical limitations of any type of aggregation mechanism that requires participant attention and effort. For example, in an ideation process with 100 groups of 10 people each, where each group proposes one idea and then discusses all other ideas, each group would have to discuss 100 ideas. This is a very intense task. However, there could be filtering mechanisms that require subgroups to eliminate non-interesting ideas, and other solutions designed to reduce the amount of effort required by participants.
All else being equal, as the size of the assembly grows, the logistical complexity and associated costs increases. At the same time, the ability to analyze and integrate all the information generated by participants diminishes. The question of whether established technologies like argument mapping, or even emerging artificial intelligence could help overcome the challenges associated with mass deliberation is an empirical one – but it’s certainly an avenue worth exploring through experiments and research. Recent designs of permanent mini-publics such as the one adopted in Belgium (Ostbelgien, Brussels) and Italy (Milan) that resample a small new group of participants every year could attempt to include over time a sufficiently large sample of the population to achieve a good level of representation, at least for some strata of the population, and as long as systematic sampling errors are corrected, and obvious caveats in terms of representativeness are clearly communicated.
Another approach is to abandon the idea of achieving representativeness and instead target specific problems of inclusion. This is a small change in the current approach to mini-publics, but in our opinion, it will generate significant returns in terms of long-term legitimacy. Instead of justifying a mini-public through a blanket claim of representation, the justification in this model would emerge from a specific failure in inclusion. For example, imagine that neighborhood-level urban planning meetings in a city consistently fail to involve renters and disproportionately engage developers and business owners. In such a scenario, a stratified random sample approach that reserves quotas for renters and includes specific incentives to attract them, and not the other types of participants, would be a fair strategy to prevent domination. However, note that this approach is only feasible after a clear inclusion failure has been detected.
In conclusion, from a democratic innovations’ perspective, there seems to be two productive directions for mini-publics: increasing their size or focusing on addressing failures of inclusiveness. Expanding the size of assemblies involves technical challenges and increased costs, but in certain cases it might be worth the effort. Addressing specific cases of exclusion, such as domination by organized minorities, may be a more practical and scalable approach. This second approach might not seem very appealing at first. But one should not be discouraged by our unglamorous example of fixing urban planning meetings. In fact, this approach is particularly attractive given that inclusion failures can be found across multiple spaces meant to be democratic – from neighborhood meetings to parliaments around the globe.
For mini-public practitioners and advocates like ourselves, this should come as a comfort: there’s no shortage of work to be done. But we might be more successful if, in the meantime, we shift the focus away from the representativeness claim.
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We would like to express our gratitude to Amy Chamberlain, Andrea Felicetti, Luke Jordan, Jon Mellon, Martina Patone, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Hollie Russon Gilman, Tom Steinberg, and Anthony Zacharewski for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this post.
[1] Renwick, A., Allan, S., Jennings, W., McKee, R., Russell, M. and Smith, G., 2017. A Considered Public Voice on Brexit: The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit.
[2] Goidel, R., Freeman, C., Procopio, S., & Zewe, C. (2008). Who participates in the ‘public square’ and does it matter? Public Opinion Quarterly, 72, 792- 803. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfn043
[3] Lafont, C., 2015. Deliberation, participation, and democratic legitimacy: Should deliberative mini‐publics shape public policy?. Journal of political philosophy, 23(1), pp.40-63.
[4] Griffin J. & Abdel-Monem T. & Tomkins A. & Richardson A. & Jorgensen S., (2015) “Understanding Participant Representativeness in Deliberative Events: A Case Study Comparing Probability and Non-Probability Recruitment Strategies”, Journal of Public Deliberation 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.221
Open government’s uncertain effects and the Biden opportunity: what now?
A review of 10 years of open government research reveals: 1) “a transparency-driven focus”, 2) “methodological concerns”, and 3) [maybe not surprising] “the lack of empirical evidence regarding the effects of open government”. My take on this is that these findings are, somewhat, self-reinforcing.
First, the early focus on transparency by open government advocates, while ignoring the conditions under which transparency could lead to public goods, should be, in part, to blame. This is even more so if open government interventions insist on tactical, instead of strategicapproaches to accountability. Second, the fact that many of those engaging in open government efforts do not take into account the existing evidence doesn’t help in terms of designing appropriate reforms, nor in terms of calibrating expectations. Proof of this is the recurrent and mostly unsubstantiated spiel that “transparency leads to trust”, voiced by individuals and organizations who should have known better. Third, should there be any effects of open government reforms, these are hard to verify in a credible manner given that evaluations often suffer from methodological weaknesses, as indicated by the paper.
Finally, open government’s semantic extravaganza makes building critical mass all the more difficult. For example, I have my doubts over whether the paper would reach similar conclusions should it have expanded the review to open government practices that, in the literature, are not normally labeled as open government. This would be the case, for instance, of participatory budgeting (which has shown to improve service delivery and increase tax revenues), or strategic approaches to social accountability that present substantial results in terms of development outcomes.
In any case, the research findings are still troubling. The election of President Biden gives some extra oxygen to the open government agenda, and that is great news. But in a context where autocratization turns viral, making a dent in how governments operate will take less policy-based evidence searching and more evidence-based strategizing. That involves leveraging the existing evidence when it is available, and when it is not, the standard path applies: more research is needed.
Open Government Partnership and Justice
On another note, Joe Foti, from the Open Government Partnership (OGP), writes on the need to engage more lawyers, judges and advocates in order to increase the number of accountability-focused OGP commitments. I particularly like Joe’s ideas on bringing these actors together to identify where OGP commitments could be stronger, and how. This resonates with a number of cases I’ve come across in the past where the judiciary played a key role in ensuring that citizens’ voice also had teeth.
I also share Joe’s enthusiasm for the potential of a new generation of commitments that put forward initiatives such as specialized anti-corruption courts and anti-SLAPP provisions. Having said this, the judiciary itself needs to be open, independent and capable. In most countries that I’ve worked in, a good part of open government reforms fail precisely because of a dysfunctional judiciary system.
Diversity, collective intelligence and deliberative democracy
Part of the justification for models of deliberative democracy is their epistemic quality, that is, large and diverse crowds are smarter than the (elected or selected) few. A good part of this argument finds its empirical basis in the fantastic work by Scott Page.
But that’s not all. We know, for instance, that gender diversity on corporate boards improves firms’ performance, ethnic diversity produces more impactful scientific research, diverse groups are better at solving crimes, popular juries are less biased than professional judges, and politically diverse editorial teams produce higher-quality Wikipedia articles. Diversity also helps to explain classical Athens’ striking superiority vis-à-vis other city-states of its time, due to the capacity of its democratic system to leverage the dispersed knowledge of its citizens through sortition.
Now, a Nature article, “Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features”, presents new evidence of the power of diversity in problem-solving tasks. In the paper, the authors examine the patterns of group success in Escape The Room, an adventure game in which a group attempts to escape a maze by collectively solving a series of puzzles. The authors find that groups that are larger, older and more gender diverse are significantly more likely to escape. But there’s an exception to that: more age diverse groups are less likely to escape. Intriguing isn’t it?
Deliberative processes online: rough review of the evidence
As the pandemic pushes more deliberative exercises online, researchers and practitioners start to take more seriously the question of how effective online deliberation can be when compared to in-person processes. Surprisingly, there are very few empirical studies comparing the two methods.
But a quick run through the literature offers some interesting insights. For instance, an online 2004 deliberative poll on U.S. foreign policy, and a traditional face-to-face deliberative poll conducted in parallel, presented remarkably similar results. A 2007 experiment comparing online and face-to-face deliberation found that both approaches can increase participants’ issue knowledge, political efficacy, and willingness to participate in politics. A similar comparison from 2009 looking at deliberation over the construction of a power plant in Finland found considerable resemblance in the outcomes of online and face-to-face processes. A study published in 2012 on waste treatment in France found that, compared to the offline process, online deliberation was more likely to: i) increase women’s interventions, ii) promote the justification or arguments, and iii) be oriented towards the common good (although in this case the processes were not similar in design).
The external validity of these findings, however encouraging they may be, remains an empirical question. Particularly given that since these studies were conducted the technology used to support deliberations has in many cases changed (e.g. from written to “zoomified” deliberations). Anyhow, kudos should go to the researchers who started engaging with the subject well over a decade ago: if that work was a niche subject then, their importance now is blatantly obvious.
(BTW, on a related issue, here’s a fascinating 2021 experiment examining whether online juries can make consistent, repeatable decisions: interestingly, deliberating groups are much more consistent than non-deliberating groups)
Fixing the Internet?
Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev published a great article in The Atlantic on the challenges to democracy by an Internet model that fuels disinformation and polarization, presenting alternative paths to address this. I was thankful for the opportunity to make a modest contribution to such a nice piece.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the effects of the Internet in politics. For instance, a new study in the American Political Science Review finds that radical right parties benefit more than any other parties from malicious bots on social media.
Open democracy
2021 continues to be a good year for the proponents of deliberative democracy, with growing coverage of the subject in the mainstream media, in part fueled by the recent launch of Helène Landemore’s great book “Open Democracy.” Looking for something to listen to? Look no further and listen to this interview by Ezra Klein with Helène.
A dialogue among giants
The recording of the roundtable Contours of Participatory Democracy in the 21st Century is now available. The conversation between Jane Mansbridge, Mark Warren and Cristina Lafont can be found here.
Democracy and design thinking
Speaking of giants, the new book by Michael Saward “Democratic Design”, is finally out. I’m a big fan of Michael’s work, so my recommendation may be biased. In this new book Michael brings design thinking together with democratic theory and practice. If the design of democratic institutions is one of your topics, you should definitely check it out!
Civic Tech
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to deliver a lecture at the Center for Collective Learning – Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute. My presentation, Civic Technologies: Past, Present and Future, can be found here.
Scholar articles:
And finally, for those who really want to geek-out, a list of 15 academic articles I enjoyed reading:
Modern Grantmaking: That’s the title of a new book by Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg. I had the privilege of reading snippets of this, and I can already recommend it not only to those working with grantmaking, but also pretty much anyone working in the international development space.
Lectures: The Center for Collective Learning has a fantastic line-up of lectures open to the public. Find out more here.
Learning from Togo: While unemployment benefits websites were crashing in the US, the Togolese government showed how to leverage mobile money and satellite data to effectively get cash into the hands of those who need it the most
Nudging the nudgers: British MPs are criticising academics for sending them fictitious emails for research. I wonder if part of their outrage is not just about the emails, but about what the study could reveal in terms of their actual responsiveness to different constituencies.
DataViz: Bringing data visualization to physical/offline spaces has been an obsession of mine for quite a while. I was happy to come across this project while doing some research for a presentation
I’ve recently been exchanging with some friends on a list of favorite reads from 2020. While I started with a short list, it quickly grew: after all, despite the pandemic, there has been lots of interesting stuff published in the areas that I care about throughout the year. While the final list of reads varies in terms of subjects, breadth, depth and methodological rigor, I picked these 46 for different reasons. These include my personal judgement of their contribution to the field of democracy, or simply a belief that some of these texts deserve more attention than they currently receive. Others are in the list because I find them particularly surprising or amusing.
As the list is long – and probably at this length, unhelpful to my friends – I tried to divide it into three categories: i) participatory and deliberative democracy, ii) civic tech and digital democracy, and iii) and miscellaneous (which is not really a category, let alone a very helpful one, I know). In any case, many of the titles are indicative of what the text is about, which should make it easier to navigate through the list.
These caveats aside, below is the list of some of my favorite books and articles published in 2020:
Participatory and Deliberative Democracy
While I still plan to make a similar list for representative democracy, this section of the list is intentionally focused on democratic innovations, with a certain emphasis on citizens’ assemblies and deliberative modes of democracy. While this reflects my personal interests, it is also in part due to the recent surge of interest in citizens’ assemblies and other modes of deliberative democracy, and the academic production that followed.
I just came across the recently published data from the GenForward project in the United States, a nationally representative survey of over 3,000 young adults aged 18-36 conducted by political scientist Cathy Cohen at the University of Chicago. The new data on race, young adults, and the 2020 elections paints a challenging picture of how young adults in the country perceive institutions and democracy. For those who think the recent election outcome put democracy back on track, these results reveal important challenges, but also opportunities.
Negative enthusiasm takes the lead in young voters’ motivations
Prior to the election, in an interview with the Washington Post, Donald Trump asserted that “Negative enthusiasm doesn’t win races. Positive enthusiasm, meaning ‘they like somebody’ is how elections are won.” But judging from the survey, negative enthusiasm was determinant in young voters’ choices: 64% of respondents said they would vote for Joe Biden precisely because they disliked the other candidate. There are significant differences across the profiles of respondents: for instance, only 28% of white respondents indicated that they would vote for Biden because they were enthusiastic about the candidate, while this number reaches 47% for black respondents.
While these numbers can be disheartening, one could say they just show democracy at work, with young adults sanctioning the incumbent at the ballots. Add to that the polarized nature of elections, and the results are hardly surprising. But could this also reveal something more worrisome, particularly in the long-term? After all, research shows that voting is a rather habit-forming behavior: a citizen who votes today is more likely to vote in the future, and an 18- year-old who votes for a certain party now is likely to be voting for the same party when he turns 81. Does antagonistic voting behavior follow the same pattern? If it does, what signal does it send to parties? And what does it mean for the future of US democracy if such adversarial behavior crystalizes in the long-term?
Perception of elite capture and de facto disenfranchisement
Overall, 83% of respondents agreed (strongly or somewhat) with the statement that “the government is run by a few big interests, looking out for themselves and their friends.”
These results may seem surprising, but how do they fit with reality? Let’s take, for instance, the US Congress. While only 3% of the US population is made up of millionaires, in Congress they are a majority. And while workers make up more than half (52%) of the US population, they are only 2% in Congress. Is this exclusive club of Congress an exception in American politics? Unfortunately not. When looking at all levels of US government, politicians from working class backgrounds are less than a tenth of all elected officials.
Some might argue that these disparities are not necessarily problematic, as elected individuals can act on behalf of broader interests. But as the saying goes, “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Similar to most representative systems around the world, US policymaking is systematically biased towards the interests of the wealthier. So, while it may be depressing that 83% of young adults feel the government is run by a few big interests, it is understandable in the face of a governmental model that is, unfortunately, by the rich and for the rich. This discredit of representative institutions is reinforced by another result of the survey: 75% of young Americans agree (strongly or somewhat) with the statement “The leaders in government care very little about people like me”, revealing a sense of political alienation.
4) Between discredit and revolution
Young adults were also asked about the most effective way to drive real change in the country. And their responses tell us a lot about how they currently perceive traditional democratic institutions and their capacity to address collective issues. First, only 16% of respondents answered that real change can be achieved by voting in national elections. In other words, the overwhelming majority of young adults in the US reject the notion of voting in presidential elections as the ultimate democratic practice in the country.
Second, 22% of respondents find that voting in state and local elections is the most effective way to bring about change. One can only speculate on the reasons for this, but here are a few potential explanations that come to mind. In socioeconomic terms, sub-national institutions are slightly more representative than national ones. This, at least hypothetically, should make these institutions marginally more responsive to larger constituencies. Also, given that most of the participatory institutions that allow citizens to impact decision-making in the US are at the sub-national level (e.g. referendums, initiatives), citizens may perceive state level institutions as being more responsive. Finally, the recent protagonism of some state governments in the response to the Covid-19 crisis might also play a part in these views.
Third, 38% of responses on the most effective ways to create real change in the US mention unconventional (non-electoral) forms of public participation, including categories such as protests, boycotts and social media campaigns. This is the same proportion as answers mentioning voting in elections, presidential and subnational, combined. Most strikingly, the third-most selected means to bring about change is “revolution” (14%). While the term revolution is not clearly defined here, this result certainly shows an eagerness for structural change in the way American democracy works, rather than milder reforms that are unlikely to alter the status quo. If we add revolution to the list of non-electoral forms of participation, these represent a total of 52% of survey responses.
In short, the majority of young Americans between 18 and 36 years old, a sizable part of the electorate, finds that the best way to effect real change in the US lies outside typical democratic institutions. Even the much celebrated “return to [pre-2016] normalcy” following the recent election result is unlikely to reverse this picture on its own. After all, it was this very political normalcy of recent decades, characterized by inequality and poor responsiveness, that led to the situation that now affects US democracy.
Not indifferent to the fact that a return to the pre-2016 era is unlikely to be sustainable, there are now a number of proposals on the table for how American democracy could be strengthened. These include, for instance, the Protecting our Democracy Act, the six strategies put forward by the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, and the implementation of proportional voting, most effectively defended in Lee Drutman’s recent book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.
While most of the proposed reforms are well-intended and likely to produce positive results, they are unlikely to address the fundamental issue of unequal responsiveness that affects liberal democracies nowadays. Furthermore, given the context of polarization and distrust, any democratic reforms undertaken by political elites alone are bound to have their legitimacy questioned by a large part of the population. What the numbers of the GenSurvey reveal, above all, is a sense of disenfranchisement and a belief that public decisions are taken by “few big interests, looking out for themselves and their friends.”
Citizens will be wary of any attempts to change the rules of the game, but particularly if these changes are defined by those who benefit the most from the current rules. Thus, efforts to rebuild the foundations of modern democracy, be it in the US or elsewhere, are unlikely to be sustainable if citizens are not effectively included in the process. In that case, why not constitute a large citizens’ assembly on democratic reform, to be subsequently validated through the popular vote? Or, as suggested by Archon Fung, why not empower ordinary citizens to make recommendations to Congress and the administration on how to address democratic issues?
The modalities for citizen involvement in this process are multiple. And while some models may be more feasible than others, one thing is certain: tokenistic approaches to citizen participation in democratic reforms are equally doomed to fail. Addressing the challenges highlighted by this survey will require more than politics as usual. But this can also be an opportunity for Americans to collectively reimagine the democracy they want.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, legislative bodies around the world have struggled to function. Meanwhile, from Europe, all the way to Australia and Pakistan, calls to ensure that national legislatures continue to operate abound. In the UK, over 100 MPs signed an open letter asking for the creation of a digital parliament to “maintain democratic traditions in accordance with social distancing.” In the US, amidst media concerns of a “sidelined” Congress, dozens of House Democrats sent a letter to their leadership calling for a change in the rules to enable remote voting.
The disruption in legislative work caused by the pandemic has visibly impacted crisis response efforts. For instance, in Canada, the House of Commons delayed for weeks the vote on a critical wage bill, aimed at covering a percentage of employees’ wages so that employers can keep them on the payroll. The key point of contention? Liberals wanted to vote via virtual parliament, while Conservatives asked for in-person participation.
The functioning of parliaments becomes all the more important as fears of executive overreach are revealed to be founded). Indeed, previous evidence suggests that a pandemic crisis is fertile ground for authoritarian drifts; and chronic abuses are unlikely to stop as the outbreak expands and a growing number of parliaments are unable to work.
Freedom of information for example – particularly relevant during such crises – is under assault. The Global Right to Information Rating shows that since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, countries on multiple continents have altered or lifted their “right to know” legislation. At the same time, a growing number of governments restrict journalistic coverage of the outbreak through threats and detentions.
In a context where traditional forms of collective action and resistance – such as social movements and protests – are constrained by physical distancing, parliaments should be the first line of defense in flattening the authoritarian curve. While innovative models of social activism are certainly emerging, they may not be sufficient to contain authoritarian drifts. To avoid rule of law giving way to rule by decree, parliaments must continue working, even if virtually.
The Brazilian Virtual House of Representatives
On March 11th, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Six days later, in one of the swiftest parliamentary responses, the Brazilian House of Representatives approved a normative resolution authorizing MPs to vote online and provided guidelines for the launch of a “virtual parliament”.
The Office of the Clerk and the House’s digital services (Department for Information Technology and Innovation, DITEC) immediately got to work on the technical solutions required by this rule change. The mobile application Infoleg, originally developed to follow up on the work of the House of Representatives, was repurposed to enable MPs’ mobile phones, following authentication protocols, to function as remote devices for registering presence and casting votes. But Infoleg is more than an e-voting app: it integrates most of the information required by an MP to properly navigate parliamentary sessions, including the list of representatives that will discuss a bill, or the pending procedural motions involved in the deliberation of a matter. While MPs use an external videoconferencing system for their interventions during sittings, the critical systems for registering presence and votes are entirely developed and managed by the House’s internal digital services.
On March 25th, eight days after enacting the new Rules of Procedure, the House of Representatives conducted the first online voting in its history. By April 9th ten virtual sessions had been held, with 15 pieces of legislation, six urgency motions and one constitutional amendment passed. Average attendance for these ten virtual sessions was 98.6% (503 out of 513 representatives), far above the in-person average (87.1%). The constitutional amendment, it seems, was the first ever to be approved by a legislative body through online voting. It was also one of the fastest legislative responses to the financial challenges generated by the pandemic – especially important given the delicate fiscal situation of the country.
Explaining the rapid transition
There is no single explanation of why some parliaments are struggling to function, while others are being more reactive. Yet in the case of Brazil, three enabling factors are worth highlighting.
Political response
Strong digital capacity does not guarantee a smooth transition to a virtual modus operandi. Take for instance Estonia, which has one of the most technologically savvy governments in the world and where online voting for elections is old news: as noted by Andy Williamson, Senior Researcher for the Inter Parliamentary Union, existing regulation prohibits remote sitting of the Estonian parliament. In other words, along with digital capacity, the shift to a virtual parliament may in many cases require political leadership to eliminate analog obstacles. In the Brazilian case, this included swift action by the Speaker of the House, who expedited a normative resolution that was rapidly approved by MPs across the political spectrum. This process, however, must be understood in its broader political context. The current relationship between the national Executive and Legislative is notoriously conflictual. It is therefore possible that the rapid response was also a preemptive move by the House to avoid executive overreach and to maintain political relevance during the crisis. Parliaments in similar situations may want to take note.
Administrative capacity
The importance of the administrative capacity of the Office of the Clerk (the Office) should not be understated. Amassing some of the most qualified civil servants in Brazil, it is the Office that makes political responses technically viable – examining constraints and opportunities and advising the House leadership on the most effective approaches. It should be noted that the adoption of the virtual parliament resolution was facilitated by existing legislation. Passed in October 2019 as a result of a shared vision between the House leadership and the Office of the Clerk, this legislation includes guidelines for a paperless legislative process.
Digital capacity
Finally, a key enabler of the rapid response by the Brazilian House was the existence of a highly qualified, in-house digital team (DITEC), with the mandate and resources to quickly redesign systems that were already developed , maintained and updated internally (e.g. Infoleg, remote voting for committees). The full implementation of the virtual parliament was by no means a small task, and involved DITEC’s core teams on user experience, cybersecurity, application development, legislative informatics, voting and attendance systems, plenary operation (e.g. video streaming), help desk, and emergency response.
It is worth noting that DITEC’s response builds on a tradition of excellence. The House of Representatives has for over a decade been a trailblazer in digital democracy, illustrated for instance by the 2009 launch of e-Democracia, a collaborative platform to engage citizens and civil society organisations in the lawmaking process.
In short, digital transformation does not happen overnight, and the House’s timely response to pandemic-related challenges was in part due to in-house capacity built and honed over the years. (Full disclosure, I was an adviser to the e-Democracia program in its early days, when working on my research ondigital parliaments).
(MP connects to virtual session)
Potential effects of virtual parliaments
It is too early to assess the effects of the pandemic on democratic institutions. The same is true for the medium- and long-term effects of legislatures’ transitions to digital environments. But for the Brazilian case, we can hypothesize:
Effects on party politics
The virtualization of parliamentary procedures may lead to further strengthening of party leaders. First, given that MPs are no longer traveling to the capital, the number of in-person meetings, both formal and informal, is drastically reduced. This reinforces the coordination role of party leaders, already an important position in Brazil. Second, with sittings taking place virtually, for practical reasons the ‘floor time’ allocated to MPs is reduced, increasing the visibility of party leaders who also control the floor time allowed for their MPs.
The impact of this increased influence and visibility of party leaders is uncertain. On the one hand, in a multi-party system with 24 parties represented in the House, a strengthening of leaders’ coordination roles may facilitate the management of legislative politics and even enhance House efficiency. On the other hand, it may weaken the position of a considerable contingent of representatives who work somewhat independently, across party lines. This could be particularly problematic for newly elected MPs who benefited from the support of political renewal movements, whose allegiances to party lines are weaker. This effect could be offset, however, by the stronger online presence of these new, often younger MPs who are used to engaging remotely with their constituents.
Effects on media coverage and third party oversight
As in most countries, the media coverage of politics in Brazil is centered in the capital city, with most journalists, offices and support staff based in Brasília. A good part of that infrastructure depends on in-person and informal exchanges between journalists and their sources, through hallway conversations, over coffee, or at social events. Civil society organisations follow a similar pattern, focusing their advocacy and oversight activities where most MPs are found. With a transition to virtual operation, economies of scale in terms of geographic location and in-person interactions are lost.
A potential secondary effect is that the House becomes less subject to scrutiny from the press and organized groups. Some CSO leaders have indeed expressed such concerns over the shift. José Antonio Moroni, leader of a coalition of social movements for political reform lamented to a local media outlet: “[…] before the MPs circulated in the corridors, and we managed, to a certain extent, to have a dialogue. Now, with this process, we get nothing.” But organisations are reacting quickly, as described by a member of the Education Workers’ Confederation: “We, for instance, already have a list of all the MPs, with e-mail, WhatsApp details, and now we are incentivizing our member organizations not only to maintain their communication with MPs, but actually to intensify the online pressure.”
More digital politics (and fake news)
As the Brazilian parliament moves to an online environment and physical distancing measures continue to be implemented (with varying degrees of success), we should also expect that more political conversations will take place online. This is not necessarily good news, particularly given that somestudies suggest that Brazil is particularly fertile ground for fake news. Add to this a combination of a growing polarization between the branches of government, and the infodemic generated by the current crisis, and you have all the ingredients for accelerating the fake news arms race in the country. As we argued in a recent report, a possible consequence of this arms race is a further and unhealthy shift of the focus of public debates: towards disputes over the authenticity of statements and evidence, reducing the time and energy left to discuss possible actions and solutions to problems.
Whether these hypotheses are validated or not remains an empirical question. These effects become more probable the longer that parliament is obliged to work remotely – a function of the length of the crisis.
So what?
For national legislatures like Brazil’s, the hypothetical adverse effects of a virtual parliament are dwarfed by the possibility of undermining the structure of checks and balances. In other words, these potential effects should be weighed against the possibility of a closed parliament.
The temporary transition to an online environment should also be regarded as an opportunity to explore options for a more open parliament going forward. For example, virtual citizen panels, consisting of randomly selected citizens representing a microcosm of the population, could be convened online to advise on divisive issues including crisis response measures (after all, if parliament can function in a decentralized manner, why not consider the same for a more participatory model of politics?) Such an effort – which would, again, require a political decision by the House leadership – would put the parliament at the forefront of democratic innovations.
In this respect, from a digital democracy perspective, the Brazilian case is one more example of the prospects and limitations of technology for achieving democratic aspirations. The fact that the House adopted a virtual model is critical at this moment. Yet it does not render the legislative any more transparent, representative or participatory than before. Without reforms, digital practices will always mirror their analog origins, whether good and bad. International organizations, donors and tech enthusiasts should not therefore delude themselves: establishing virtual parliaments will do nothing for national legislatures that suffer from pre-existing conditions or that are already on life support. As some recent events attest, national parliaments themselves can be accomplices in the crossing of democratic lines during the coronavirus response.
From a more technical perspective, democracy scholars and practitioners (myself included), have long been aware of the importance of face-to-face interactions for democratic processes. The limitations of existing solutions for digital replication of these interactions was no secret. What few of us expected, however, was how fast democratic praxis would have to transition to a virtual space in order to maintain basic functioning. This applies not only to legislative procedures but also to democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting and citizens assemblies. Unless one believes this pandemic is a one-off with short-term consequences only, the current context reveals the need to invest time and resources in reducing, at least partially, the dependency of democratic processes on face-to-face interaction. If the question of how to best achieve online participation and deliberation at scale was once a niche area, this is no longer the case.
On a more futuristic note: could virtual parliaments be an additional source of resilience in the case of unilateral action by any given executive? Consider the case of Estonia’s Digital Embassies program. Based on cloud technology and off-site servers based in Luxembourg, the program aims to ensure the functioning of critical government functions regardless of Estonia’s territorial integrity. Historically, parliaments have been shut down through coercion of parliamentarians and the closure of legislatives’ physical spaces. But what happens if a parliament can work virtually, with MPs geographically dispersed within and outside their territory? Again, it is an empirical question that – one hopes – won’t need to be answered anytime soon.
Finally, and back to the Brazilian case: as previously mentioned, several countries have altered or lifted their “right to know” legislation during the crisis. The Brazilian President recently enacted a provisional measure temporarily suspending deadlines for answering certain information requests from the public. The Speaker of the House has already announced his intention to reverse the measure in parliament. While the final result is hard to anticipate, one thing is certain: the next battle for the right to information in Brazil will take place online.
(I should have posted this on the 31st, but better late than never)
Below are some of the most read posts in 2014. While I’m at it, I’ll take the opportunity to explain the reduced number of posts in the last few months. Since mid-2014 I have been working with a small team of political and data scientists on a number of research questions at the intersection of technology and citizen engagement (I presented a few preliminary findings here). Following the period of field work, data collection and experiments, we have now started the drafting and peer-review stage of our research. This has been an extremely time-consuming process, which has taken up most of my weekends, when I generally write for this blog.
Still, one of my new year’s resolutions is precisely to better discipline myself to post more regularly. And I am hopeful that the publication of our upcoming research will make up for the recent reduction in posts. We will start to disseminate our results soon, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s a selection of the five most read posts in 2014.
The Journal of Field Actions, together with Civicus, has just published a special issue “Stories of Innovative Democracy at the Local Level: Enhancing Participation, Activism and Social Change Across the World.” When put together, the 13 articles provide a lively illustration of the wealth of democratic innovations taking place around the world.
Does democracy promote development? Despite a large number of empirical studies of this question, the evidence remains inconclusive since it is difficult to establish causality running from democracy to development: democracy is likely to be endogenous to socio-economic factors that also affect development (Lipset 1959). As democracy at the national level is clearly not randomly assigned across countries, the empirical challenge is to disentangle the effect of democracy from other confounding factors to the largest possible extent. This paper revisits this question in the context of human development in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, I investigate whether the democratization sweeping the region in the 1990s has reduced infant mortality.
(…)
My findings are as follows. After democratization in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, infant mortality drops by 1.2 percentage points (12% of the sample mean). This result is robust to controlling for country-specific linear trends in the birth year of babies, country-specific birth-order dummies, country-specific quadratic trends in the mother’s age at birth, and country-level covariates such as per capita GDP, the incidence of wars, and the amount of foreign aid. Except for a couple of outlying cases, there is no such reduction in infant mortality in countries where the dictator holds multiparty elections and stays in power by winning them or where leadership change takes place in a nondemocratic way.
Interesting paper by Yuen Yuen Ang, Political Scientist at the University of Michigan:
Authoritarian states restrain online activism not only through repression and censorship, but also by indirectly weakening the ability of netizens to self-govern and constructively engage the state. I demonstrate this argument by comparing I-Paid-A-Bribe (IPAB) — a crowd-sourcing platform that collects anonymous reports of petty bribery — in India and China. Whereas IPAB originated and has thrived in India, a copycat effort in China fizzled out within months. Contrary to those who attribute China’s failed outcome to repression, I find that even before authorities shut down IPAB, the sites were already plagued by internal organizational problems that were comparatively absent in India. The study tempers expectations about the revolutionary effects of new media in mobilizing contention and checking corruption in the absence of a strong civil society.
DemocracySpot 
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