Social innovation driven by citizen-led digital innovation: technologies of citizenship and the war on unemployment in Flanders

ABSTRACT

Citizens’ participation in technology design is increasingly deployed as a means to tackle social issues and a technique of empowerment. Techniques of empowerment belong to a set of strategies and methods employed by governmental and nonprofit organizations to constitute active, participatory citizens. This contribution exposes the political rationalities underpinning emerging initiatives that perpetuate citizens’ subjection by deploying participation as their essential governing technology. It analyses an initiative developed by a Belgian nonprofit organization to involve citizens in the design and development of digital tools to tackle unemployment. Findings unveil the potential downsides of participatory practices of technology design for social innovation. Critical reflections invite practitioners to pay greater attention to their design and implementation towards making them truly empowering processes.     

What News on the Rialto? The Trade of Information and Early Modern Venice’s Centralized Intelligence Organization

This article explores one of the earliest centrally organized state intelligence services in world history. Contrary to the orthodoxy that sees systematized intelligence as a modern political phenomenon, this was developed in early modern Venice. The article reveals the complex organization of Venetian systemized intelligence that distinguished it from other contemporaneous states’ espionage networks. It also shows how Venetian authorities commodified intelligence by engaging citizens and subjects in a trade of information for mutual benefits. Ultimately, the article challenges our understanding of early modern political communication and offers a fresh vista of intelligence as a business trait and economic necessity.     

The ‘problem’ with youth: young people,citizenship and the community

Fears that we are experiencing a crisis in citizenship have been increasingly directed towards youth. Popular political and government rhetoric has frequently positioned young people as a threat to the healthy functioning of citizenship and democracy. Policies have been implemented to educate them and control their behaviour, particularly in their local communities, in an attempt to foster them as citizens deemed appropriate to join adult society. This article provides evidence to the contrary, of young people who wish to be part of their local communities and incorporated in the development of relationships of mutual trust and respect. In this context it is argued that the New Labour government's approach to renewing citizenship for the modern age is contributing to the alienation of young people from any sense of inclusive citizenship. It is put forward that if we are truly concerned with the engagement and empowerment of young people, what is needed is a broader definition of citizenship that enables them to participate as young citizens and respects their voices as an important part of a fair society. This, it is argued, would entail a departure from currently dominant conceptions of citizenship towards, instead, a cultural citizenship approach.     

Mapping silent citizenship: how democratic theory hears citizens' silence and why it matters

Democratic theory hears silent citizenship as disengagement or disempowerment. Normatively, silent citizenship evokes the specter of civic passivity – of democratic citizens variably characterized by apathy, disaffection, selfishness, or a lack of political knowledge. Empirically, silent citizenship is linked to deficits of democracy – including voter turnout rates, the quality of political representation, and overall government responsiveness. One problem with these conclusions, however, is that we lack any systematic conceptualization of the range of different attitudes democratic citizens might hold in silence. This article seeks to fill in this conceptual gap by mapping the range of possible motivations for citizens to remain silent in developed liberal democratic systems. The key to doing so, I argue, is to distinguish between two measures of democratic citizenship: empowerment and communication. Separating these two measures reveals an entire spectrum of motivations for silence, which I organize into five distinct degrees of silent citizenship.     

Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics? – Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorantabout political issues, because the costs of being informedgreatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. Thecosts of information (supply side) as well as the utility ofinformation (demand side), however, can vary substantiallydepending on the political system under which citizens live.Using survey data from the European Union and Switzerland, wepresent empirical evidence that citizens are politicallybetter informed when they have more extended politicalparticipation rights. The results corroborate theoreticalarguments and circumstantial evidence that voter informationshould be treated as endogenously determined by politicalinstitutions.     

The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative: Towards Inclusive Agenda‐setting?

This article examines whether the Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland has enhanced inclusion in processes of political agenda‐setting. Democratic innovations such as CIs have been proposed as a solution to the challenges facing Western democracies. CIs are expected to increase political inclusion by allowing citizens to set the political agenda and by mobilising otherwise marginalised or passive citizens. However, the empirical evidence on this proposition remains scarce. This study examines the impact of the CI in Finland on political inclusion. It relies on the Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM) to determine whether the CI mobilises citizens who otherwise tend to be less involved in political matters and thereby enhances inclusiveness. The data come from the Finnish National Election Study 2015 (FNES2015), which is a cross‐sectional representative survey conducted in the wake of the national parliamentary elections in April 2015. Logistic regression models are used in the article to examine the relative importance of socioeconomic resources and civic skills, psychological political engagement and recruitment networks. The results show that while users have many of the familiar traits of political activists, the CI also activates marginalised groups. Most importantly, young citizens are likely to support CIs and the Internet constitutes a central recruitment network. In this sense, the CI has helped increase democratic inclusiveness.     

美国社区非营利组织基本结构与发展模式

美国社区非营利组织的发展是政府资助、政治赋权、项目化运作以及自组织能力建设四者结合的结果,也同时体现了美国公民传统与现代社区公共服务网络化供给的结合。     

Explaining non‐participation in deliberative mini‐publics

This article investigates citizens’ refusal to take part in participatory and deliberative mechanisms. An increasing number of scholars and political actors support the development of mini‐publics – that is, deliberative forums with randomly selected lay citizens. It is often argued that such innovations are a key ingredient to curing the democratic malaise of contemporary political regimes because they provide an appropriate means to achieve inclusiveness and well considered judgment. Nevertheless, real‐life experience shows that the majority of citizens refuse the invitation when they are recruited. This raises a challenging question for the development of a more inclusive democracy: Why do citizens decline to participate in mini‐publics? This article addresses this issue through a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of those who have declined to participate in three mini‐publics: the G1000, the G100 and the Climate Citizens Parliament. Drawing on in‐depth interviews, six explanatory logics of non‐participation are distinguished: concentration on the private sphere; internal political inefficacy; public meeting avoidance; conflict of schedule; political alienation; and mini‐public's lack of impact on the political system. This shows that the reluctance to take part in mini‐publics is rooted in the way individuals conceive their own roles, abilities and capacities in the public sphere, as well as in the perceived output of such democratic innovations.     

Postmodernists,pragmatists and the justification of democracy

According to current wisdom, we have entered a new ‘age of democracy’. The new global popularity of the democratic ideal appears likely to pose new challenges to democratic theory, adding yet more formulations and nuances to existing categories. Just as some key questions about democracy–such as ‘why is it a good (or the best) political system?’ and 'precisely what does it demand of us, and owe to us, as citizens?' – become daily more urgent, some worry about the RESOurces of political theory to cope with them, given the apparent shift towards scepticism and a suspicion of large-scale, encompassing claims about politics. This article focuses of four arguments from postmodernist and pragmatist writers who have given democracy a prominent part in their work. It asks whether the writers examined provide convincing justifications for the democratic ideal.     

Politicians,professionalization and anti-politics: why we want leaders who act like professionals but are paid like amateurs

Why are politicians so unpopular? One common explanation blames a professionalized political class that is increasingly detached from ‘ordinary citizens’. But, there is very little empirical investigation of what it is about the professionalization of politics that engenders distrust. This article uses 12 focus groups and 15 interviews with civil servants from the Australian Public Service—‘insiders’ with first-hand knowledge and experience of the political system—to reflect on political professionalization and its impacts. As a group, civil servants’ views on this question remain largely unexplored yet their proximity to the political process gives them a distinct vantage point from which to reflect on current explanations for rising anti-political sentiment. We find both positive and negative attitudes towards professionalization that destabilize prevailing explanations: on the demand side, civil servants share first-hand experience and knowledge of how the political process works but remain cynical about politicians, whilst on the supply side, they value governing competence more than demographic representation yet still want more ‘amateur’ politicians. Our reflections on these findings highlight contradictory expectations: we want politicians who act like professionals, but who are paid like amateurs.     

Institutionalising participatory and deliberative procedures: The origins of the first permanent citizens’ assembly

In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens’ assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long-term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. Our analysis of this particular conception lead us to argue for the need of developing context-sentive approaches to participatory and deliberative procedures, as well as to discuss whether we should consider the latter as mere elites’ legitimation tools.     

The politics of other citizens

In all kinds of political action, citizens are confronted with the performances of other citizens. An important guide to political behaviour is therefore likely to be the assumptions people make concerning how others can be expected to behave. This article explores common sense ideas about other citizens as potential political participants, drawing on a series of group interviews conducted with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic. I argue the expectations voiced of other citizens tend to be pessimistic in nature, casting them as ill-informed, apathetic, passive and unduly self-interested, notwithstanding the appearance of a more optimistic view which holds they can be expected to follow the lead of those who ‘take a stand’. These empirical observations lead to a discussion of the theoretical issues they raise, notably where to locate the origins of such views, and how to appraise their implications for democracy.     

The ‘Too Difficult Box’: Its Temptations and How to Avoid Them

Within our democratic political system too many of the pressing and serious political, economic and social challenges of our times are delayed or put off, deposited in the ‘Too Difficult Box’. This happens for a variety of reasons which include failure correctly to identify the best solution, failure to understand obstructions in implementing the proposed solution, difficulties in placating or overcoming a range of vested interests, glitches in circumnavigating a range of legal constraints, lack of appreciation of the international dimension of the issue, succumbing to the vicissitudes of the political process and evaporation of the necessary political creativity and energy. It is a responsibility of democratic politics to find ways of dealing with these problems, through more collaborative or consensual politics if necessary. Otherwise citizens will lose confidence in the ability of democracy to solve the problems which concern them.     

Full employment

The recent civic revival has been largely carried out in the register of contemporary political philosophy, with its characteristic division between liberal and communitarian visions of a transcendental moral subject. This article argues that such an approach, with its affiliations to Rousseau's pathbreaking recuperation of the classical civic tradition, tends to bypass the question of what concrete attributes have been required of citizens, and how citizens have historically acquired the attributes to function as responsible civic-minded individuals. As a result its demaraction of ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ models of historical citizenship is unworldly and unhelpful. I conclude by sketching in a tentative outline of a history of modern citizen self-discipline in the early modern period, when citizen status expanded from the city environment to the populations of the territorial states. And I suggest, following Foucault, that these techniques still form the foundations of modern citize-formation.     

The consequences of supply gaps in two-dimensional policy spaces for voter turnout and political support: The case of economically left-wing and culturally right-wing citizens in Western Europe

Parties with left-wing positions on economic issues and right-wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left-authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left-authoritarian citizens are less likely to vote, less satisfied with the democratic process and have lower levels of political trust when there is a left-authoritarian supply gap. Using data for 14 Western European countries from the European Social Survey 2008 in the main analysis, it is shown that left-authoritarians are less likely to vote and exhibit lower levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust. A supplementary analysis of national election studies from Finland before and after the electoral breakthrough of the left-authoritarian True Finns Party in 2011 indicates that whether left-authoritarians participate less and believe less in the efficacy of voting is contingent on the presence of a strong left-authoritarian party. This study illuminates how constrained party supply in a two-dimensional policy space can affect voter turnout as well as political support, and has broader implications for the potential further rise of left-authoritarian challenger parties.     

The Bifurcation of Politics: Two Englands

A dynamic of global economic development means that many countries are experiencing uneven development and their citizens are increasingly split between those who can access high‐skill jobs and those who cannot. As a result some citizens are living in cosmopolitan areas of growth and others in backwater areas of decline. There are emerging out of these processes two versions of England. In cosmopolitan areas we find an England that is global in outlook, liberal and more plural in its sense of identity. In provincial backwaters we find an England that is inward‐looking, relatively illiberal, negative about the EU and immigration, nostalgic and more English in its identity. This bifurcation of England is already having political effects, reflected in the outcome of the 2015 general election. It will further reconfigure politics over the next two decades, creating diverse political citizens and a complex array of challenges and dilemmas for governments, political parties, campaigners and political organisers.     

The electoral roots of unequal representation. A spatial modelling approach to party systems and voting in Western Europe

For a number of Western democracies, it has been observed that the preferences of poor and rich citizens are unequally represented in political institutions and outcomes. Yet, the causes of this phenomenon are still under debate. We focus on the role of elections in this process, by disentangling biases towards different income groups that stem from the party system and from voters’ behaviour. Our aim is to uncover whether elections as selection mechanisms contribute to unequal representation by analysing factors of the supply and demand sides of the electoral process. On the supply side, we focus on the congruence of parties’ policy offers and voters’ preference distributions. This shapes citizens’ possibilities to express their policy preferences. On the demand side, we are interested in the extent to which citizens from different income groups base their vote decisions on their policy preferences. The empirical analysis relies on the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and covers 13 Western European countries. Our results indicate, first, that the economic and cultural preferences of poor and rich citizens differ significantly, and second, that party systems in the countries under investigation represent the lowest income groups the worst, and the middle income groups the best. This makes it difficult for citizens at both the lower and the higher end of the income distribution to voice their preferences in elections. Additionally, we show that low income citizens tend to take policy less into consideration when making an electoral choice than richer citizens. Thus, while the rich make up for their representation bias by taking policy more into account in their voting behaviour, the electoral stage poses another obstacle for the poor to overcome the representation bias. In summary it can be said that already on the supply side there is an unbalanced disadvantage in terms of representation for the very poor and the very rich, but the pattern leads to an even more asymmetrical misrepresentation of the poor due to the election act.     

Primary Voters Versus Caucus Goers and the Peripheral Motivations of Political Participation

Depending on their state of residence, Americans can participate in Presidential nomination contests either by voting in a primary or by attending a caucus. Since caucus participation requires more time and effort than primary voting, it has long been thought that caucuses must attract a more partisan, activist, and politically extreme cohort of citizens than primaries. This paper challenges the view that more burdensome electoral institutions necessarily ought to attract more politically engaged citizens. I propose a theory of peripheral motivations that predicts caucus goers and primary voters will not differ in terms of their political attitudes or interest, but they will differ in their levels of community engagement. The key insight is that many of the reasons why citizens choose to participate or abstain from politics actually have little to do with politics. Analysis of two surveys from the 2008 Presidential election substantiates the theoretical expectations.     

‘Swanning back in’? Foreign fighters and the long arm of the state

As foreign fighters have flocked to conflicts in Syria and elsewhere, their home governments have often claimed a right not only to criminalise their doing so, but also to deprive them of the right to return. This article challenges some problematic assumptions about the intersection among political allegiance, extraterritorial jurisdiction and the right of abode. It traces the origins of today’s conventional wisdom to a particular modern experience of state–society relations, including the rise of administrative ambitions that outrun the original bounds of the territorial state. In contrast, it argues for an ‘unbundling’ of state authority, prepolitical membership in society, and cross-border political action. This position would chasten overreaching views about states’ ownership of their citizens, while still leaving other ways to deal with jihadist violence.     

E Pluribus Unum: fostering a new era of citizenship by teaching civic engagement and healthy civic discourse

• In a time of profound national challenge and change, it is important to promote a new definition of active citizenship locally, nationally and globally. As the effects of economic, political and social globalization continue to underscore interdependence, the imperative of fostering democratic minds among a citizenry is evermore important. It is essential to conceive a common future that encourages the participation of all American citizens; inviting diversity as an asset and broadly reawakening the call to leverage the rich potentials of pluralism in search of common solutions. However, many schools are retreating from basic civics lessons and are not teaching students how to become active citizens. More importantly, public institutions overall do not appear to be advancing the fundamental awareness and skills required for sifting through political hucksterism, opinion masquerading as news and political spin. It is essential for our schools and public institutions to teach the responsibilities and joy of active citizenship. To meet the challenges of democratic cooperation and social cohesion, leaders and citizens alike should be taught and encouraged to openly question, to critique and even to criticize the status quo. The means for cultivating and institutionalizing such habits on a broad scale involves educational reformation and initiatives in civics and citizenship education to increase opportunities for meaningful public engagement. These are by no means the only answer, but they are a critical component for meeting the challenges of truly inclusive and active representative democracy where out of many, we are one.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.