Rebooting Democracy: Democratic Innovation for the Information Age

重启民主：信息时代的民主创新

• 批准号: MR/S032711/1
• 负责人: Matthew Ryan
• 金额: $ 155.65万
• 依托单位: University of Southampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FS032711%2F1
• 关键词: Rebooting; Democracy; Democratic; Innovation; Information

The spread of democracy has been crucial to developing a world order that has facilitated productive economic, social, and cultural growth, yet by almost any measure, democracy is in crisis. I have made a leading contribution to comparative approaches to the study of democratic innovation. I have been to the fore in drawing insights from democratic theory and empirical social science, connecting researchers with practitioners of democracy in government and society. With this fellowship, I will develop interventions to avert the crisis of democracy. Despite continued support worldwide for democracy as a regime, democracy as a practice is suffering. Issues include declining trust in government and political parties, distorted digital communications, and rising populism and polarisation in politics. In a positive response, governments, businesses, and charities are already reimagining democracy. They have designed inventive democratic services and devices that can help sustain democratic order. Some examples include participatory budgeting, randomly selected juries, and different forms of referendums. These social innovations are often supported by civic technologies, open data applications, citizen science, and behavioural nudges such as information cues that increase civic volunteering. Yet we know little about what works beyond case studies. I have taken a leading role in the development of a comparative research agenda. A number of projects such as participedia.net (of which I am a co-investigator and executive member), have begun to collect systematic data on how these devices improve democracy (or do not). Despite the abundance of information, research has yet to take advantage of the analytic potential of data science and new technologies. In the project, I will bring together traditional survey data, and new forms of crowdsourced and real-time data to understand what interventions actually help to sustain rather than hinder democracy. In the first step, the project will push the frontiers of knowledge about what has worked before and what has not. I will use set-theoretic methods, at the cutting edge of comparative analysis in the social sciences to determine the conditions in the past that have been necessary and sufficient for increases in positive democratic behaviours. The method can establish which combinations of conditions in different contexts achieved democratic improvements such as inclusion, learning, deliberation, and support for institutions. At the University of Southampton, I am uniquely positioned among prominent social and computer scientists to lead a multi-disciplinary research team in developing indicators and data analytics for democratic innovation. I will harness available data to provide the necessary information on developing political contexts to guide policymakers in the development and choice of instruments for democratic decision-making. My work will reduce wasted resources in public consultation. These indicators will include new measures of the extent to which debates are consolidating in the public sphere using social media data, argument mapping and opinion polling. Economic indicators of government capacity, as well as indicators of civil society capacity and the levels demand for inputs from citizens will be incorporated to complement those data.The ultimate aim of the project is to use advances in traditional and new forms of data analysis, to work in accordance with the best that democratic theory and political philosophy has to offer. The project will involve agile design of indicator dashboards and complementary social interventions. In conjunction with international and national experts in public engagement, we will deliver field experiments to test feasibility of designs. The fellowship will allow me to lead a multi-disciplinary research agenda developing data science that responds to and integrates the lessons of democratic theory and empirical social science.

民主的传播对于建立一个促进生产性经济、社会和文化增长的世界秩序至关重要，但无论从哪方面衡量，民主都处于危机之中。我对民主创新研究的比较方法做出了主要贡献。我一直在从民主理论和实证社会科学中汲取见解，将研究人员与政府和社会中的民主实践者联系起来。有了这个奖学金，我将开发干预措施，以避免民主危机。尽管全世界继续支持民主作为一种制度，但民主作为一种实践正在遭受苦难。问题包括对政府和政党的信任下降，扭曲的数字通信，以及政治中的民粹主义和两极分化上升。作为积极的回应，政府、企业和慈善机构已经在重新构想民主。他们设计了能够帮助维持民主秩序的创新性民主服务和手段。一些例子包括参与式预算，随机选择陪审团和不同形式的全民公决。这些社会创新往往得到公民技术、开放数据应用、公民科学和行为推动的支持，如增加公民志愿服务的信息提示。然而，我们对案例研究之外的工作知之甚少。我在制定比较研究议程方面发挥了主导作用。一些项目，如participedia.net（我是其中的共同研究者和执行成员），已经开始收集关于这些设备如何改善民主（或不改善民主）的系统数据。尽管信息丰富，但研究尚未利用数据科学和新技术的分析潜力。在这个项目中，我将把传统的调查数据和新形式的众包和实时数据结合起来，以了解哪些干预措施实际上有助于维持而不是阻碍民主。在第一步，该项目将推动知识的前沿，什么是以前的工作，什么没有。我将使用集合论的方法，在社会科学比较分析的前沿，以确定在过去的条件，已经增加了积极的民主行为的必要和充分的。该方法可以确定在不同背景下条件的组合实现了民主的改善，如包容，学习，审议和支持机构。在南安普顿大学，我在杰出的社会和计算机科学家中处于独特的地位，领导一个多学科研究团队，为民主创新开发指标和数据分析。我将利用现有数据，提供关于发展政治环境的必要信息，以指导决策者制定和选择民主决策工具。我的工作将减少公众咨询中浪费的资源。这些指标将包括使用社交媒体数据、论点分布图和民意调查对公共领域辩论整合程度的新衡量。将纳入政府能力的经济指标以及民间社会能力和要求公民提供投入的水平的指标，以补充这些数据，该项目的最终目的是利用传统和新形式数据分析的进步，按照民主理论和政治哲学所能提供的最佳方式开展工作。该项目将涉及灵活设计指标仪表板和补充性社会干预措施。我们将与国际和国内的公众参与专家一起进行实地实验，以测试设计的可行性。该奖学金将使我能够领导一个多学科的研究议程，发展数据科学，响应并整合民主理论和经验社会科学的教训。

项目成果

M-Arg: Multimodal Argument Mining Dataset for Political Debates with Audio and Transcripts

M-Arg：带有音频和文字记录的政治辩论多模态论证挖掘数据集

• DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.argmining-1.8
• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Mestre R

Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: A Comparative Analysis of Participatory Budgeting

公民参与为何成功或失败：参与式预算的比较分析

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Ryan

The credibility of regional policymaking: insights from South America

区域决策的可信度：来自南美洲的见解

• DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2021.1893530
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: Globalizations
• 影响因子: 2.5
• 作者: Riggirozzi P

Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now?

共享知识：现在需要什么？

• DOI: 10.5334/ijc.1250
• 发表时间: 2024
• 期刊: International Journal of the Commons
• 影响因子: 1.9
• 作者: Richardson L

Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology

住房公地中的社区控制：概念类型学

• DOI: 10.5334/ijc.1093
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: International Journal of the Commons
• 影响因子: 1.9
• 作者: Durose C