Rebooting Democracy: Democratic Innovation for the Information Age

民主的传播对于建立世界秩序至关重要，这种秩序促进了生产性的经济、社会和文化增长，但几乎以任何标准衡量，民主都处于危机之中。在研究民主创新的比较方法方面，我做出了主要贡献。我一直站在从民主理论和实证社会科学中汲取见解的前沿，将研究人员与政府和社会中的民主实践者联系起来。有了这笔奖学金，我将制定干预措施，以避免民主危机。尽管全世界继续支持民主作为一种制度，但作为一种实践的民主正在遭受痛苦。问题包括对政府和政党的信任下降，扭曲的数字通信，以及日益高涨的民粹主义和政治两极分化。作为积极的回应，政府、企业和慈善机构已经在重新想象民主。他们设计了创造性的民主服务和装置，可以帮助维持民主秩序。一些例子包括参与式预算、随机挑选的陪审团和不同形式的全民投票。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，例如增加公民志愿服务的信息提示。然而，除了案例研究之外，我们对什么是有效的知之甚少。我在制定比较研究议程方面发挥了领导作用。一些项目，如articipedia.net(我是该项目的联合调查员和执行成员)，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在一起，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，了解什么以前奏效了，什么没有奏效。我将使用集合论方法，在社会科学比较分析的前沿，确定过去增加积极民主行为所必需和充分的条件。该方法可以确定不同情况下的哪些条件组合实现了民主改进，如包容、学习、审议和对机构的支持。在南安普顿大学，我在杰出的社会科学家和计算机科学家中独树一帜，领导一个多学科的研究团队，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背景的必要信息，以指导政策制定者制定和选择民主决策工具。我的工作将减少在公众咨询中浪费资源。这些指标将包括使用社交媒体数据、论点映射和民意调查来衡量辩论在公共领域巩固程度的新衡量标准。将纳入政府能力的经济指标以及民间社会能力指标和对公民投入的需求水平，以补充这些数据。该项目的最终目的是利用传统和新形式的数据分析的进展，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，回应并整合民主理论和实证社会科学的教训。

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.