Abstract
We summarize the concept of Self-Service Government (ss-Gov) as presented earlier and explore how the principles of Liquid Democracy (LD) can be applied in ss-Gov for collaborative decision making. We provide a thorough insight into the history of LD and summarize its recent developments. By combining ss-Gov and LD, we develop the concept of Sustainable, Non-Bureaucratic Government (SNBG) as a novel, blank-slate approach to government of eligibilities within- and towards governmental systems. We argue that such entanglement of LD with ss-Gov results in a closed-circuit system that can provide end-to-end self-management of jural relations. Thus, we argue, SNBG is a vision concept capable to enable morphable self-managed government which requires virtually no mediatory human agents for government. We discuss the feasibility of such approach based on a Gedankenexperiment featuring a modern parliamentary decision-making process.
Highlights
Approach makes the existence of an administrative middle-layer of mediating agents hypothetically obsolete, without systemically rejecting or disabling such system
Computerization of the public sector has in large parts of everyday bureaucratic chores shifted bureaucratic discretionary power from a predominantly street-level bureaucracy with “large numbers of faceless officials whose freies Ermessen could cause an open society to be smothered in the bud” (Bovens and Zouridis 2002, p.174) to a system-level bureaucracy in which information is collected from various sources in an automated form and applications from citizens can be instantly handled – e.g. approved, rejected, or set aside for manual inspection
This article described Sustainable Non-Bureaucratic Government (SNBG) as the entanglement of Self-Service Government, a model for determining jural eligibilities based on jural facts stored in digital form in a dedicated ICT network, and Liquid Democracy (LD) as a method of selforganized collaborative decision making
Summary
The modern system of public administration and its dependent stakeholders relies on an everincreasing influx of capital (through e.g. taxes or public resources) to sustain itself, which it does by constantly increasing its legitimacy that bases on an increasing self-imposed handling of new regulations, responsibilities, and taxes (cf. Shleifer and Vishny 1993). Storing and querying structured data from which eligibilities can be derived by means of the CBR approach could be realized using well-known technologies – using for example relational databases and the SQL query language for navigation through the data Aside from this future research needs to define how to sustainably express identity within such system, how to assure non-repudiation of interaction with the system, as well as how access-/restriction-policies shall be expressed and embedded into the system for access control. Self-Service Government (Paulin 2013) through its Constellation-Based Reasoning (CBR) concept represents a scaffolding for creating, storing, retrieving and changing jural facts based on which eligibilities of jural subjects can be determined While this model provides a feasible approach towards a sustainable base infrastructure for storing and communicating jural data, it represents only a part of the complexity required to bring into reality the vision towards a form of government that does not require a bureaucratic machine for administering jural relations in a juropolitical society. Approaching the design and development by e.g. starting at layer #4 – by for example developing a methodology for describing business processes on a high level and automatically translating them into the business logic of e-government artefacts, would, without considering layers #2-3 inevitably result in an unsustainable approach that might well satisfy acute needs (such as e-government does), but would not be prepared for future
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