Democratic Input Research Articles

Public participation in decisions about measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review

BackgroundDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and health authorities faced tough decisions about infection prevention and control measures such as social distancing, face masks and travel. Judgements underlying those decisions require...

Between Scylla and Charybdis: the implications of the human right to science for regulating the harms and benefits of environmental science and technology

ABSTRACT This article explores whether the integration of human rights approaches, in particular, the human right to science in Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, offers a basis for improving upon current approaches in international environmental law by widening democratic input and oversight in decisions involving environmental science and its applications. It examines a case study regarding the international regulation of marine geoengineering under an amendment to the 1996 Protocol to the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter. The analysis focuses on how the harms and benefits of marine geoengineering research are conceived of in the amendment, and the norms and processes adopted to address them. These same issues are then examined under the human right to science, focusing on the recent interpretation of the right by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its General Comment No. 25. It seeks to show in a particular case how international environmental law and international human rights law each bring to bear different objectives, norms, and processes in how they treat issues of environmental science and technology, and explores the benefits of more integrated approach.

From politics to ethics: Transformations in EU policies on digital technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation have become an integral part of public governance. While digital technology is expected to enhance neutrality and accuracy in decision-making, it raises concerns about the status of public values and democratic principles. Guided by the theoretical concepts of input, throughput and output democracy, this article analyses how democratic principles have been interpreted and defended in EU policy formulations relating to digital technology over the last decade. The emergence of AI policy has changed the conditions for democratic input and throughput legitimacy, which is an expression of a shift in power and influence between public and private sectors. Democratic input values in AI production are promoted by ethical guidelines directed towards the industry, while democratic throughput, e.g., accountability and transparency, receive less attention in EU AI policy. This indicates future political implications for the ability of citizens to influence technological change and pass judgement on accountable actors.

Managerial Discretion, Market Failure and Democracy

Managers often have discretion in interpreting their ethical requirements, and they should seek democratic guidance in doing so. The undemocratic nature of managerial ethical discretion is shown to be a recurring problem in business ethics. Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) is introduced as a theory better positioned to deal with this problem than other views. However, due to epistemic uncertainty and conceptual indeterminacy, the MFA is shown to allow a much wider range of managerial discretion than initially appears. The paper explores how this range can be narrowed down with democratic input, comparing models based on formal state institutions and on the informal public sphere. A case study from the pharmaceutical industry illustrates the merits of the informal public sphere approach.

Judicial Review by the People Themselves: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Ancient Athens

Abstract Modern democratic constitutions mediate the tension between democracy and the rule of law through institutions that check unrestrained popular rule with expert judicial bodies. This paper considers the alternative arrangement that existed in ancient Athens, where checks on popular rule coexisted with strong popular control. Judicial review in Athens, however, raised two additional threats to democracy and the rule of law: unpredictability and partisanship. We combine a formal model with historical exegesis to show how the strategic incentives of Athenian institutional design, along with a strong societal consensus on the value of constitutional democracy, were necessary ingredients for dispelling both threats. In Athens, institutions responsive to citizens’ demands existed alongside a robust rule of law. This case study provides empirical evidence allowing us to reflect on the feasibility of extensive democratic input to the process of constitutional review. [JEL: H11—structure, scope, and performance of government; K40—legal procedure, the legal system, and illegal behavior (general)]

Deliberation on Childhood Vaccination in Canada: Public Input on Ethical Trade-Offs in Vaccination Policy

Background Policy decisions about childhood vaccination require consideration of multiple, sometimes conflicting, public health and ethical imperatives. Examples of these decisions are whether vaccination should be mandatory and, if so, whether to allow for non-medical exemptions. In this article we argue that these policy decisions go beyond typical public health mandates and therefore require democratic input. Methods We report on the design, implementation, and results of a deliberative public forum convened over four days in Ontario, Canada, on the topic of childhood vaccination. Results 25 participants completed all four days of deliberation and collectively developed 20 policy recommendations on issues relating to mandatory vaccinations and exemptions, communication about vaccines and vaccination, and AEFI (adverse events following immunization) compensation and reporting. Notable recommendations include unanimous support for mandatory childhood vaccination in Ontario, the need for broad educational communication about vaccination, and the development of a no-fault compensation scheme for AEFIs. There was persistent disagreement among deliberants about the form of exemptions from vaccination (conscience, religious beliefs) that should be permissible, as well as appropriate consequences if parents do not vaccinate their children. Conclusions We conclude that conducting deliberative democratic processes on topics that are polarizing and controversial is viable and should be further developed and implemented to support democratically legitimate and trustworthy policy about childhood vaccination.

National Security, Self-rule, and Democratic Action

Most discussions of the relationship between liberty and security focus on the idea that enhancing citizens’ security may require imposing constraints on their civil liberties (e.g., freedom of association, of movement, of communication, and so on). This paper explores the question of how measures to enhance security stand vis a vis the idea of political liberty, i.e. the idea of citizens’ collectively directing the power of their state. It distinguishes two models whereby citizens might enact that ideal of self-rule and argues that with respect to issues of national security, the less direct model, which entrusts political agents to make decisions beyond direct democratic input, will often be more appropriate. It argues as well that various practices often seen as fundamentally at odds with the ideal of rule by the people (e.g., government deception, lack of transparency, covert action) are in fact consistent with a reasonable construal of that ideal. It concludes by outlining various criteria that would have to be met for such practices to be morally permissible in democratic states.

The inexorableness of constitutional amendments and its democratic potentiality

Constitutional law and Democracy are two domains that are inevitably in tension. Nevertheless, there have been theories and proposals to improve the necessary coexistence of both elements in modern constitutional democratic systems. Richard Albert's work distinguishes between constitutional changes (amendments and dismemberments) and introduces a non-merely symbolic role to the people in terms of legitimacy, can be qualified as one of these theories. This paper focuses on the democratic input that Albert proposes along with his book.

SMART TECHNOLOGIES, ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE AND DATA JUSTICE

This panel engages critically with the development, application and emerging effects of ‘smart’ technologies of governance. Attending specifically to the ramifications of new forms of (‘big’) data capture and integration implemented by or for state agencies, the panel describes how the rollout of these technologies impacts on and is shaped by contexts prefigured by social and economic inequalities.
 Two specific arenas are addressed and juxtaposed, with two papers on each of these. The first arena is the introduction of ‘smart city’ technologies and their implications for low income and marginalised communities. Often presented as novel augmentations of urban space, enhancing and customising the urban experience at the same time that they increase the city’s efficiency and ‘awareness’, smart city technologies also reconfigure urban spaces and how they are understood and governed by rendering the city a site of data generation and capture. This presents new opportunities and risks for residents and powerful commercial and state actors alike.
 The emergence of public wi-fi kiosks as a means of providing internet access to underserved communities, as one panellist describes, can be shown to expose low-income residents to new forms of surveillance and to new kinds of inequity in terms of the asymmetry of information made available to the parties in the exchange at the kiosk. Surveillance and data capture is organised to particular ends and powerful interests shape and leverage the design and affordances of such initiatives in particular ways. Insofar as concerns are raised about these developments, they are commonly framed in terms of individual rights to privacy, missing the scale of the issues involved. It is not merely that ‘opting out’ becomes untenable. As other panellists show, the issues involved are fundamentally social rather than individual in that they foreground questions around the appropriate relations between state and commercial actors, the use and nature of public space, and the uneven distribution of rights of access to space, information, and other resources within the city. Economically disenfranchised groups are not only denied meaningful access and participation, but colonised by data processes designed to extract various forms of value from their use of ‘public’ infrastructure which may not best serve their own interests.
 The second arena addressed by the panel is the role of algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence in the provision of social welfare. This context is described in terms of both the effects for the frontline service encounter, and the design, justification, and implementation of the technologies reformatting this encounter from key locations within state agencies. Emerging technological infrastructures for social welfare do not simply reconfigure how existing services are offered and accessed. They facilitate the identification of new target populations for intervention, at the same time that they introduce additional burdens, hurdles and forms of intervention and surveillance for these populations. As such, it is evident in the design and application of these technologies that they accord with and expedite punitive logics in welfare provision, providing new opportunities for the application of dominant neoliberal governance strategies.
 In both arenas, one can conceptualize ‘pipelines’ for the implementation of these developments. These pipelines are interstitial and heterogeneous, and combine different timelines, technologies and actors. They are often technically or administratively opaque or otherwise obscured from view. This gives rise to a methodological and intellectual problem, around the extent to which researchers can say they know enough to point to determining instances, political agendas, commercial agreements, incidental alignments and so on in such a way as to advocate effectively for democratic input and oversight. In this sense the papers assembled highlight how these developments call for new politics of method, new modalities of analysis and critique, and more effective activist and academic engagements with the question of how ideals of justice and equity can best be instantiated in these contexts.

‘Opening up’ Education Policy Making in England – Space for Ordinary Citizens’ Participation?

ABSTRACT This article explores UK attempts to boost ordinary citizens’ participation in government policy formulation through ‘open policy making’. Drawing primarily on an analysis of government documents dating from 2012–2018 and focusing on the case of the Department for Education in England, the article highlights elite network control of policy making which works to depress ordinary citizens’ democratic input. Groups who do not fit with depoliticised, ‘top down’ understandings of what counts as valid citizen participation become delegitimised and excluded.

Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health

Howard Waitzkin and his co-authors argue that it is better to trust civil servants and governments with our health than capitalist managers and corporations, since the former can be held more publicly accountable and the latter cannot. They look askance at public-private partnerships, non-governmental organizations, and foundations that receive tax deductible contributions. These are plutocratic health governance systems in which wealthy foundation trustees decide what is to be done and spent in the public sphere without first seeking democratic input. Edited by sociologist and physician Howard Waitzkin, Health Care Under the Knife explores the shortcomings and failures of neoliberal health care systems in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America. It contributes to the current health care debate among the 2020 presidential primary candidates, and describes how social forces and health care movements led by progressive physicians can bring about social action and change health care systems. The volume’s 15 chapters are grouped into five parts: Social Class and Medical Work; The Medical Industrial Complex in the Age of Financialization; Neoliberalism and Health Care Reform; The Trajectory of Imperialism’s Health Component, and The Road Ahead. The book includes 66 pages of notes.

Participation of interest groups at the local level: can inter-municipal cooperation become democratic?

The article focuses on the question of whether the inter-municipal cooperation can be analyzed by referring to democratic representation and democratic legitimacy concepts. We focus on the democratic input, output, and throughput legitimacy dimenions that reveal how municipal cooperation arrangements deal with the problems of democratic deficit. The article offers a theoretical discussion on network governance that analyzes different interactions between local actors and emphasizes the forms of decentralization and horizontal cooperation and involvement strategies of various stakeholders. We propose the theoretical model of democratic legitimacy in inter-municipal cooperation that is complemented with the data of a quantitative survey of inter-municipal cooperation motivations and potential conducted in January-May of 2018. The aim of the survey was to investigate the drivers and outcomes of inter-municipal cooperation forms in Lithuanian municipalities; reveal the inter-institutional coordination mechanisms used by different local interest groups; evaluate the distribution of power among cooperative partners in delivering municipal services; assess the role of municipalities and social stakeholders in improving the provision of public services. The results of the structural model show the significant differences in treating the initiatives, motives, and outcomes of collaborative arrangements. The main decision-making power is associated with the municipality bureaucrats and local politicians that use their mandate to foster inter-municipal cooperative initiatives. The internal mutual networks and high level of trust enable the more effective inter-municipal cooperation that is associated with a greater impact on municipal service quality and public interest. [...]

Democratic demand and supply: a spatial model approach to satisfaction with democracy

ABSTRACTSatisfaction with democracy (SWD) is a commonly used indicator, and its determinants have been analysed extensively. But what does dissatisfaction with democracy substantially mean? This paper tests if satisfaction is actually a coherent consequence of citizens considering democratic supply and demand. It starts from the simple idea that satisfaction can be explained by the distance between what “should be” and what “is”; between democratic expectations and reality. I capture this idea in a spatial model of democratic support, where size and direction of the gap between citizens’ expectations and evaluations of democracy determine levels of satisfaction. I use data for 26 countries from the European Social Survey. Taking into account both expectation-surplus and evaluations-surplus gaps, I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. The main finding is that liberal criteria of democratic quality are generally agreed upon amongst citizens, and that a perceived lack of their realization is the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction. Democratic input dimensions like direct participation and output criteria like social justice are more disputed, and create dissatisfaction amongst those wanting more of them as well as those wanting less.

The British Academy Brian Barry Prize Essay Justifying Public Funding for Science

AbstractPublic funding for science is increasingly coming under attack. This article explores the normative force of these charges, and the arguments that are available to counter them. It examines two justifications of state support for science: Vannevar Bush’s vision of the universal material benefits of scientists pursuing basic research and John Rawls’s liberal justification of science funding as a voluntary public good. It argues that both accounts neglect the important political impact of scientific research and its status as the source of knowledge for the modern state. The article then traces the implications of the political role of science for the appropriate forms of democratic input into funding decisions.

Inter-parliamentary cooperation as a means for reinforcing joint scrutiny in the EU: upgrading existing mechanisms and creating new ones

Abstract This special issue develops a contextual analysis of EU inter-parliamentary cooperation in the post Lisbon Treaty framework. Indeed, it is possible to claim that there are several sources and causes for renewed EU inter-parliamentary cooperation: first, a voluntary one, i.e. the connection with the Lisbon Treaty’s intent to facilitate a wider democratisation objective; second, this time more a reaction than an initiative, the need to counterbalance the institutional outcomes of the economic and financial crisis that shook the world but particularly the eurozone; and, third, the call for an improvement in existing rules and mechanisms to develop even further democratic (read: parliamentary) input in common policies. The special issue analyses whether current inter-parliamentary mechanisms are suited to react to these challenges. It specifically assesses the practical impact of interparliamentary cooperation on the numerous democratic gaps that still exist in the EU's multi-layered decision-making process. Its objective is to show, beyond the mere sharing of information and the comparison of best practices at a supranational and transnational level, whether existing inter-parliamentary practices contribute to joint parliamentary scrutiny by involving both the EP and the national parliaments of EU member states.

The importance of input and output legitimacy in democratic governance: Evidence from a population‐based survey experiment in four West European countries

AbstractThe study of subjective democratic legitimacy from a citizens’ perspective has become an important strand of research in political science. Echoing the well‐known distinction between ‘input‐oriented’ and ‘output‐oriented’ legitimacy, the scientific debate on this topic has coined two opposed views. Some scholars find that citizens have a strong and intrinsic preference for meaningful participation in collective decision making. But others argue, to the contrary, that citizens prefer ‘stealth democracy’ because they care mainly about the substance of decisions, but much less about the procedures leading to them. In this article, citizens’ preferences regarding democratic governance are explored, focusing on their evaluations of a public policy according to criteria related to various legitimacy dimensions, as well as on the (tense) relationship among them. Data from a population‐based conjoint experiment conducted in eight metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom is used. By analysing 5,000 respondents’ preferences for different governance arrangements, which were randomly varied with respect to their input, throughput and output quality as well as their scope of authority, light is shed on the relative importance of different aspects of democratic governance. It is found, first, that output evaluations are the most important driver for citizens’ choice of a governance arrangement; second, consistent positive effects of criteria of input and throughput legitimacy that operate largely independent of output evaluations can be discerned; and third, democratic input, but not democratic throughput, is considered somewhat more important when a governance body holds a high level of formal authority. These findings run counter to a central tenet of the ‘stealth democracy’ argument. While they indeed suggest that political actors and institutions can gain legitimacy primarily through the provision of ‘good output’, citizens’ demand for input and throughput do not seem to be conditioned by the quality of output as advocates of stealth democratic theory suggest. Democratic input and throughput remain important secondary features of democratic governance.

Defining diversity: a critical discourse analysis of public educational texts

ABSTRACTWith this paper we present findings from a cultural studies project that aims to illuminate and define the various, sometimes overlapping, conceptions of diversity in public educational discourses. We do so via a critical discourse analysis of select political texts: namely speeches by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that reference diversity as a focal point of intervention and reform (national and international in scope). We begin with a general overview of literature outlining diversity’s historical links to the education sector, after which we describe our theoretical framework, data sources, and methodology. Next, we present the study’s findings through the lens of two paramount themes: diversity as an economic input and diversity as a democratic input. To conclude, we provide discussions based on these findings, point to an overall lack of effort regarding the meaningful implementation of diversity policies, and suggest potential avenues for future research.

Courts, Crisis and Contestation: Democratic Judicial Decision-Making in Times of Crisis

This dissertation explores judicial decision-making in times of crisis. By way of a number of case studies focusing on terrorism and economic crisis, it answers two questions: how judges do judge in times of crisis and how judges should judge in times of crisis. It concludes with an agonistic theory of legitimacy for judicial decision-making that focuses on the democratic input to and output of the judicial decision.

The Morality of Health Care Reform: Liberal and Conservative Views and the Space between Them.

We have just completed an exhausting nine-month debate on the future of the Affordable Care Act. I see this debate as having ended-as of this writing-in a draw. After months of repeal efforts, Republicans in the House barely passed in early May, with a 217-to-213 margin, the American Health Care Act, which would have significantly amended the ACA. Republicans in the Senate spent the summer trying to arrive at amendments to the AHCA that could attract fifty of their fifty-two votes, but in the end, the clock ran out on their opportunity to enact an amendment without Democratic input. With this legislative failure, we appear to be in a stalemate. The Affordable Care Act remains in place as the law of the land, but the Trump administration seems committed to at best condemning the ACA to malign neglect and at worst actively undermining it at every opportunity. Given the political stalemate, the time is right to reassess the deeper issues at stake and ponder the prospects for a considered compromise on health reform.

Control, Historic Pitfalls, and the UK Nuclear Renaissance

ABSTRACTIn September 2015, the UK government announced that future taxpayers will underwrite the construction of two European-designed nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Partly financed by Chinese utility companies, this announcement presents a fait accompli with little democratic input. Few, if any, historic lessons evident from previous attempts to manage its nuclear industry appear to have been learnt. This paper discusses the announcement with reference to the governance of the UK’s historic nuclear legacy—specifically dealing with control, stakeholder engagement, and transparency—and its implications for a nuclear renaissance.