This 2 week roundup has lots of evidence on monitoring to reduce bribery and SMS to increase voter information. There's comparative evidence on increasing political trust and decreasing corruption, plus excellent advances on understanding how to get evidence used in policy. Plus a review of open data measurement frameworks.
Findings Politically marginalized groups have less access to the internet, worldwide. This shocker based on network measurements over 8 years and identification of politically relevant groups as defined by the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR). The relationship between online and offline activism is messy, according to a survey of 1023 adolescents from five Balkan countries, while a year-long study in...
The institutional language of engagement has been defined by its measurement. Chief engagement officers in corporations are measuring milliseconds on web pages, and clicks on ads, and not relations among people. This is disproportionately influencing the values of democracy and the responsibility of public institutions to protect them. Too often, when government talks about engagement, it is...
And by beef I clearly mean civic interaction. I’m in the beginning of a phd, which means swimming in theory and concepts. This can get pretty removed from actual practice, but has led to one surprising question: despite all the field’s rhetoric on responsive government, e-participation and conversational governance, there are very few examples of digital interaction between people and their...