Papers and Findings Autocracy Online: Freedom on the Net 2016 was released, and shows continued declines in internet freedom around the world, with an increase of app censorship. Meanwhile, a paper in Telecommunications Policy argues that autocracies have “caught up” with democracies in terms of internet penetration since 2013, and an article in press argues that moving from electoral...
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...
How human rights scholars conceal social wrongs. That’s the title of an Open Democracy article published yesterday, which takes issue with the way that international comparative indices (such as Ciri Human Rights Data Project and Freedom in the World) hide injustice in rich western democracies. Specifically, the authors are angered by the US government’s consistently high ranking...
The GSDRC is a resource centre that synthesises and summarizes research for use in international development programming. It’s a great initiative for making scholarly work relevant and useful in the real world, and last week they released a new topic guide on open data and accountability. I was excited to take a look, as I’ve previously found their guides and responses to research help desk...
4 weeks’ worth, yikes. #summer Papers/Findings Citizen Engagement FTW! The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory just released a “virtual issue” on citizen engagement, collecting the most important articles with that focus in that journal since 1995, to make some sense of how citizens actually engage with governance across the policy cycle. The editors’ take...