SCALABLE DEMOCRACY · Can Direct Democracy Be Scaled? The Promise of Networked Democracy and the Affordances of Decision-Making Software
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-09-01 → 2018-08-31
- EU contribution
- €180,277
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Can Direct Democracy Be Scaled? The Promise of Networked Democracy and the Affordances of Decision-Making Software
Scalable Democracy compared the design and use of digital platforms for political participation within three European parties: Podemos in Spain, the 5-Star Movement (5SM) in Italy and the Pirate Party in Germany (PPG). The project assessed whether these platforms allow ordinary party members and citizens to have an impact on high-level decision making by lowering the costs of participation to political life, that is, without having the need of participating as full-time activists or career politicians. In other words, the project aimed at understanding whether digital platforms can scale political participation from the local to the national level without passing through traditional forms of delegation and representation. The question of scalability of direct democracy and of political participation via digital platforms is of particular importance for European society and institutions. Indeed the EU encourages the e-participation of all citizens in public affairs and legislative activities through various initiatives such as the ECI. Because parties such as Podemos, 5SM and PPG have pioneered the use of online participation platforms aimed at empowering their members European citizens can learn a great deal from these experiences about the potential and challenges to digital democracy and e-participation. The overall objective of Scalable Democracy was to understand whether the introduction of digital participation platforms within political parties may help democratize the relationship between the represented and the representatives, ordinary party members and party leaders. This objective was achieved via a two-step process. First, the project sought to assess how different conceptions of democratic participation are embedded in the design of the participation platforms Loomio, Plaza Podemos and Participa (Podemos); Meetup and Rousseau (5SM); and LiquidFeedback (PPG). Second, the project explored the alignments and gaps between the political values embedded in the software design—that is, the imagined conditions of its use—and its actual uses.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project investigates the recent rise of networked forms of political participation in Europe. It does so by analyzing a set of political parties—namely, Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany—that encourage the participation of all citizens in political deliberation through the use of networked media. More specifically, the research focuses on the technical affordances and uses of the decision-making software adopted by these parties to advance a new idea of democracy, which mixes elements of representative democracy and direct democracy.Software such as LiquidFeedback, Agora Voting, Appgree, Loomio, AdHocracy, and DemocracyOS allow users not only to select party delegates and representatives but also to submit, discuss, and vote their own policy proposals. On the one hand, these emerging practices can be seen as an extension to the electronic realm of participatory decision-making processes associated with recent social movements for “real democracy.” On the other hand, the existence of party delegates, the adoption of majority voting, and the choice of participating in the elections signal that these parties acccept representative democracy, even as they vow to transform it from within.By bringing together different theoretical perspectives in media studies, political theory, and social movement studies, the research maps how these different conceptions of democracy are reflected in the design of decision-making software. A first set of semi-structured interviews asks software developers to discuss the political values embedded in the software—e.g., whether the software privileges consensus or majority rule, temporary delegation or representation, public or anonymous voting. A second set of interviews asks users whether they are aware of the values embedded in the software, have considered their limitations, have suggestions on how to improve them, or see online deliberation as inherently flawed.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE · PisaCoordinatorItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union