CPM

Obstacles to rational decision making

- Lack of money
- time pressure
- conflicts of value
- bureaucracy
- bounded rationality
- path dependence
- resistance
- groupthink

Bureaucracy

Street level bureaucrats (Lipsky) often face severe stress (ex: teachers, police officers, GPs, social workers) which leads to the creation of coping strategies
Counterproductive outcomes

Bounded rationality (Simon)

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world

Path dependence

Clients, administrative organizations, and other persons or parties involved develop vested interest in existing policies
Policymakers get “locked in” in existing institutional arrangements
Possibility of radical policy change decreases

Resistance

Occurs when the goals of policymakers do not align with the citizens’

Groupthink

One way of thinking of people in a closeknit group in which the members’ desire for anonymity is stronger than their will to seriously consider alternatives
Shared illusion of invulnerability, neglecting alarm signals, unthinking belief in own morality, negative stereotyping of opponents, self-censorship

Policy network approach

- Mutual dependency actors for goal achievement
- through networks
- importance of joint action
- linking substantive, strategic and institutional perspectives

The prisoners dilemma

Individual and group rationality can be opposite: a group whose members pursue rational self interest may all end up worse off than a group whose members act contrary to self interest

In negotiation situations, it is difficult to get rational, selfish agents to cooperate for their common good
Any corporation designed to facilitate mutually beneficial exchanges will need to overcome the dilemma or avoid it

Citizen engagement

Two ways interaction between citizens and government or the private sector, that give citizens a stake in decision making with the objective of improving development outcomes

Citizen state interface

State action
information
civic mobilization
citizen action

Why the state matters

Provides the environment for information and association
offers avenue for accountability
supports/initiate citizen management
its response determines the outcome of citizen initiatives

Political society

Conceited by a loose community of recognized elected politicians, political parties, local political brokers, concilors, and public servants

Forms a set of institutions, actors, and cultural norms that provide the links between the government and the public
The nature of the state (the actors and dynamics within the political society) are crucial in explaining the effectiveness of CE

State-society relations

Different forms of social contract will emerge in different contexts, depending in part on the balance and interaction between democratic and more clientelist forms of politics.

Elections can provide a window of opportunity for politicizing certain demands and beginning to forge new public agreements around them.

To make accountability claims, there must first be an assumption about the responsibility of the state and entitlements of citizens

Civil society

Refers to both organized and unorganized citizens acting independently from government, political parties, and for-profit organizations in order to transform society and governance (Ackerman)

The technical capacities, networking abilities, and legitimacy of civil society organizations are fundamental for the effectiveness of CE

Ex: cobra effect in French Indochina

Drivers of citizen engagement

1. issue awareness
2. interest
3. impact
4. initiative
5. inaction cost

The heroic illusion (Dobry)

Tending to think of revolutions as governed by subjective factors
To consider the same actors and make history and perceive actors’ choices, decisions, and calculations as the decisive elements
ex civil rights

The causal illusion (Dobry)

Consists in looking at the results of revolution and retrospectively trying to reconstitute the sequence of events
Explanations can be found for any event, the real questions should therefore be “why men do not revolt” the rest of the time (Moore)

How to find why men rebel

Keeping the two illusions in mind, it is possible to assess the potential for collective action and/or collective violence, provided the researcher does not assume that the sequence of events is predetermined

The relative deprivation model

Gurr explains his term as a discrepancy between what people think they deserve, and what they actually think they can get

Gurr’s hypothesis: the potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity

How to analyze rebellion

1. Begin by examining the group identities and grievances of disadvantaged people
2. Ask why group identities and disadvantages make their members susceptible to different kinds of political appeals and ideologies
3. Analyze the motives and strategies of leaders who seek to build movement
4. Study the motives and strategies of governments in dealing with the advantaged groups
5. Look for evidence about international factors that affect the group grievances and choices in government response
6. Consider how political action and government responses affect the groups involved

Long route of accountability

Citizens provide mandates to policy makers to design services to respond to citizens needs. If these needs are not met, this could result in electoral sanctions or other political backlash.

Political patronage: leaders dispense favors to individuals and families in the form of jobs, contracts, school placement, intercessions with the police in return for support
Clientelism: leaders devise policies to deliver benefits to specific groups at the cost of other groups in the population in return for support

Accountability breakdown

In modern democracies is when leaders shrink their job responsibilities, but no one punishes or attempts to al the behavior

Short route of accountability

Refers to increasing the client’s meaningful influence over the providers of the service. Citizens can exercise “client power” with providers or become directly involved in state decision making.

Necessity for information and for feedback.

Amartya (Kumar) Sen

Noted in his 1999 book “Development as Freedom” that there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy.
Suggested that democratic authorities are incentivized by elections to be more responsive to food crises and that the presence of a free press can quickly draw attention to the event and hold governments to account

Preconditions for short route

Information needs to be relevant, localized, accessible, reliable, and consistent.
Feedback should identify problems so that they can be worked on right away and identify what is going well and who are the creative or dedicated types that make things work despite obstacles.

Empower deliberative democracy (EDD): 5 experiments

- Neighborhood governance counselors in Chicago
- labor market transparency and skill formation in Wisconsin
- stakeholder ecosystem governance
- participatory city budgeting in Brazil
- village governance in India

Principles of EDD

1. Practical orientation: quite concrete concerns, practical problems
2. Bottom up participation: variety of experience and knowledge offered to buy more diverse call my relatively more open minded citizens and field operatives. Direct participation grass root operators increases accountability and reduces the length of the chain of agency
3. Deliberative solution generation: participants listen to each other’s positions and generate group choices after due consideration

Corruption

- The use of public resources in powers for private gain
- debasement of integrity for money, position, privilege, or other self benefit
- abuse or missuse of power or trust for personal benefits rather than the reasons for which the power or trust was given

Types of corruption

Favoritism, bribery, abuse of authority, nepotism, extortion, cronyism, parochialism, patronage, fraud, influence peddling, graft, embezzlement

Bribery spectrum

Major/extortion of bribes
open bribery
subtle bribery
facilitating payments

Facilitating payments

OECD defines the payment to be a facilitating one if it is paid to government employees to speed up an administrative process where the outcome is already predetermined

Subtle bribery

Anything of value improperly requested or given in exchange for a corrupt action

Open bribery

Ex: Selling legal documents on the Internet

Major/extortionate bribes

The act of accompanying the request for a bribe with a specific or implied threat of lost business

Measuring corruption

1. Perceptions: surveys/interviews
2. comparing 2 measures of the same thing
3. direct measurement: estimates
4. Inference from theory: deductive approach

Effects of corruption

1. Distorted incentives: the reward is not based on the quality of goods/services but bribes
2. distortion/misallocation: price distortion, monopolies, reduction of the flow of goods/tax base, divert from efficient/socially desirable uses
3. Side effects: black markets, underground economy, loan sharks, well-being

Why ICTs matter for interactive policy

Include both traditional forms of ICT‘s (community, amateur radio) and modern uses (Internet, phones, social media)

Ways ICTs enable citizen engagement

- Lowering barriers to participation (through social media, mobile SMS, interactive mapping)

- increasing accountability (through increased visibility and ICT tools: captain Zimbabwe)

- increasing transparency (through making information more accessible)

E government

The use of technological communication devices (computer, Internet) to provide public services to citizens

E governance

The application of information technology for delivering government services, exchange of information, communication

Developing an impact chain between ICT and human development

- concrete enhancements (does this translate into concrete enhancement?)
- access issue (Who has access to this technology?)
- information assessment (what are the existing information ecologies?)

According to ICT specialists

- New digital technologies have allowed speakers of native languages to better participate in the political arena
- uptake in usage of new digital and social media tools has been uneven in democracies, often contributed in urban, wealthy, and highly educated areas

Challenges of big data

Volume (Jakarta floodings - 900 tweets per minute)
Reliability

Reliability meets big data: opportunities and challenges

- Products can be outfitted with sensors that can be used to capture information about how and when and under what environmental and operating conditions products are being used
- crowdsourcing can also be used as a way to ensure the reliability of information

Unique value of ICT for CE

- radical openness
- effectiveness
- timeliness
- directness
- inclusiveness

Thick engagement

Small rapidity, access, reach
Big intensity, information, deliberation

Thin engagement

Big rapidity, access, reach
Small intensity, information, deliberation