Democratic Process and Digital Platforms: An Engineering Perspective by Danilo Pianini and Andrea Omicini is a book chapter published in The Future of Digital Democracy by Springer in 2019.
Over the last decade, many 4th Industrial Revolution tools and platforms have emerged which contributed to the expanded capabilities adoption of digital democracy. Many countries, in fact, are now creating government ministries in charge of determining how they can be adopted. Because of various social and political pressures as well as the incredibly complex and multi-disciplinary nature of research and development related to digital democracy platforms, several fundamental concerns still remain unanswered. In this book chapter Danilo Pianini and Andrea Omicini focus on those issues that are more traditionally conceived of as relating to the engineering process.
In the analysis phase of the classic software engineering process, one or more artifacts are produced that represent a formal model of the domain.
Looking at two e-democracy platforms adopted by electoral parties, the authors show that this imperative step is missing, along with other phases of engineering process development. Their chapter relates evidence about the current status of digital democracy using several case studies – in platforms such as Rousseau and Liquid Feedback, and then reviews the primary software engineering issues that future tool and platform developers should consider when determining how to improve existent digital democracy software.
Definitions
Citing Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the authors defer to his classic definition of democracy as the “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” While silent on accountability of rulers, how political proposals are defined, who can vote, how votes are tallied and contextualized (i.e. via their relationship to legal institutions such as the Electoral College), etc. the concern of democracy is clearly on legitimizing power.
Given the numerous ways that citizen-stakeholders can now include software in such processes and the increased diffusion of technology – the authors state that a new form of democracy, digital democracy, is increasingly influencing the techno-political landscape and forcing the evolution of our understanding of the possible within politics.
While there are numerous varieties of functional differentiation which exists between digital democracy platforms, the authors identify four fundamental phases common to each:
- Preparation of the proposal.
- Expression of users opinions.
- Summarization of the opinions into a decision.
- Enactment of the decision.
Pirate Party’s Liquid Feedback and the Dictatorship of the Active Ones
Several non-traditional parties, going by the name of the Pirate Party, have emerged in Europe over the past several years. The administrative and managerial elements within these political parties adopted Liquid Feedback as a means of facilitating policy formulation.
One of the problems with this particular platform, however, was the lack of limitations that were placed on discursive participation that subsequently gave rise to the phrase “Dictatorship of the Active Ones.” The model of democracy implicit within the platform sought to maximize expressive capacity via what was, essentially, a complex message board. A problem with this format, however, meant that users who produced large quantities of input and commentary could potentially down out users that were shared less, but of higher quality. It’s likely that because of this issue which caused the platform to be abandoned.
Reverse-Engineering Italy’s Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau deemed that the ideal form of government was that which was administered by the General Will. Fitting, then, that one of the digital democracy platforms, adopted in Italy by Movimiento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement), would be named after him.
Unlike Liquid Feedback there is significantly more capacity for the administrators of the platform to control proposal submission and debate on it. The above diagram shows a reverse-engineered description how it is that the platform worked.
A few democratic issues the authors note the Rousseau platform has are:
- Lack of enacting mechanisms for the user proposals
- Opaque user proposal selection process
- Chaotic proposal organization
- Lack of comment moderation on law proposal
- Unclear impact of comments on law proposals
What is to be done?: Determine How Best to Operationalize Democratic Processes
After the author’s have assessed Liquid Feedback and Rousseau, they point to two major issues in their deployment. First, the evident lack of appropriate software engineering processes applied to development of the platforms and, secondly, the lack of research on modern democratic processes that would allow for the porting of a model of democracy.
On the first point the authors claim that were the designers of these egovernment platforms to have approached the project from a holistic perspective rather than that which sought merely to digitize a few democratic processes then they would have used a waterfall software engineering process. Composed of a sequence of phases that lead from the idea to the implementation, the waterfall software engineering phase takes this order:
– definition of the requirements
– analysis
– architectural design
– detailed design
– verification
– implementation
– maintenance
On the second point the authors claim that this model was avoided due to the difficulty of defining the requirements to adequately operationalize democratic processes. In their own words, they state that:
“Part of the problem depends on to the orthogonality of the matter: in fact, it requires understanding and expertise over an extremely diverse number of subjects, spanning from humanities to applied sciences through social and natural sciences—including, but not limited to, sociology, psychology, law, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. It is then unlikely for small teams to possess and master such a wide expertise, and – along with the typical lack of interdisciplinary cross collaborations – this makes defining/refining knowledge on democratic processes, and their formalisation as well, a difficult issue indeed.” (92)
As digital democracy platforms, in effect, create their own democracy process rather than match what already exists in law – to produce a platform at a whole of government level rather than that which allows for idea solicitation and feedback from parties requires extensive research and development.
Concluding Thoughts
To say that digital democracy is the future and that it will have revolutionary impacts on governance and accountability is an understatement. However to achieve this requires further investment in the creation of a model of democracy that is widely agreed upon in order to develop the functional requirements of the platform.
To work the other way around, the authors contend, is neither a scientific, engineering-minded approach to the matter a hand nor one that allows for optimal operationalization of democracy via digital technology. Give the novelty of much of this research – what is needed is “a strongly-multidisciplinary effort: [as] currently, many issues remain open, and many key questions are still unanswered.” (93).
Though the authors of this article focus solely on the Waterfall process, I think that it’s worth mentioning in an aside that was there to be actual government investment into the project rather than just the parties running for the positions within it, it would be possible to use an Agile model for the development of an egovernment platform. In this case, the sequencing of phases in an Agile model would look like this (Managing Software Process Evolution):
Given current levels of political polarization and typically low level of technical knowledge of elected politicians it is likely that this would be a very difficult process. It is, nevertheless, within the realm of possibility.
Citations
Managing Software Process Evolution: Traditional, Agile and Beyond – How to Handle Process Change edited by Marco Kuhrmann, Jürgen Münch, Ita Richardson, Andreas Rausch, He Zhang
Keywords: Digital democracy · Software engineering · Democratic model