Technologies to support citizen deliberation and participation form a growing market. This work has been commissioned to support the development of new technologies aimed at enhancing and scaling the use of the Scottish Government's Participation Framework for data governance.
Introduction
There is an increasing recognition regarding the imperative to enable citizens to engage directly in political decision-making, drawing upon the tenets of participatory and deliberative democracy. This consensus stems from the acknowledgement that citizen engagement is an essential procedure for securing the public legitimacy of political decision-making, improving the quality of policy, and fostering civic values such as respect and open-mindedness (Bächtiger & Parkinson, 2019).
Countries worldwide have embarked on experimenting with citizen deliberation mechanisms, referred to as the "deliberative wave" in governance (OECD, 2020). In a general sense, deliberation can be characterised as decision-making through reason-giving, critical questioning and mutual listening (Bächtiger & Dryzek, 2024). Within this landscape, deliberative mini-publics and participatory budgeting have become some of the most common democratic innovations, but participatory processes more generally can take multiple forms and methods.
Concepts like participation and deliberation are sometimes loosely used (Bobbio, 2019; Elstub, 2018). Broadly speaking, participatory democracy means increasing citizen control over political decisions, while deliberation places a particular emphasis on reason-giving and informed dialogue (Bobbio, 2019). Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, it is safe to say, as Curato et al. (2017) stated, “participation and deliberation go together” (p.32). For this review, we will refer to both under the banner of “engagement” to refer to citizen-led processes that are talk-centric and typically invited by institutions.
In the Scottish context, these new demands for citizen-led governance are reflected in the Scottish Government's commitment to Open Government as partners in the international coalition. Additionally, it furthers previous efforts like the formation of the Institutionalising Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Working Group (IPDD) that helped consolidate Scotland's interest in establishing permanent infrastructures for high-quality participatory and deliberative engagements. Most recently, the Scottish Government's Participation Handbook showcases the Government's commitment to coordinating and improving the overall support for deliberative engagement.
Against this background, we understand the centrality of the CivTech challenge for supporting the development of a high-quality participation infrastructure in Scotland. For context, the CivTech challenge is a Scottish Government programme that connects private and third sectors to address public needs. Specifically, the upcoming CivTech challenge that motivates this work seeks to address how can technology be systematically explored, to enhance and scale the use of the Scottish Government's Participation Framework for data governance.
Digital technologies have great potential to help scale up deliberation and participation without losing deliberativeness or supporting coordination for collective intelligence (often called "Civic Techs") However, there is little ground to believe that technology in itself can deliver these results without being incorporated into a broader, careful process design and an appropriate institutional and sociotechnical context. Moreover, the vast diversity of already available tools with different designs and affordances creates a complex scenario for future developments seeking a differentiating factor.
The complexity and competition level for new Civic Techs is so demanding that the most recent guide on building new tools by Grassroot South Africa and MIT is called "Don't Build It" (Jordan, 2021). Nonetheless, a significant portion of the competition among Civic Techs can also in part be explained by the redundancies in features they provide. In other words, there are many available tools that cover the same democratic needs, but there may be a lot of democratic needs not being covered. For instance, exploratory studies have shown that most civic techs focus on the citizen experience during the forum more than on the political impact monitoring after it (Mellon et al., 2022).
Broadly speaking, Civic Techs can be used for different functions including the following (Stempeck, 2022):
- Proposing new projects.
- Deliberating to agree on shared decisions.
- Planning how to use public spaces.
- Voting on how to spend public budgets.
- Prioritizing potential options.
- Drafting policies and legislation.
However, not all these functions are equally relevant for citizen deliberation. As described by Zhang et al. (2022), only a few Civic Techs are designed for democratic engagement and not just citizen services. Given the nature of the CivTech challenge, we will focus on the tools for engagement. More specifically, we will focus on technologies purpose-built for engagement (Meylan-Stevenson et al., 2024).
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