Centre for Digital Governance
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To unlock the full potential of ICT-related public sector innovation and digital transformation, governments must embrace collaborative working structures and leadership, is commonly argued. However, little is known about the dynamics of such collaborations in contexts of hierarchy, silo cultures, and procedural accountability. A widely voiced but empirically insufficiently substantiated claim is that bringing cross-cutting digital endeavours forward requires more lateral, network-based approaches to governance beyond traditional Weberian ideals. We test this claim by shedding light on three distinct challenges (complexity, risk, and power imbalance) encountered when implementing the specific collaborative case of the German Online Access Act (OAA) and by examining how they have been addressed in institutional design and leadership. Our analysis, which combines desk research and semi-structured expert interviews, reveals that flexible, horizontal approaches are on the rise. Taking a closer look, however, vertical coordination continues to serve as complementary means to problem-solving capability.
Is There an AI Cold War?
(2021)
Regulation is a means societies use to create the stability, public goods, and infrastructure they need to thrive securely. This policy brief is intended to both document and to address claims of a new AI cold war: a binary competition between the United States and China that is too important for other powers to either ignore or truly participate in directly, beyond taking sides. We argue that while some of the claims of this narrative are based at least in part on genuine security concerns and important unknowns, evidence for its extreme binary nature is lacking. This absence of factual evidence is concerning, because related geopolitical tensions may be used to interfere with regulation of AI and agencies associated with its development. Here we first document and then analyze the extremely bipolar picture prominent policymakers and political commentators have been recently painting of the AI technological situation, portraying China and the United States as the only two global powers. We then examine the plausibility of these claims using two measures: internationally registered AI patents and the market capitalization of the companies that hold them. These two measures, while each somewhat arbitrary and imperfect, are often deployed in the context of the binary narrative and can therefore be seen as conservative choices in that they should favor exactly the “champions” of that narrative. In fact, these measures do not produce bipolar results: Chinese capacity has been exaggerated and that of other global regions deprecated. These findings call into question the motivation behind the documented claims, though they also further illuminate the uncertainty concerning digital technology security. We recommend that all parties engage in contributing to a safe, secure, and transparent regulatory landscape.
The process of digitalising government is rapidly gaining speed, resulting in a pressing need for increased inter-governmental integration and challenging the traditional silo structures of government. This has sparked the adoption of inter-governmental collaborative working arrangements and efforts to develop joint standards and solutions; yet little is known about how exactly this manifests itself in the context of ambitious digitalisation projects. This report provides new empirical evidence on the challenges and dynamics of collaboration within and between public organisations in order to drive digital transformation. The report begins with a literature review on collaborative management with a particular focus on collaboration in the context of government digitalisation. This literature serves as a basis for developing a set of five propositions regarding how intergovernmental collaborative digitalisation projects can be best designed and managed. Following the conceptual framework of the TROPICO project deliverable 6.3 developed by Rackwitz et al. (2020), the report investigates the interplay between system context, collaboration challenges and dynamics (i.e. complexity, risk and power imbalances), public management interventions (i.e. institutional design and leadership) as well as outcomes. Emphasis is placed upon the role of institutional design and leadership in order to cope with the challenges inherent to collaborative governance approaches. The framework and related propositions are then verified through the use of empirical findings from ten comparative case studies from five European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom). The case studies, presented in detail in TROPICO deliverable 6.3, examine the development of national government-wide online portals, as well as the implementation of municipal Smart City initiatives. The cases show that the system dynamics and challenges of digitalisation projects, such as size and scope, tend to generate resource-intensive and demanding working conditions. Creating hybrid structures that incorporate both network and hierarchical approaches has been a common approach to handling these conditions and balancing the demands of inter-departmental collaboration with the inherent accountabilities and existing working cultures of public organisations. At the steering level, a central coordinator with collaborative leadership skills was found to be key to driving the projects forward and achieving outcomes. Participatory, network-style approaches at the working group level were successful in balancing the demands of all collaborative partners and encouraging wide-scale engagement. In addition, opting for wide-scale inclusion, setting ground rules and clear processes as well as a focus on trust and social capital development proved essential. While most leadership approaches still maintain elements of transactional leadership in managing projects, collaborative leadership approaches such as bringing stakeholders together, mediating problems, and guiding and steering the process were used in many instances to handle the complexities inherent in the project objectives. In the conclusion of the report, contributions are discussed, followed by an outline for future research avenues.
This paper proposes a novel instrument – the political position generator - for measuring individuals’ political ties, or personal, affective connections to state officials and other political actors. It adopts and adapts the more general position generator framework in social capital research to capture three key dimensions of political ties – upper reachability, network diversity, and tie strength. The measure is validated with data from a representative survey of the Chinese population and three scales representing the three political ties dimensions are created. In correlational and multivariate regression analyses, we find initial evidence of the instrument’s criterion-related (discriminant and concurrent) validity.
While the coronavirus spreads, governments are attempting to reduce contagion rates at the expense of negative economic effects. Market expectations plummeted, foreshadowing the risk of a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. Governments provide huge financial aid programmes to mitigate the economic shocks. To achieve higher effectiveness with such policy measures, it is key to identify the industries that are most in need of support. In this study, we introduce a data-mining approach to measure industry-specific risks related to COVID-19. We examine company risk reports filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This alternative data set can complement more traditional economic indicators in times of the fast-evolving crisis as it allows for a real-time analysis of risk assessments. Preliminary findings suggest that the companies' awareness towards corona-related business risks is ahead of the overall stock market developments. Our approach allows to distinguish the industries by their risk awareness towards COVID-19. Based on natural language processing, we identify corona-related risk topics and their perceived relevance for different industries. The preliminary findings are summarised as an up-to-date online index. The CoRisk-Index tracks the industry-specific risk assessments related to the crisis, as it spreads through the economy. The tracking tool is updated weekly. It could provide relevant empirical data to inform models on the economic effects of the crisis. Such complementary empirical information could ultimately help policymakers to effectively target financial support in order to mitigate the economic shocks of the crisis.
During campaigns for legislative elections, a large portion of the general public follows televised debates between the front-running candidates. How can the candidates use the public interest in the debates to increase the support for their party? In this article, we argue that especially challenger candidates can improve the public perception of their valence qualities, such as personal integrity, leadership, and competence, and can - as a result - raise the support of their party. We expect that the perceived policy stances of the candidates matter less. Building on televised debate experiments during the German Federal Elections of 2009 and 2013, we analyse the effect of the debates on party vote and in how far this relationship is mediated by changes in valence and policy evaluations of the candidates. Results show that changes of candidate valence, but not changes in policy perceptions, of the social-democratic front-running candidates mediate the vote intention for the party. Respondents who perceived the candidates more competent, empathetic and have integrity as a result of the debate are more likely to vote for the candidate's party. Our analysis further reveals, however, that this valence effect is not long-lasting and does not carry-over to vote intention briefly before the election.
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively employ strategies to facilitate polarisation on Twitter, as past contributions show, via strategies of 'hashjacking'. For the example of COVID-19 related hashtags and their retweet networks, we examine the case of partisan accounts of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of 'hashjacking' in May 2020. Our findings indicate that polarisation of political party hashtags has not changed significantly in the last two years. We see that right-wing partisans are actively and effectively polarising the discourse by 'hashjacking' COVID-19 related hashtags, like #CoronaVirusDE or #FlattenTheCurve. This polarisation strategy is dominated by the activity of a limited set of heavy users. The results underline the necessity to understand the dynamics of discourse polarisation, as an active political communication strategy of the far-right, by only a handful of very active accounts.
“Hashjacking” the Debate: Polarisation Strategies of Germany’s Political Far-Right on Twitter
(2019)
Twitter is a digital forum for political discourse. The emergence of phenomena like fake news and hate speech has shown that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Recent findings suggest that some political actors might employ strategies to actively facilitate polarisation on Twitter. With a network approach, we examine the case of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of a “hashjacking” strategy (The use of someone else’s hashtag in order to promote one’s own social media agenda.). Our findings suggest that right-wing politicians (and their supporters/retweeters) actively and effectively polarise the discourse not just by using their own party hashtags, but also by “hashjacking” the political party hashtags of other established parties. The results underline the necessity to understand the success of right-wing parties, online and in elections, not entirely as a result of external effects (e.g. migration), but as a direct consequence of their digital political communication strategy.
For a number of years scholars have theorized about a change of paradigm in the collaborative practices between governments and citizens as a result of the newly emerged many-to-many forms of connectivity. A vibrant agenda on open government has flourished since, with critical advances on the conceptual front, but much less empirical testing of its propositions. This article makes use of a recognized typology of co-production initiatives in order to implement a Cox hazards survival analysis of 465 open government platforms from a global sample in 87 countries. Its main findings suggest that government-initiated collaborations have the lowest risk of termination and that citizen-to-government initiatives the highest. They also show that while internationally-exerted pressure for openness favors the genesis of open government platforms, it does not affect their survival chances.
Social media companies rely on user agreements as one means to manage content produced by users. While much has been written on user agreements and community standards of U.S.-based social media, surprisingly little is known about Chinese user agreements and their implications. We compare terms of services as well as privacy policies of WeChat and Weibo between 2014 and 2019 using their U.S. counterparts WhatsApp and Twitter as a benchmark. We find that Chinese user agreements reveal a territorial-based understanding of content management differentiating between PRC and non-PRC users based on language, IP address and country of citizenship. Second, Chinese social media companies are surprisingly transparent about what content can be published, which has implications for self-censorship among users. Third, changes in PRC user agreements reflect Xi Jinping’s tightening control of the Internet. Finally, U.S.-based platforms have moved towards content management that differs by region, thus becoming more similar to the Chinese approach over time.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technical term often referring to artifacts used to detect contexts for human actions, or sometimes also for machines able to effect actions in response to detected contexts. Our capacity to build such artifacts has been increasing, and with it the impact they have on our society. This does not alter the fundamental roots or motivations of law, regulation, or diplomacy, which rest on persuading humans to behave in a way that provides sustainable security for humans. It does however alter nearly every other aspect of human social behaviour, including making accountability and responsibility potentially easier to trace. This chapter reviews the nature and implications of AI with particular attention to how they impinge on possible applications to and of law.
Robot, all too human
(2019)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A large body of literature claims that ICT and digitalisation have triggered broad organisational and cultural changes in public organisations. These changes have led many to conclude that a new era has begun that is characterised by collaboration within intra-and intersectoral networks and this has become a key paradigm for public sector governance and innovation. Yet, empirical evidence of a shift towards “Networked Governance” remains limited, and few have explored further the linkages between digitalisation and collaboration in the public sector. Work Package 6 of the TROPICO project addresses this void by providing a meta-analysis of the design, coordination, and implementation of national digitalisation strategies in eight European countries with different administrative traditions (Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and UK). By coding the countries’ first significant and most recent strategies, we examine whether there is evidence supporting the argument of a paradigmatic shift with respect to public sector governance and collaboration. The final analysis is based on 8496 codes and on an additional questionnaire filled out by the relevant TROPICO partners’ country teams. Based on our results we cannot conclude that a Networked Governance is emerging in the era of digital government, but rather find confirmation that all reform paradigms are present in governments’ digitalisation efforts. In fact, the way in which digital transformation of the public sector is put forward in the strategies may strengthen hierarchical patterns of command and control. Findings further indicate that over time collaboration has changed regarding scope and motives, while its intensity has remained relatively weak. Moreover, administrative traditions do not serve as explanatory approach for country variations in the context of digitalisation strategies. Rather, divergences are explained by the different geneses and purposes of the documents. However, we observe similarities in the perceived success factors: a common vision, cultural change, accessibility, leadership and trust are main recurring themes. Furthermore, we find no conclusive evidence that governance paradigms and collaborative arrangements in the digitalisation strategies influencethe performance of digital government. Lastly, in the conclusion of the report, we address some recommendations to practitioners for designing and implementing digitalisation strategies
Research on smart cities is still at an early stage. The conjecture of this article is that smart city strategies and their impacts will inevitably vary across contexts; however, the debate still lacks an analytical toolkit that guides the exploration of such varieties (and similarities) of smart cities. Combining existing research on the governance of smart cities with theories of business–state relations from political economy, this article develops an analytical framework and typology that captures varieties (and similarities) of smart city policies and governance. We apply this framework to four illustrative cases: Prague, Barcelona, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro.
The Instinct Planner is a new biologically inspired reactive planner, based on an established behaviour based robotics methodology and its reactive planner component—the POSH planner implementation. It includes several significant enhancements that facilitate plan design and runtime debugging. It has been specifically designed for low power processors and has a tiny memory footprint. Written in C++, it runs eciently on both Arduino(Atmel AVR) and Microsoft VC++ environments and has been deployed within a low cost maker robot to study AI Transparency. Plans may be authored using a variety of tools including a new visual design language, currently implemented using the Dia drawing package.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technical term referring to artifacts used to detect contexts or to effect actions in response to detected contexts. Our capacity to build such artifacts has been increasing, and with it the impact they have on our society. This article first documents the social and economic changes brought about by our use of AI, particularly but not exclusively focusing on the decade since the 2007 advent of smartphones, which contribute substantially to “big data” and therefore the efficacy of machine learning. It then projects from this political, economic, and personal challenges confronting humanity in the near future, including policy recommendations. Overall, AI is not as unusual a technology as expected, but this very lack of expected form may have exposed us to a significantly increased urgency concerning familiar challenges. In particular, the identity and autonomy of both individuals and nations is challenged by the increased accessibility of knowledge.
The spread of false information and hate speech has increased with the rise of social media. This paper critically examines this phenomenon and the reactions of governments and major corporations in Europe. Policymakers have turned towards national regulation as a means to manage false information and hate speech. This article looks into the legislative frameworks on the issue in Germany, France, the UK, the Czech Republic, and Italy and compares them. In response to such regulatory pressure, tech companies have been changing aspects of their platforms to deal with this trend, for example through content moderation. We propose tentative alternatives to this current approach towards reinforcing boundaries for freedom of expression.
Designing authoritarian deliberation: how social media platforms influence political talk in China
(2019)
Discussion is often celebrated as a critical element of public opinion and political participation. Recently, scholars have suggested that the design and features of specific online platforms shape what is politically expressed online and how. Building on these findings and drawing on 112 semi-structured qualitative interviews with information technology experts and internet users, we explain how major Chinese social media platforms differ in structure and motivation. Drawing upon a nationwide representative survey and an online experiment, we find that platforms aiming to make users a source of information through public, information-centred communication, such as the Twitter-like Weibo, are more conducive to political expression; while platforms built to optimize building social connections through private, user-centred communication, such as WhatsApp and Facebook-like WeChat, tend to inhibit political expression. These technological design effects are stronger when users believe the authoritarian state tolerates discussion, but less important when political talk is sensitive. The findings contribute to the debate on the political consequences of the internet by specifying technological and political conditions.
Der föderale Staatsaufbau und die konsensorientierten Institutionen des deutschen Regierungssystems schaffen einen hohen Koordinationsbedarf und erschweren die Integration neuer Technologien und Politiken in bestehende Strukturen. Dies zeigt sich auch beim E-Government, also der Digitalisierung der Verwaltung. Besonders die föderale Organisation von Verwaltungszuständigkeiten verkompliziert die Koordination beim E-Government, während beispielsweise im Gesundheitsbereich die konsensorientierten Institutionen die Einführung technischer Innovationen verlangsamen. Gewisse Fortschritte Deutschlands sind im internationalen Vergleich gleichwohl zu erkennen.
While the Internet was created without much governmental oversight, states have gradually drawn territorial borders via Internet governance. China stands out as a promoter of such a territorial‐based approach. China's separate Web infrastructure shapes data when information technologies capture traces of human behavior. As a result, area expertise can contribute to the substantive, methodological, and ethical debates surrounding big data. This article discusses how a number of critical questions that have been raised about big data more generally apply to the Chinese context: How does big data change our understanding of China? What are the limitations of big data from China? What is the context in which big data is generated in China? Who has access to big data and who knows the tools? How can big data from China be used in an ethical way? These questions are intended to spark conversations about best practices for collaboration between data scientists and China experts.
Race to the Bottom: Media Marketization and Increasing Negativity Toward the United States in China
(2012)
This article examines how Chinese newspapers respond to opposing demands by audiences and Propaganda Department authorities about news regarding the United States when competition poses pressure on marketized media to make a profit. To examine the tone of news reporting about the U.S., I rely on a computer-aided text analysis of news stories published in the People's Daily and the Beijing Evening News, comparing the years 1999 and 2003 before and after the rise of commercialized newspapers in the Beijing newspaper market. Results show that the emergence of news competitors may exert pressure on less marketized papers to change news content, resulting in an increase of negative news about the United States. Evidence is provided to show that the rise of negative news is unlikely to result from an intended strategy by Propaganda authorities, actions undertaken by the American government, or journalists' own attitudes.
This article investigates how and why measures developed in the American context yield different results in China. Research in the United States has shown that a person's level of political knowledge is a stronger and more consistent predictor of news reception compared to alternative measures, such as media consumption or education. Yet a case study of news reception of pension reform in Beijing demonstrates that attentiveness and education constitute more valid indicators than knowledge. These differences in the empirical findings may result from translation from English into Chinese as well as specifics of the Chinese education system. However, when using valid measures the relationship between attentiveness and news reception is strong among Beijing residents, revealing that information-processing works as anticipated based on American media research.
This study examines the role of the media in sustaining regime stability in an authoritarian context. The article engages the recent work on authoritarian resilience in comparative politics but goes beyond the standard focus on elections to other important institutions, such as the media and courts, that are used by authoritarian leaders to bolster legitimacy. The authors find that the Chinese media contribute to regime legitimacy and effective rule by propagandizing citizens’ experiences in the legal system. However, unlike the “mouthpieces” of earlier communist regimes, the marketized Chinese media provide more convincing and sophisticated messages that continue to accord with state censorship demands while satisfying readers’ interest in real-life stories and problems. The “positive propaganda” and the relative uniformity of information sources because of state censorship lead aggrieved citizens to the law as a realm for dispute resolution and rights protection. Statistical analysis of a randomly sampled survey conducted in four Chinese cities in 2005 demonstrates that exposure to media reporting about labor-law-related issues successfully promotes the image of a proworker bias in the law among citizens, thus encouraging them to participate in the legal system. The state is able to achieve its political goal because of the lack of conflicting sources of information and the lack of previous experience with the reformed legal system among citizens.
Why does online public opinion emerge in some social media more easily than in others? Building on research on authoritarian deliberation, we describe spaces for political discussion in Chinese cyberspace in terms of interactivity, which results in different forms of political discussion. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative expert interviews with information and communications technology professionals at Tencent, Weibo, and Baidu, we explain how major social media differ in terms of their structure and the company’s motivation. We specify which features are more likely to facilitate the emergence of online public opinion in Chinese social media and provide preliminary evidence from 92 semi-structured interviews with Internet users.
Based on a survey of more than 6700 top civil servants in 17 European countries, this book explores the impacts of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms in Europe from a uniquely comparative perspective. It examines and analyses empirical findings regarding the dynamics, major trends and tools of administrative reforms, with special focus on the diversity of top executives’ perceptions about the effects of those reforms.
This book focuses on the implementation of digital strategies in the public sectors in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India and Germany. The case studies presented examine different digital projects by looking at their impact as well as their alignment with their national governments’ digital strategies. The contributors assess the current state of digital government, analyze the contribution of digital technologies in achieving outcomes for citizens, discuss ways to measure digitalization and address the question of how governments oversee the legal and regulatory obligations of information technology. The book argues that most countries formulate good strategies for digital government, but do not effectively prescribe and implement corresponding policies and programs. Showing specific programs that deliver results can help policy makers, knowledge specialists and public-sector researchers to develop best practices for future national strategies.