I am happy to report that we have support for a wonderful new research project with the Portulans Institute focused on democratic innovations. It will be anchored by two complementary components.
The first, which will be central to my work, is focused on finding and critically researching democratic innovations. While much discussion worldwide has focused on concerns over democratic backsliding, erosions of trust, and other risks to democracy, our new project will focus on the rise of informational and communicative initiatives that could improve democratic structures and processes.
There have been decades of research and speculation about innovations in democracy, but this project will identify contemporary and truly novel initiatives at various stages of implementation from anywhere in the world and at any level – from actors (e.g., platforms) and institutions to local, national, and regional levels. What are the most innovative types of democratic initiatives and the most potentially transformative among each type? Our hope is that this project will help shift the narrative and the attention of research to the potential for innovations in democratic processes and institutions as well as providing exemplars for policy and practice.
Initially, the project will focus on the identification of democratic initiatives. Innovations we discover will be grouped into general types, such as in categories of government-citizen communication, new approaches to independent journalism, democratic Internet platforms, ‘democratic-AI’, and more. Determining the appropriate types or categories and finding key examples in each category will be an initial aim of our study, We will then turn to study the standout innovations within each category through more in-depth case studies to critically assess their transformative potential.
As noted, this work will be anchored primarily in case studies, but also draw on multiple methods, including the use of search and expert interviews to ensure that identify the most promising innovations. All of our work will be complemented by a set of workshops and forums to critically discuss the current status and potential of democratic innovations.
The second component will focus on developing AI tools that will learn from but also inform our case study research. Dr Rafael Escalona Reynoso, an economist and CEO of the Portulans Institute, will manage the development of an AI lab for the Portulans Institute directly tied to this project. Our aim is to develop the use of AI-enhanced tools along with natural language processing (NLP) analyses to help discover these democratic innovations. Those innovations we identify will be viewed in the context of existing indicators of democratic nations, such as indicators documented by leading organizations such as Freedom House, Varieties of Democracy (V- Dem), and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). In contrast to national indices, the present study will be focused on innovations at any levels of governance.
We are in the early stages of establishing the research team of individuals with an academic or practitioner focus from multiple disciplines but with a serious interest in democratic innovations. I hope you will follow this project on the Portulans website as well as over this blog. We hope to call attention to the most promising innovations that support democratic processes and institutions. We would value your help. For example, please comment if you have advice or ideas on potential sites for case studies of democratic innovations anywhere in the world.
On behalf of the Portulans Institute and myself, I want to thank the Reynolds Foundation, a charity in the United States, for supporting this research at the Portulans Institute as part of the foundation’s commitment to work on issues of freedom and democracy. See: https://www.reynoldsfoundation.com/
An introduction to research on democratic innovations by Bill Dutton is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395022
The project webpage is at: https://portulansinstitute.org/announcing-the-portulans-democracy-project/