The prospects of E-democracy: an experimental study of collaborative E-rulemaking

ABSTRACT

The recent literature on e-democracy reflects a certain disillusionment with the capacity of e-ruling initiatives to generate processes that serve concurrently the goals of democratization and of “good governance”. The main challenge has been to create e-ruling platforms that facilitate a deliberative process that is sufficiently inclusive and also makes a significant contribution to the policy debate. The present article contributes to this debate through the analysis of a wiki-styled system that combined a forum and a collaborative writing tool. This system enhances the opportunities of citizens to influence the policy debate beyond conventional “notice-and-comment” platforms. The experiment sought to test the capacity of this platform to facilitate an epistemically complex dialogue in a setting that closely resembles real regulatory consultation. We also examined the dynamics of the deliberative process, focusing on the influence of differences in social value orientation on participation levels (distinguishing between active participants and lurkers). The analysis is based on a field experiment held at Bar-Ilan University in December 2014. The topic of the experiment was a debate over the Bar-Ilan University Code Concerning Political Activity on Campus. The Code establishes procedures and rules for conducting public and political activities on campus.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science, Technology and Space for funding this research article (grant no. 3-8907). We would like to thank Einav Tamir, Sara Gold, Yonatan Morell and Ori Hermelin and Doron Negrin for their research assistance.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be access on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Another term used to describe these platforms is “online policy deliberation forums” (Phang et al., 2014). We do not examine in this paper e-ruling systems designed to produce binding decisions, which are rarely used in regulatory contexts.

² We take a broad view of rule-making which covers both national law, secondary rules produced by administrative or municipal authorities and soft law produced by private institutions, such as universities or transnational standard-setting organizations (Perez, 2015).

³ Two recent examples of proposed rules which received thousands of comments are the 2014 FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules (Obar, 2016) and USDA’s proposed rules governing competitive foods in schools (Dinour & Pole, 0000).

⁴ See MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES, Dec. 8, 2009, Open Government Directive, https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-06.pdf. The future of this initiative under Trump’s administration is still unclear (Williams, 2018): https://sunlightfoundation.com/2018/01/24/under-trump-u-s-government-moves-from-open-to-closed/.

⁵ Regulations.gov basically mimics the commenting structure of the U.S. Administrative Procedure Act 5 U.S.C. §§ 553 (2012) (http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/laws/administrative-procedure/553.html and https://www.regulations.gov/#!faqs).

⁶ Lurkers are “persistent, though silent and passive, members of online communities who do not contribute to groups” (Amichai-Hamburger et al., 2016, p. 269). The distinction is not binary, however, but rather defines a spectrum of potential behaviors.

⁷ Effects on the participants refer primarily to changes in civic capacities (information, public spiritedness, tolerance) and to a potential shift in participants’ views on the debated topic (Fishkin, 2009, pp. 102–103; Mutz, 2008, p. 530).

⁸ Our approach combines elements from two strands of literature: the “discourse quality” camp and the “deliberative intelligence” camp (Mucciaroni & Quirk, 2006, 2010).

⁹ Examples include Googledoc, Etherpad, Mediawiki and FidusWriter.

¹⁰ See the “talk page” in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages.

¹¹ http://www.regulations.gov/#!home; http://www1.canada.ca/consultingcanadians/; https://petition.parliament.uk/.

¹² Most of the studies of political wikis are field studies, which have their own limitations; see, e.g., (Raynes-Goldie & Fono, 2009), (Heikka, 2015) and (Perez, 2013).

¹³ In addition to Bar-Ilan: Ben Gurion University, Haifa University, Hebrew University, Technion and Tel Aviv University. The only institute without a code is the Weizmann Institute of Science.

¹⁴ Article five of the Act states that “Without derogating from any other right stated by law, each student has the freedom to express his opinions, positions and views with regard to the content of study materials and the values expressed in them; nothing in this provision shall limit the capacity of an academic institution to regulate the way in which opinions, positions and views are expressed in order to protect the orderly function of teaching”. Article six states that “Every student has the right to organize and demonstrate on any subject and topic, including on subjects pertaining to students and their rights, according to the rules governing this issue, included in the institution’s code”. The Student Rights act gives Israeli universities significant discretion regarding the regulation of political activities.

¹⁵ Additional challenges include the potential influence of business interests, the problem of mass e-mails and the facilitation of regulatory responsiveness (Mendelson, 2012; Michael, 2014).

¹⁶ The social dilemma underlying deliberative e-ruling differs from “take-some” dilemmas, in which there is a common resource from which each member of a group decides how much to harvest.

¹⁷ Most of the studies that considered the influence of personality on participation have considered general web-based forums such as Facebook (Amichai-Hamburger et al., 2016; Preece, Nonnecke, & Andrews, 2004; Sun et al., 2014); our study is unique in its focus on electronic-mediated deliberation.

¹⁸ This potential hypothesis was ignored by Kube et al (Kube et al., 2015).

¹⁹ We describe below the indicators through which we measured activity levels.

²⁰ We posted several messages on several BIU student forums.

²¹ This is how we formulated the condition: “You will receive a financial compensation in the amount of NIS 200, contingent upon completion of both questionnaires (from beginning to end), and upon active participation in forum discussions and in the preparation of the joint document.”

²² We started with 120 students who were allocated to the four groups. Eight participants did not answer the first questionnaire and were excluded from the experiment (8 participants: 7 females, 1 male; 1 from LA, 2 from LI, 3 from SA, 2 from SI). Two participants asked to withdraw (2 females, 1 from LI, 1 from LA). Of the remaining group of 110, 8 students were deleted from the final database because they failed to interact with the platform (complete “free-riders”) (6 females, 2 males: 1 from LA, 1 from SA, 2 from LI, 4 from SI). From the remaining group of 102: 4 participants (females: 1 from SA, 3 from SI) failed to answer the second questionnaire, and 1 participant answered it twice (female, from SI); her answers were excluded.

²³ User201-230 for LA; user301-330 for SA.

²⁴ The term we used in Hebrew would be more accurately translated as “summary document.” To maintain consistency, we use the term “joint document” in the article.

²⁵ Hebrew is written from right to left.

²⁶ Because the experiment was conducted in Hebrew, the buttons were ordered from right to left.

²⁷ The home page had a table-like structure, with the title of the Code section, number of participants who were online, number of comments (in each discussion thread), number of visits to the given thread, and updates on recent posts/comments to the thread.

²⁸ For the anonymous groups these were the anonymous user names.

²⁹ Because the experiment was conducted in Hebrew, the main body of the forum was on the right and the tracking column on the left.

³⁰ For a detailed discussion of Regulation.Room intensive moderating approach see (Epstein & Leshed, 2016).

³¹ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Benayoun and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJMEy1XKDs.

³² See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Bakri. These two figures represent the radical right (Benayoun) and radical left (Bakri) in Israel, and we thought that they could trigger a discussion on Article 6.

³³ The meeting took place on 28 January 2015.

³⁴ Part of the texts included strike-through paragraphs, which some participants used instead deleting text. These paragraphs were not included in the word count.

³⁵ The distribution of types was somewhat different from other studies which have found more prosocials than individualists (Van Lange, Bekkers, Chirumbolo, & Leone, 2012, p. 464; Van Lange, Klapwijk, & Van Munster, 2011, p. 862). For example, Van Lange et al. identified 45 prosocials, 33 individualists, 7 competitors; and 15 unclassifiables (P. Van Lange et al., 2012, p. 464).

³⁶ The findings were checked twice by two teams of students for consistency.

³⁷ Group SI: 1 participant (male); Group LI: 2 participants (1 female, 1 male); Group SA: 2 participants (males); Group LA: 1 participant (male).

³⁸ The relevant decision-making body within Bar-Ilan University is the Senate, although the issue would have probably been discussed first by the Rector and the Dean of Students.

³⁹ Excerpts were translated from the Hebrew original.

⁴⁰ Quoted from “About the University”, http://www1.biu.ac.il/EN/about. There is some similarity between Bar-Ilan and American universities such as Yeshiva University, Pepperdine University, and Notre Dame (although there are also important differences that we cannot discuss here). Most of Bar-Ilan students are secular Jews and that there is also a significant number of Israeli Arab (Muslim) students.

⁴¹ Article 1.3 of the Code states similarly that “The purpose of this Code is to establish procedures and rules for conducting public and political activities on campus so as to allow maximum freedom of expression, subject to observing the laws of the state; ensuring security; preventing disorders and disruption of the proper course of instruction, research, and work at the university; maintaining the integrity of facilities and equipment; maintaining order, cleanliness, and landscaping; respecting the special character of the university; and preserving harmony and tolerance on campus” (our emphasis).

⁴² A similar concern was raised by this forum regarding the text of Article 6.1.1, noting again that the vagueness of the term could leave too much power at the hands of the University. They also noted, however, that the provisions have some advantage because it gives the University the power “to ban controversial activities (such as commemoration of Nakba Day)”.

⁴³ The joint document of Forum S also discussed this question, but it focused on a particular problem related to student accommodation, which was less relevant to the BIU Code.

⁴⁴ For recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court that discuss this doctrine see, e.g., Skilling v. U.S. 130 S. Ct. 2896 (2010) and Johnson v. United States 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015).

⁴⁵ Three additional themes are noted in Appendix I.

⁴⁶ The terms “cell” designates a group of students that seeks approval of the University to act as a recognized association. Such recognition is needed if the group wants to organize events within the University and receive such benefits as permission to use rooms.

⁴⁷ Taken from the text of forum LA; the issue was also raised by forums LI and SA, but not with the same level of detail and sophistication.

⁴⁸ Group LA thought that this prohibition is too wide because demonstrations may focus on topics that are important to the broad public. The prohibition was also criticized by groups LI and SA, although these forums also included arguments supporting the prohibition.

⁴⁹ The strongest opposition was voiced by forum LI. Forum SA discussed it from a different perspective.

⁵⁰ Technically, the Dean of Students has the authority to make decisions only with respect to applications by students (the Rector and the Director General hold the respective authorities to applications by academic faculty and administrative stuff). But because almost all applications come from students, and participants of the experiment were all students, in our shortened version of the BIU Code we referred only to the Dean of Students.

⁵¹ For example, forum LA criticized the extensive authority granted to the Dean by Article 9, finding it is problematic that the authority to approve public activity resided with the Dean alone, and some of the students proposed that the decision should be made by a committee. Forum SA raised similar concerns with regard to the same article, asking explicitly: “Can there be a situation in which the students do everything according to the Code but the Dean prohibits the activity because it is incompatible with his worldview”? Groups LI and SI did not discuss this issue.

⁵² Gabriel Michael showed that legal representation has played an important factor in predicting influence in digital consultation (Michael, 2014). This finding is not inconsistent with ours since we measured the influence of “legal education” and not of “legal representation”.

⁵³ We did not find evidence of a censuring effect; this was reflected in references to minority opinions in the joint texts.

⁵⁴ For the contrast with Regulation Room see (Farina et al., 2013).

⁵⁵ More details on the GRI consultation platform can be found here: https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/Pages/default.aspx; more details on ‘co-cities’ can be founds here http://collaborativecties.designforcommons.org/ (Iaione, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Technology and Space [grant no. 3-8907].