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Ben Kaplan 01:01
Hey, it's Ben Kaplan. Today on Unpolitics. I'm chatting with Tiago Peixoto, who currently serves as a visiting professor at the Center for Democratic Features at the University of Southampton. Born in Brazil and based in Serbia, Tiago is an expert in participatory governments and approach to governance that involves citizens in the very decision making processes that affect them. Tiago has been honored as one of the 20 most innovative people in democracy, and is one of the 100 most influential people in digital government. He has also managed projects for the European Commission, OECD, the World Bank in the United Nations. So how can government's involve citizens directly in the budget allocation process? And what role does AI play in democracy's future? Let's innovate.
Ben Kaplan 01:51
Tiago, you're Brazilian, and you got your start in really exploring digital governments looking at one particular issue, which is interesting, not done a lot of in the US, which is this notion of participatory budgeting. So let's maybe start there. First of all, what is the participatory part? And how does that relate to budgeting and how we might look at government differently?
Tiago Peixoto 02:15
First of all, Ben, thanks a lot. It's great to be here. So brightspot Three, budgeting. When we think of government and government talks about their policy intentions, when we vote on a certain candidate, I'm going to do this or that the way that policy intentions translate into actions, it's through the budget. It's where the where the money calls the budget, it's what really materializes, policy intentions into action. I always think it also is if there's not a clear plan for a government, you go to the budgets, right? The budget shows where those priorities where there's decisions made, if there is no like Official Plan, the budget is the plan, because in this case, Money Talks, you are 100% correct on that Ben, actually, if you want to see if a government walks to talk is to see if what they say they're doing. If that corresponds to the budget, in which many cases we're going to find that either the policy or the policy is a piece of fiction, compared to the budget where we're actually it's like where the rubber hits the road. And so the idea of participatory budgeting, it started in in Brazil in 1989, in a city called Portalegre, where the new incoming mayor wanted to involve citizens more in governing. So why have to start for any of those who understand the inner workings of government, if you don't involve citizens, you need to involve them in budgetary decision. So how does spritz Batory budgeting works, you take a part of your investment budget, let's say we have $100 million to invest, you take a part of that 10 million, 20 million 50 million. And you say, Okay, we gonna ask the citizens where this money should go. And then you have a whole process for citizens to help to decide on that one important aspect of rich, buttery budgeting. It is that in principle on its design, you want to make sure that the poor gets the most. So think of a city like San Francisco, you take the poorest neighborhoods, the number of inhabitants and the budget that is distributed, it is proportional to the population and also proportional to the poverty so to speak, so that it makes sure that you have a redistributive effect, enrich those most populated places where people are most in need, have a bigger say on the budget in the sense of of they get more money. And just to be clear, for people listening who haven't encountered this idea before. This isn't just a survey, give us your opinion on where it should go and we'll take it into consideration. This has a bit more teeth than that. Correct in terms of what is the effect of doing we say engaging
Ben Kaplan 05:00
Residents engaging citizens, maybe putting some it sounds like some guidelines in place about how you're going to engage them based on overall societal goals. But then they have more to do than just raise their hand and say, I think we should fund this or that priority.
Tiago Peixoto 05:16
That's precisely the idea of participatory budgeting is not a Budget Consultation. Okay. So participatory budgeting in principle, what the citizens decide gets done. So, sometimes people are afraid of that, well, but citizens don't have enough information on these issues like that. But what we see in practice in there, lots of studies, and I've, I've participated in lots of these studies, sexually that many times citizens make much better decisions than if you didn't have the bridge, but for improved in places are most most of the times. So it is politically binding, in the sense that there is a pre commitment from the government before on achieving those goals, because budget consultations have a problem. And just to see, which is cherry picking, if you ask 100,000 citizens, what you're going to do with the budget, there is always gonna you're always going to find somebody who say something that we're planning to do anyway. And then you just do that cherry picking and do that participatory budget, no, citizens decide
Ben Kaplan 06:16
what is the mechanics for this? Because to use your example, if you ask 100,000 people how to spend the money, you might get 100,000 answers. How do you turn that into a binding effect? or actual implementation? Like, is it multiple choice, like, you know, choose from these five options, or 10 options or 50? Options? How is the world of what they can fund limited so it actually can be implemented.
Tiago Peixoto 06:39
So think of a crowdsourcing process, right? Lots of ideas come in first. And at the neighborhood level, people start meeting, either online or offline or in person. And people start to bring their ideas. And as people put their ideas, some ideas get voted, and they go to the top. So you have a first round, which would call the ideation rally in which everybody can come with their ideas. And each ideas confronted to one another, and people go voting in those ideas that go to the top, they enter into a ballot. And then those of us let's suppose, for example, for neighborhood a, you're going to have 10 options. And those that were the most popular ideas going through that those 10. And then you vote on them afterwards. The idea but what is important in your approach, but verbiage is not just people voting, it's people also discussing on what they need, meaning
Ben Kaplan 07:36
that it's part of being invested in the whole process, having a say, encouraging participation in engagement, it's so as a lot more invested, if simple example, if you're planning a party, and that party from the very beginning, you've involved in all of that, versus you just show up at the party and someone says, Hey, can you you know, can you put the ice over here, you're not that invested in the party. But if you plan the whole party and came up with the whole concept, and did all of that you're much more invested, which is probably a very healthy thing for a democracy. Yes.
Tiago Peixoto 08:06
And it's precisely that. And the other thing that you want is that is creating a space of empathy, which likes so much nowadays. And that sometimes leads to polarization, which is not having people understanding what are other needs. So the example that I like to give you and I create the opposite of Noreen in my backyard, in the sense of at, Barry, you want to create empathy towards one certain group, because if you just ask people what they want, and if you're in a rich neighborhood, maybe you ask just for greening spaces, but it becomes very difficult. If you have somebody, for example, from another neighborhood and says, like, look, the bathrooms in the school of my children are not properly functioning. So you create this space of not confrontation, but space of understanding one another needs and empathizing and being aware of other people's needs, which is builds a common ground in terms of human understanding that sometimes someone's needs is more important than others. And that's and in that case, we need to give up on our most immediate preferences and think on a broader collective good. And that's that's what the mechanism tries to.
Ben Kaplan 09:21
So where is participatory budgeting implemented now? Is it just in Brazil? Where do you see it around the world? And what level of governments are we talking about? Is it primarily local governments?
Tiago Peixoto 09:32
Yeah, primary. So primary is very local governments. But participatory budgeting nowadays is estimated to be in over 10,000 local governments around for example, there's a very small participatory budgeting but a beautiful participatory budgeting in New York City, which lots of people don't know because the budget is quite limited. But you have also at other levels, Portugal, for example, as the national participatory budgeting enriches more Our amount of the budget in which citizens participate, it has spread around the globe. And one of the things is not only about participatory budgeting, reinforcing democracy, but it's about the results that we found on participatory budgeting on multiple studies. So I'm just gonna tell you very quickly about the results that we found on participatory budgeting. First, participatory budgeting has been associated with improved service delivery. For example, in Brazil, one of the things that one can find is that many similar municipalities or local government, with and without participatory budgeting those with participatory budgeting has lower infant mortality. Why is that is because when you start asking citizens about where the money should be going, mothers in Brazil, they come to the assemblies, and they're going to start to ask for improved healthcare, improved water, and sanitation. And that makes the money go towards that. And that saves lives. And so when we're talking about democracy, we're not just talking about people getting along, we're talking about saving lives, we're talking about making a difference about heavy development outcomes, both social, economic and human outcomes. The other thing that I found, which is interesting, because when you talk to governments about doing participatory budget, they said, Oh, but our budget is too tight, right? We don't have, we barely have money to pay for everything wrapped up. The other thing that we found is that participatory budgeting actually increased tax revenues. Because when people see and they feel part of that process, less people are dodging taxes, less people are doing tax evasion, less people are under declaring their taxes. So once you involve the citizens, you reinforce the vision of a social contract, in which, okay, I'm the government, I trust you. So I'm going to participate, I'm going to tell you where the money goes. But once I know where the money goes, I'm also more willing to pay my taxes. And
Ben Kaplan 12:02
I think in the US, I'm based in San Francisco, we have it's not participatory budgeting, but the way that people participate in budget decisions, or just where money goes, is really through more like a process. It's a charter amendment process, which means you get things on the ballot, people vote on it. And so some politician on whatever side will say, Oh, I think we need more police staffing, we want to set aside X amount of dollars to recruit more police because crime and public safety is a big issue, they'll get a number of signatures or get a number of votes from the board to get it on the ballot, then people will vote and it will be a normal political process like that. So that's how people get a say in this or, more commonly, it's a bond measure for some type of infrastructure improvements. We're going to, you know, build this building for the community college, we're going to improve this for affordable housing, and people vote on that bond. So how does that compare to what you've described? Just on the surface, it doesn't have any of the participatory elements, right, it's just a vote. And people decide, though, where money goes, and I suspect a lot of places have a version of something like that. What is your feeling on that as a way that people have a say in the budgeting process? Look,
Tiago Peixoto 13:20
Ben, first to say, we always want to talk about democratic press practices and democratic innovations. And I think that will be a recurring theme on this podcast. We try to measure always democratic innovations against an ideal, but we need to measure democratic innovation is actually against the status quo. Does it move the needle? The process that you were telling me, it does move the needle as opposed to just a representatives or council members just saying Where do we go and not involving anybody? Okay, so I want to say this point, what what you're saying? I think it's, it's valid if we compared to status quo politics, but what participatory budgeting brings. And I think it's an extremely important element, if you want to think about democracy and about building a civic infrastructure, and because we need the civic infrastructure, it is the idea of trade offs and idea of choices. And so it is not just let's vote for that, but it is who every choice has a loss. And you're saying
Ben Kaplan 14:29
you have to prioritize. There's a limited amount of budget, it has to go and you have to choose the issue with this sort of binary choice of voted or not. Now, both campaigns on either side of that issue might try to say like, Oh, if we do this, for police staffing, we're going to have to cut support for children and families and other things. They might try to make that argument but it's more of an argument than a literal budgetary choice in participatory budgeting, where you've really got to decide are we doing a or are we doing b Eat, which might enable tough choices. I know one of the things that sometimes people criticize of the charter amendment process is this idea of set asides. You set aside money from the budget, you then can't touch it in a way that might be sub optimal in a later year, right? Maybe you've set aside money for this. That's because that's the problem now, but then that's part of our Constitution. We can't undo that so easily, versus a budgetary process might change year to year, it might adjust, because we're doing great on problem A and now we need to focus on problem B, precisely.
Tiago Peixoto 15:33
And this is an excellent point that you bring up on participatory budgeting, it's repeated yearly, you can review not only your budgetary choices, but also for the next year budget plan. But you can also even review, for example, the process. So let's say that everybody agrees that safety is a big problem, okay? Or that? I don't know, homelessness is becoming a big problem. On year to year, people say, Okay, let's give a different weight for choices on homelessness and issues like that. But the idea here, and as you as you captured well, it is that the art of governing, it is the art of making choices, right. And the art of governing democratically. It is spurring those choices to people, but they need to understand what comes in with the consequences of our choices. And particularly in our time that distrust, it is so big, so big, so vague, towards governments globally, bringing this notion of choices and trade offs, sometimes creates an even higher level of renewed empathy, even towards those who are governing us.
Ben Kaplan 16:45
Meaning that, oh, if you have to make these choices and trade offs is not so easy. It's difficult. I empathize with our elected leaders that have to do this. those trade offs are difficult.
Tiago Peixoto 16:56
I remember years years ago, I was advising large German city on their participatory budgeting. And I and I found interesting, the mayor was such an advocate for that. And I asked him like, why he liked participatory budgeting so much, because he did stand out as as a big supporter. He's like, Well, now everybody knows what a tough job I have to do.
Ben Kaplan 17:17
Okay. Sure. And do you think that solves it all. I mean, I think one of the most challenging parts of the budgetary process, especially when it involves large sums of money, is there's a whole process involved in people, groups, nonprofits, for profit companies that rely on the city for payments. So there's a lot of lobbying done. And there's a lot of entangled alliances related to that meaning a politician needs support to run from office for certain groups, those groups might need funding from the government to implement something that for the government. So usually, what I've observed in San Francisco and other places, is it is much easier for politicians to just say, Yes, you get your budget, even if it's not well spent, and everyone knows it's not well spent, just you get your funding, because you have a group of people that I need support, otherwise, I'm not going to get elected, and I'm out of office, and there's all of these entangled alliances, that even get more thick, the longer people are in office, because there's a lot of alliances that are made. So this is have a hope of solving the is it better. So as people say they're worried about entrusting the people with like all of this money, and they might not be as well as knowledgeable as the elected leaders. But does it help solve some of the whether it's hard corruption or soft corruption or just sub optimal decisions by elected officials to do it in this way, instead of allowing these entangled alliances to occur? Yeah,
Tiago Peixoto 18:39
I mean, that if brigade Excellent point, which is this clientelism around budget and location, which we which is systematic around the globe, it's very difficult to find a politician who did the participatory budgeting, and who doesn't want to do it again, because what they realize is, of course, most politicians, they have the groups to each do allegiance. And as we're saying, policy intentions, and demonstrations, actually, they are embodied in the budget. But what happens is that this mechanism of give and take, actually, politicians, they are talking to very small, organized minorities, which are essentially the loudest voice in the room. In this case, for example, a CT is a room, when you expand your group of people and you create a mechanism, you are creating the same give and take, but instead of doing with, like 500,000 people you're doing one minute, and the electoral returns of that are much more interesting.
Ben Kaplan 19:46
I see you're saying politicians by engaging a lot more people it actually might help their election prospects because they brought a lot more people into the tent. A lot more people have a say. It actually may help them to do that. And
Tiago Peixoto 20:00
there's reserved for instance, for a colleague of mine from Southampton University, which shows the electoral dividends of doing birds Batory budgeting, participatory budgeting at some point was done. And I'm sorry, I forgot the name oh, kind of kind of like a district or something of Chicago. I do remember they have the mayor of the Council of the customer. But he got reelected by a landslide. And if you ask him why he got reelected by a landslide was because he did participatory budgeting. Participatory Budgeting doesn't bring only social dividends and public policy dividends and optimal allocation of resources, dividends, the idea of birds buttery budgeting and why it's been successful. It is also because it brings electoral dividends. I have a colleague who clearly shows that if you do purchase lottery budgeting, your odds of re election are statistically significantly higher. Right. So the idea here is actually instead of doing stuff with like a small group, do it with the whole city, and the whole city will re attribute it, which is actually the spirit of democracy and what the whole idea of what so to speak their founding fathers when it when it you have right democracy is a mechanism of sanctions Not Only But Also mechanism of rewards of rewards on the ballot,
Ben Kaplan 21:27
I would love to talk with you about a second topical area that you discuss a lot and you write about, which is digital democracy. And this idea this digitization of government, does it improve democracy? From everything ranging from doing an E petition to reporting potholes online and everything else in between? So Tiago first for you, digital transformation, does it improve democracy?
Tiago Peixoto 21:57
Okay, so let me start with, with with my researcher hat, he has to give a bit of perspective. Every time a new technology came about, there has been hopes about technology, that technology changing the way democracy happened in about in the 1780s. In France, it was created was called the optical telegraph, which was kind of like a towers that sent messages from one than others, and was the first time that humankind could make messages travel faster than horses. Right. So the way that this happened is that these towers, they had some arms, and depending on how these arms that were movable, that was like manipulated, they would correspond to a ladder, and then one tower would relate that to another. So you'd make a one tower that you could see from far away a series of towers will make the letter H, E, L, B, and at the end, it would say help. And that message, the French intellectuals at the time said like, Well, now, democracy can be highly participatory, because we can hear the citizens from all over our friends on what they need. And we want to just be needed being being us in Paris here. Making decisions and calling the shots technology is gonna change tomorrow is interesting as well, at that time, because of security reasons, these codes of these towers, this telegraph, they were secret, not everybody knew. So the advocates for the tele democracy at that time, they would say, we need to open up the coat. And we need to open up the code. So it was actually the first open source democracy movement was in the 1800s in France, saying let's open up the code of this technology and let citizens take it and let them communicate or citizen it's going to happen. Of course, it did not happen and was used for anything but But democracy. So starting on that bit of like a sour historical, we do have this a number of gazes that technology does improve democracy. I've been doing lots of studies on that and collaborating with a number of researchers on that. What is
Ben Kaplan 24:13
the largest impact way that technology helps democracy? If you were going to describe maybe many ways? Where does it have the most impact? I
Tiago Peixoto 24:21
would say that we need to separate here two areas of impact one if we're talking about electoral democracy, elections, and the second one, if we're talking about participatory democracy, which would be participatory budgeting petitions, citizens initiatives, and things like that, on participatory democracy, on electoral democracy, I'm sorry, on elections, where you're going to have more impact are going to be in two areas when on quality of information to citizens, and number two, on enabling them to vote better. I'm going to elaborate on that. So for example, now there is enough evidence that if citizens have good enough information received about the performance of their elected leaders, they're likely to reward or sanction them or balance. So this is something that we know, for example, cities, with more local radios, for example, if you're talking to technology, in general cities, with more local radios, you're going to have governments performing better, especially because people are sanctioning. And you have those feedback loops between citizens and elected elected officials, which makes them perform. And if they're not performing, when the time of elections come, there's lots of evidence that on political, the other thing is lowering the barriers for people to vote. For example, in the United States, they're like initiatives, for example, like when you free to register your voting and kind of like a driver's license. So lowering the barriers for people to participate. Of course, it's an important element, getting more people to to vote, we do lots of efforts for people to get out the vote. But if you get people to vote over the internet, which is taking us for example, in countries like Estonia, you can get more people involved, not so much, not as much as we would like to be. But you do give the opportunity of people to participate, who otherwise would not have.
Ben Kaplan 26:20
You said it's mixed results. So how has digital transformation is still ongoing? It's not fully transformed various parts of the world transforming at different paces. How has it damaged democracy? Well,
Tiago Peixoto 26:34
I could go on the very easy path to talk about misinformation and deep fakes, issues like that. But I would say that is perhaps not the biggest damage to democracy, probably I'd say there's two bigger damages to democracy. In my opinion, one technology made it extremely easy for governments to ask citizens what they want, but didn't change their capacity to respond to citizens in terms of changing actions. So technology made extremely easier to do tokenistic forms of participation.
Ben Kaplan 27:10
ICS or se but not truly engaged in like, you could just sort of say, like people are participating, and you could call it a day. So for instance, you can have an app like we have in San Francisco, that's a 311 app, and you can report problems of potholes, or trash or graffiti or crime or something else. But if like some people experience you report it, and nothing happens, and it doesn't seem like you get an acknowledgment and the loop is not closed, you're not feeling more engaged in government, you're feeling less engaged, because you're like, Wow, I did this, and what's the point and nothing happened? And it makes you less confidence in your government. As a result? Would that be a description of what you're describing? Like we can call it Yeah, people can report potholes. But be they now people think they never get fixed, no one listens, because we have no capacity to really respond and take actions on that, that
Tiago Peixoto 28:06
precisely, I think a big damage is when you want I call it the voice response deficit, right? Technology makes very easy to create spaces for citizens to voice their concerns. But the response is not there. So if you're creating expectations, if you're raising the expectations, proactively sometimes creating an app or platform, but if your capacity to respond is to saying you're increasing the voice response deficit, and that undermines democracy office, because satisfaction is the difference between expectation and results.
Ben Kaplan 28:41
And is that get to another aspect of digital democracy, which is that, yes, we have to work on our front end systems, let's say that engage residents or citizens, but we need to also simultaneously and in parallel, work on back end systems that allow the government to respond and take action to that. So what happens? All of these 311 incidents come in? How is that processed? What happens to it? How do we react? How is that information shared? It has to be shared between different departments, and all of that. And it starts to get not only what another guest in the podcast Jennifer Pahlka would say is that it's not just a technological challenge. It's a process challenge. Now, we have to actually because now we have a lot of great reporting of where the city needs to put resources. But now we need an entire process to do that, that maybe government is not that good at implementing that process.
Tiago Peixoto 29:37
Precisely. You cannot create front end without backend government and every time you create a new front end, that will probably require some changes in terms of backend because sometimes citizens will be requiring issues that will be asking for issues or raising issues that they don't only invite Have one department of government or issues like this citizens, their interaction of the with their city with their state with the public spaces. It's not per department. It is per space. And in one space sometimes, for example, I don't know to renew a park or something you have multiple agencies involved. And when you open space for a citizen voice should that and the government on the back end is totally organized in silos, all of those things emerge. And they emerge in a pretty frustrating way for the citizens. So government's working on how to organize that. That's one of the things that I always like to say, I mean, if you're thinking if you're in government, you think you're gonna engage our citizens do two things. First thing that you want to do is to ask yourself the question, if citizen engagement is the answer, then what's the question? What's the problem? And number two, if you're not able to respond, if your back end is not there? Don't do it? Because you're just gonna do more damage?
Ben Kaplan 31:01
And what about this notion of the role of artificial intelligence? Because like you said, digital transformation, it changes over history, right, we can go back hundreds of years in digital transformation, we go back to the printing press, right, as in terms of a transformation to improve democracy. But what about artificial intelligence? What can AI first of all do for democracy to improve democracy? Yes,
Tiago Peixoto 31:30
so I mean, we've been talking a lot about the potential of AI for democracy, I think one of the things that AI can do in democracy, it is, for example, bringing any equalizing effect in participatory processes. Imagine any virtual meeting or a participatory budgeting, or other types of participatory spaces, one, one of those will be certainly translation, some people can participate because of language barriers, right. And AI can support that more and more, in many cities in the United States included to do participatory processes, a challenge of them is a linguistic barrier. So this is one of the things that AI can write. The other thing is the United States, for example, for a number of years, they have been using different techniques of data analytics, because they receive so much inputs from the public on regulations, that you try to make sense of that. So AI also when you particularly when you're making this kind of like you'd call like high frequency kind of engagement with the public in which people are sending suggestions and everything, you don't have enough people to read 100,000 suggestions, AI can help you parse out that information that is coming, AI can help RCW the information that is coming.
Ben Kaplan 32:51
Another example would be when there's pages and pages and binders full of government regulations on building codes. planning includes things that are highly tactical, that requires a lot of specialized expertise. And a general member of the public needs to access it and get questions answered, that have real world consequences in their lives. But it's hard to know. So anything I think that has like lots of difficult inputs based on quantity, or silos or different things, we could maybe use AI to make it easier to access.
Tiago Peixoto 33:25
That's an excellent example. Ben have been working on a project here in Serbia, in which groco governments when they are going to do their investments, they want to take into considerations, climate issues. So for example, we are more and more exposed to extreme weather events, flooding, extreme heat. So when a government is going to build something, they need to take into consideration that and if you want to involve citizens, intraoperative authority process, these are issues that you want to take into place. But you also have all the regulations, the code for buildings, you have national regulation and issues like that, there is extremely difficult to make sense all of that for politicians, for local governments, let alone if you want to involve citizens in the process. So one of the things that we're doing here is that we leverage AI to take all that quantitative data plus that legal amount of information and translate that in very clear set of visuals, but also have simplified text, which lowers the barrier for people to participate. So you're spot on lowering the barrier on dealing with the complexities with government. It is a major step, but linkage watchers say another thing that AI can help do a lot in democracy. It is also by simplifying these processes by helping simply find them in the first place. So now, there are some governments that are starting to do that. It is Okay, let's take, for example, the text code that you have like zillion of our versions of that text code, and use AI, to start to eliminate redundancies to improve the language to make the language more accessible to citizens. One of the things that generative AI is great at it is actually in terms of bringing it down to a more simple language because of editorial capacity, so to speak. So another use of that AI can help us moving forward as though it is on simplifying these processes, simplifying laws, simplifying the structure, or the way we communicate, or we make it official, simplifying this AI might have a huge role. And that opens the space for democracy. Why? Because one of the big things that people say, when you want to do democracy, they say, oh, no, no, that's too complicated for citizens,
Ben Kaplan 35:51
you have raised warning flags, red flags for the negative side of AI and democracy. And you've written about a very specific kind of example, which is, if elected leaders listen to their constituents, and when they get a lot of phone calls and emails, and oh, there's a clamoring for the state tend to respond like, oh, it has an impact. And one of the first things people do when they want to, like, make a change and start a movement is like, okay, let's have a campaign to contact our congressman or our elected leader, you've talked about the danger of well, AI can do things like emails really well, this latest version of cat GPT. There's a lot of voice inputs, we can impersonate other voice, we can do other things. What if AI is unleashed for advocacy? Where it seems like he have 10,000 people clamoring for this, but it's just an AI bot and a clever person or group implementing? So is that a specialized threat? Or is that a real threat that will become more pervasive? No,
Tiago Peixoto 36:52
that is a real threat, when actually there's research, for example, that AI emails to members of parliament, for example, AI written emails, actually, they prompted better more responses from government than human written emails. Meaning that
Ben Kaplan 37:08
if you just look at humans all over, there's lots of variants in effectiveness of writing, the maybe AI baseline effect, which is very sort of systematic and bullet point and sort of has a certain approach might actually be more effective than the average person at advocating for something.
Tiago Peixoto 37:24
Yes, it goes like the heart, one of the heart of democracy. And we're talking earlier about dialogue, and trade offs, initiatives, like this one at the heart of democracy is the notion of persuasion. But what we're seeing is that AI research more and more is showing AIS capabilities compared to humans in persuasion, AI is getting more and more an edge over humans. And when it comes to democracy, that can become an issue in one side that politicians and This already happened with electronic communications. Politicians might discount that in the sense that say, Oh, this is an orchestrated, or he's just bots doing that. This already happens. Now, with the technology that we have. We already have cases in which we already see politician. Sometimes they're like, Oh, this is an orchestrated thing. We're just gonna have a blast campaign.
Ben Kaplan 38:15
I see. So then even if it's real, even if it is 10,000 of your constituents clamoring for this, now, it's easy to discount it because you're not sure what's true, what's not. And of course, a next step of this would be you got 10,000 bots, messaging, a congress of the Congressman responds with AI to so now it's just AI altogether, talking back and forth, really the nobody, and as a result, we've broken up the engagement in the dialogue, which would be an important part of representative government. Yeah.
Tiago Peixoto 38:46
So so there's there's an expression that is called the liars dividend. In terms of AI, in which one of the one of the negative in fact effects of AI is that politicians can start your claim, even if they did something in there caught red handed, they can say, well, it wasn't me. It's a deep fake. Right. And this is the liars different from the other side, which I think it's another big problem is going to be the doubters dividend is that politicians can just say, Well, you know, this is was just orchestrated by bots and stuff. And I will just listen to my my constituents on the ballots, which brings us like, again, to a very old model of democracy, the doubters, dividend, a way to lead politicians to not become more responsive, because we start to have so to speak bazookas of information and of mass contacting and of mass campaigning politicians, which may make them somehow numb to the interaction of citizens.
Ben Kaplan 39:46
The last topic I want to chat with you about Tiago is something that I find interesting and fascinating. we've chatted about it before in the past, and that is this notion of, I guess the best term would be cross selling, civic engagement. This idea that we engage with residents or citizens or constituents in maybe one manner and high quantity, right, maybe somewhere where you complain about something or you do something, let's say it's that 311 post, again, about the dirty street out in front of my house. And that that could actually be not only a moment to respond to that person's concern, but an opportunity to engage people who are engaged, because they actually took the time to report it in lots of other processes. Like, for instance, Hey, did you know thank you for reporting that but we also have a neighborhood meeting that you can come up, we're also having a town hall, we're also having a task force being formed, you might be a great candidate for this. So does that happen in government? It seems more like a private sector thing, where they're going to cross sell a product to you on Amazon. But does that actually happen in government basically, leveraging our human capital to get more engagement? That's
Tiago Peixoto 40:54
an excellent point, Ben in one of my favorite subjects. So you explained, well, the idea of cross selling, which is leveraging a point of engagement to get further engagement, the private sector is extremely good, extremely good at that, whereas the public sector, it is, does it very poor or poorly, or when it does, right? Some examples are some examples, not necessarily in citizen engagement, but on other types of things. So for example, in the UK, when you're going to register for a driver's license, you can also say if your Oregon donator, or not right for Oregon donation, which increases enormously the number of people who are so to speak self declaring as Oregon. donators, the of course this is but this we're asking people what they want to do, which is great. But we could be doing better hustle for Baskin, leveraging this for work, while people are alive as well, so to speak, right? So what I'm saying is, I've been in a number of countries, a number of countries where they have what is a 311 number. And then they have a participatory process, or they have a consultation, or they have some purpose, something that they want to do to engage citizens. And they are saying, but nobody comes. Nobody wants to participate or anything. But then it's like, Do you have a toll free number a unique toll free number? They say? Yes, yes. Why? Right? How many calls you get? Well, hundreds of 1000s of calls the or 1000s? Of calls a day? And why don't you leverage that. So imagine 311, people who call about 2311, they must be annoyed about something, but it's people who have enough time as well to complain about something that bothers them. But that also concerns most of the times the public space. Nobody shows that neighborhood or a neighborhood planning meetings or things like this, right? Because the outrage is pretty bad. We announced it in a way that nobody understands the, in the in the most bureaucratic and attractive manner that there is,
Ben Kaplan 43:04
or even I mean, to be fair, and some that I attend, they can be well attended, or there's people there, but it's like the same people, right? You go to everyone, and it's the same 50 people or 100 people or somebody just like the two political sides, right? They're trying to make a point. So they say you open up public comments, and it's the same people, no matter what you go to. So maybe it's like, let's bring more people into this that are not just the same voices over and over again, okay?
Tiago Peixoto 43:29
Because and that's a very good point, when you are always having the same people. I mean, people are just going there, like with their position, they're not there for the Democratic praxis, which is not defend my point of view, but it is democratic practice. It is to hear your point of views, and also being open to change my point of view, if you give me reason for that, right, which we don't see happening, when the same people are showing because they're just there to defend their grounds, so to speak. So the idea here is that you want to increase the number of people who are coming are gonna say like, no, hold on, it's not a or b, there is option C as and other people, and the people who attend the same people who attend, they're like very vested interest is
Ben Kaplan 44:15
interesting, because it would be interesting for governments, if you were to say, how do you implement this? He'd say, Well, what are the touch points where we have lots of interaction with our constituents, our residents, our citizens? And how can we think about those as valuable to us in government? So what are ones you mentioned? 311. What's another one? Well, there's people who, you know, they get their tax bills for property taxes, and they have to pay those maybe there's something else we could do, or something else we could show them to show where their money's going. We could do that. What are other moments? Well, actually, the moment of voting is another one. So that's very pure form of engagement, but like once someone's voted, they've taken the time to do that. Maybe there's a follow up step that's at that time. voting place? Do you want to get involved in these committees or these groups or other things? Because they've just voted, they've thought about it. So if we did that, and said, Those are moments of opportunity, what could we do? And then on the side of those who are less fortunate, what about giving out services? So maybe we're able to those who are homeless? Who need shelter? Shelter is something we're trying to distribute. But then maybe can we make those ways to access other services that might be needed there? And do we put enough time on that? So it's all of these ways to do it. And the only thing I think of is, it's almost like a government has to make a commitment to do it everywhere. Because otherwise, if you just do it on the property tax bill, you're just going to engage those who own homes, and you're not going to get everyone else. So any thoughts on that, like any governments really embrace this comprehensively? Or is it all like little pockets of departments? That just happened to have one leader who does it in a limited way? No,
Tiago Peixoto 45:56
governments are starting to look at this definitely. And particularly those doing digital government, I think, for example, we Estonia is a country that is starting to look on this, on this idea of like touching points and being more proactive in engaging in other areas in which are their calling, for instance, proactive service delivery, right, as opposed to, to reactive service delivery. So very quickly, in terms of thinking government should do a mapping every government what they should have, as part of their either civic or service infrastructure, what are the touch points that we have already existing of citizens, right? And you have a mapping of those touch points? And which constituencies does that reach? Right? And then based on that, depending be your purpose, their purpose, democratic engagement, your purpose service delivery, so whoever needs sheltering probably also needs of service, D, E and F. Right? You leverage that touch point? Because then it is it is money that you're saving, but it's also better targeting that you say, if if the private sector worked with their touch points, the way that the public sector does nowadays, they would be bankrupt. Right? What they do, or the private sector does well, is precisely to understand what are the touchpoints? Where do I engage in what is the good point for me here to bring that that second level of engagement, which is good to be for me, for my business, but also for that person on taxation? It is a you gave a good example, right, but of course, only for taxpayer. We did an example, an experiment, when we did I think, in 50 countries with 85,000 people, we would ask them, where they would like to see the money going a bit like a participatory budgeting ally. And after that, we had a control group play a little bit like a B testing for your audience to understand. We had a group in which we didn't do that. And afterwards, we had a battery of questions to say about tax payment behaviors, just by asking very simply and was even wasn't saying we're going to implement this. But just like, we'd like to hear your thoughts. Where should the money go? The tax payment behavior of that group that was exposed to tell us where you think it should go, already changed, changed dramatically. And this was in 50 countries around the globe, rich poor and stuff. It's not about culture. It is really about a human mechanism that we have in which you feel holder and of the deal. I'm also willing to work with you. And I think that's what we need to be promoting more and more, particularly in these difficult times of economy, democracy, climate change, and all the challenges that lie ahead of us,
Ben Kaplan 48:56
Tiago, my final question for you on all of this, everything we've talked about, from participatory budgeting to digital democracy to the power or dangers of AI to sort of cross selling, you were sort of saying both civic engagement and service delivery. Also, with all of that if you had a magic wand, and you could implement one thing worldwide, from all of this, you can't just solve all the world's problems, but you can do one specific thing that you've been empowered to do everywhere. What is it that you would do? What do you think would be the most impactful thing for democracy? If among this entire menu of possibilities, you are empowered to do just one thing, I
Tiago Peixoto 49:34
would probably take every country that has a bicameral system, Senate and the House of Representatives, or even at the local level, or in the local level when there's not, I would add or replace one of those chambers by a chamber so to speak, or by a panel of orange genericity dissents, who can make a call? One of the things that is very obvious, and it's across the globe, is that representative democracy, when the interests of the wealthy differ from those of middle class and lower income classes, those who are of higher income, their interests are systematically when, and which creates all the alienation, frustration and polarization that we see nowadays. So creating a space to bring the everyday citizen to the heart of decision making, seems to be seems to be the only option. It might seem far fetched that origin airy people voting on their on their representatives, centuries ago was also far fetched idea. And now it's one of the most treasured pieces of society, including American democracy in so many other democracies, the fact that we can choose our leaders. It was a far fetched idea what I'm saying, which is like we brought origin, we gave citizens the right to choose who represents us. We gave that we created that enfranchisement, what we need is a second wave of infringement, which is not only to give a voice on who decides but it's to give a voice on decision itself and creating this chamber of citizens, ordinary citizens, randomly selected representative, representative of the population would be a great solution or a great step towards a better democracy.
Ben Kaplan 51:33
Well, there you go. You heard it here first Tiago’s Citizen Senate, or whatever it's called, and truly embracing the participation of those who government is meant to serve and many other forms of that is an interesting development, one that we want to keep exploring and finding great success stories. So thank you so much. Tiago Peixoto, visiting professor at the Center for democratic features an expert, a thought leader on digital transformations of government. Thank you so much for joining us on Unpolitics.
Tiago Peixoto 52:05
Thank you, Ben, it was great conversation. Thank you.
52:11
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