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We, the undersigned citizens of the world, from movements representing tens of millions around the globe and in Israel, condemn the aggressive, anti-democratic legislation proposed by the Israeli government. We stand in solidarity with the citizens of Israel who have been fighting for democracy and taking to the streets in hundreds of thousands for the past 12 weeks.

The legislation promoted by the Israeli government, now in its final and crucial stage, will de facto abolish the independence of the judicial system and provide unlimited power to the executive branch. Destroying the checks and balances of Israeli democracy will endanger the rights of so many first, the political and individual rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel, including disenfranchisement, but also the rights of women, LGBTQI+ people, secular communities, civil society, asylum seekers and immigrant workers.

Destroying the checks and balances of Israeli democracy will endanger the rights of so many.

Moreover, the anti-democratic legislation will perpetuate the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and enable formal annexation of the occupied territories. This goes against international law and denies the rights and freedom of millions of Palestinians.

Some of us live in countries where governments took similar steps to form an illiberal democracy. We are deeply worried to witness that the same playbook is being used by prime minister Netanyahu and his far-right government.

Israel and democracies around the world enjoy an enduring and unique friendship. It is built on shared values such as democracy, liberty and the protection of human rights. The occupation of the Palestinian territories against international law has already severely weakened this relationship. Now, the Israeli government is completely turning its back on these values and is undermining the precious relationship that citizens of democracies value so much.

We call on the worlds leaders to take urgent action to defend democracy in Israel for the sake of all people living in the region.

DeClic, Romania | Kreni-Promeni, Serbia | Skiftet, Sweden | ~ le mouvement, France | Akcja Demokracja, Poland | 38 Degrees, Great Britain | #aufstehn, Austria | Campax, Switzerland | Campact, Germany | Zazim Community Action, Israel | Uplift, Ireland | Leadnow, Canada | MoveOn, USA | ActionStation, New Zealand | aHang, Hungary

Originally posted here:
Solidarity with the fight for democracy in Israel - POLITICO Europe

Its billed as a summit for democracy. Under U.S. leadership, countries from six continents will gather from March 29 to March 30 to highlight how democracies deliver for their citizens and are best equipped to address the worlds most pressing challenges, according to the U.S. State Department.

Although advancing technology for democracy is a key pillar of the summits agenda, the United States has been missing in action when it comes to laying out and leading on a vision for democratic tech leadership. And by staying on the sidelines and letting othersmost notably the European Unionlead on tech regulation, the United States has the most to lose economically and politically.

One in five private-sector jobs in the United States is linked to the tech sector, making tech a cornerstone of the U.S. economy. When U.S. tech companies are negatively impacted by global economic headwinds, overzealous regulators, or other factors, the consequences are felt across the economy, as the recent tech layoffs impacting tens of thousands of workers have shown.

And tech isnt just about so-called Big Tech companies such as Alphabet (Googles parent company) or social media platforms such as Metas Facebook and Instagram. Almost every company is now a tech companyautomakers, for example, can track users movements from GPS data, require large numbers of computer chips, and use the cloud for data storage. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence, especially in the field of natural language processing (the ability behind OpenAIs ChatGPT), have widespread applications across an even larger swath of sectors including media and communications.

This means that tech policy is not just about content moderation or antitrust legislationtwo of the main areas of focus for U.S. policymakers. Rather, tech policy is economic policy, trade policy, andwhen it comes to U.S. tech spreading across the globeforeign policy.

As the global leader in technology innovation, the United States has a real competitive edge as well as a political opportunity to advance a vision for technology in the service of democracy. But the window to act is rapidly narrowing as others, including like-minded democracies in Europe but also authoritarian China, are stepping in to fill the leadership void.

The European Union has embarked on an ambitious regulatory agenda, laying out a growing number of laws to govern areas including digital services taxes, data sharing, online advertising, and cloud services. Although the regulatory efforts may be based in democratic values, in practice, they have an economic agenda: France, for example, expects to make 670 million euros in 2023 from digital services taxes, with much of that coming from large U.S. tech companies.

Whats worse is that while other key EU regulations, such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), target the largest U.S. firms, they leave Chinese-controlled companies such as Alibaba and Tencent less regulated. Thats because the DMA sets out very narrow criteria to define gatekeepers, such as company size and market position, to only cover large U.S. firms, thus benefiting both European companies and subsidized Chinese competitors and creating potential security vulnerabilities when it comes to data collection and access.

While Europe rushes to regulate, China has developed an effective model of digital authoritarianism: strangling the internet with censorship, deploying AI technologies such as facial recognition for surveillance, and advocating for cyber sovereignty, which is doublespeak for state control of data and information. Beijing has been actively exporting these tools to other countries, primarily in the global south, where the United States is fighting an uphill battle to convince countries to join its global democracy agenda.

And the battle for hearts and minds has implications far beyond techit goes to the heart of U.S. global leadership. In last months vote at the United Nations to condemn Russias brutal invasion of Ukraine, endorsed by the United States, the majority of the countries that voted against or abstained were from Africa, South America, and Asia.

Without a U.S.-led concerted effort to push back against authoritarian states desire to define the rules around technology, large democracies such as Turkey and India are also wavering, imposing increasingly authoritarian limits on free speech online. The result is growing digital fragmentationfragmentation that benefits authoritarian adversaries.

The Biden administration says it wants to see technology harnessed to support democratic freedoms, strengthen our democratic alliances, and beat back the authoritarian vision of a government-run internet.

Heres how it could help achieve these goals.

First, the administration should map out an affirmative technology strategy, making sure that U.S. workers and consumers benefit from U.S. tech leadership. This means investing in competitiveness and a smarter public-private approach to research and development, an area the United States has underfunded for over a decade.

Tech touches on almost every sector of the U.S. economy as well as international trade, defense, and security, and involves almost every government agency from the State Departments Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy to the Federal Trade Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And while most European countries now have full ministries for digital affairs, the U.S. doesnt have similarly politically empowered counterparts tasked with coordinating a whole-of-government effort across all government agencies to produce a national strategy for technology. This needs to change.

Second, the administration should take advantage of the bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress on the need to push back against Chinas growing domination in tech by putting forward a balanced regulatory agenda that establishes clear rules for responsible innovation. In an op-ed earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden called for Republicans and Democrats to hold social media platforms accountable for how they use and collect data, moderate online content, and treat their competition. To be sure, a national privacy law is long overdue, as several states have already passed their own laws, creating a confusing regulatory environment.

But this agenda is too backward-looking: Policymakers today are debating how to regulate technology from 20 years ago, when social media companies first emerged. As ChatGPT has shown, tech advancements far outpace regulatory efforts. A balanced agenda would set out key principles and ethical guardrails, rather than seek to regulate specific companies or apps. Banning TikTok, for example, wont prevent another Chinese company from taking its place.

Third, the U.S. should reenergize its engagement in multilateral institutions. The United States is taking the right steps in endorsing Japans initiative at the next G-7 meeting to establish international standards for trust in data flows, known as the Data Free Flow with Trust. The administration has also appointed an ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy to work more closely with allies on tech cooperation.

The U.N.s International Telecommunication Union, which helps develop standards in telecoms, is now directed by American Doreen Bogdan-Martin, which also presents an opportunity to beat back Russian and Chinese attempts to impose government control over the internet and instead reinforce the present private sector- and civil society-led internet governance model.

Washington has led important defensive efforts to challenge Beijings system of sovereignty and surveillance and has brought key allies along in these efforts. But it has not done enough to drive an affirmative agenda on technology innovation and tech-driven economic opportunity. The Biden administration has an opportunity now to prioritize tech. There is no time to waste.

Original post:
Summit for Democracy 2023: How the U.S. Can Lead on Tech ... - Foreign Policy

Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan is one of the world's leading theorists of democracy, and his new book Democracy: A Guided Tour is a valuable overview of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, and various arguments on that topic developed by leading political thinkers from ancient Greece to the present day. Brennan has an impressive command of the relevant literature, and he's a very clear writer. The book is a great resource for anyone interested in debates about democratic theory.

Democracy: A Guide Tour is divided into five sections, each of which considers a leading traditional rationale for democracy: stability, virtue, wisdom in decision-making, liberty, and equality. Each section includes a chapter outlining arguments holding that the democracy effectively promotes the value in question, followed by one outlining reasons for skepticism.

One of the strengths of Brennan's book is that he carefully avoids the widespread tendency to conflate that which is "democratic" with that which is good. This leaves room for the possibility that increasing democracy might actually cause harm, as opposed to defining it away in advance.

Brennan himself is something of a democracy-skeptic, as evidenced by his previous work. But in Guided Tour, he strives hard to be balanced, and mostly succeeds. Still, it's hard to come away from the book without getting a sense that democracy falls well short of at least the more expansive claims on its behalf. For example, far from promoting careful deliberation over policy and making effective use of the "wisdom of crowds," democracy is often plagued by systematic voter ignorance and bias. Far from making citizens more virtuous, democratic political participation often brings out and exacerbates some of the worst tendencies in human nature. And so on.

I myself am also skeptical of many of the benefits claimed for democracy, especially when it comes to issues related to voter ignorance. It's possible that a reader who comes to the book with the opposite predisposition will view it differently. Either way, the book provides an excellent analysis of a wide range of perspectives on these issues. And it manages to cover a lot of ground in a relatively modest amount of space.

Despite its many strengths, Guided Tour does have a few notable limitations. First, while Brennan carefully considers strengths and weaknesses of democracy in an absolute sense, there is little in the way of comparison between democratic and non-democratic regimes. Brennan discusses a number of thinkers who reject democracy in favor of authoritarianism, but says little about the actual performance of the sorts of regimes they advocate.

Incorporating the latter would make democracy look better on many dimensions. For example, as Brennan explains in Chapter 9, democracy is often a threat to liberty. But authoritarian governments are far worse. For all their many injustices, no democratic government has even come close to the level of oppression perpetrated by communist and fascist regimes. Similarly, a dictator who listens mainly to boot-licking cronies who tell him what he wants to hear will often make even worse cognitive errors than ignorant democratic electorates. Vladimir Putin's recent disastrous miscalculations may be a case in point.

Brennan is aware of the relative superiority of democratic regimes over authoritarian ones. But it gets little mention in this book, perhaps because the author had to cover so much other ground. Still, I think this issue deserved more attention. The relative failure to consider it may lead readers to (wrongly) dismiss Brennan's more democracy-skeptical chapters by citing Winston Churchill's famous statement that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried."

This ties into Brennan's second notable omission: there is very little discussion of various institutional structures that can potentially mitigate the flaws of democracy, such as federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review. In a previous book, Brennan himself advocates "epistocracy," giving more power to relatively more knowledgeable voters (see my assessment of the idea here). It's only briefly mentioned here, as part of a discussion of John Stuart Mill.

Many of these institutional fixesmost obviously, judicial revieware actually constraints on democracy (defined as majoritarian government). Thus, to the extent they are effective, they don't necessarily vindicate democracy, as such. But there is still a crucial difference between structures that limit democracy and those that dispense with it entirely. If nothing else, the potential benefits of the former undercut Churchill-quoting complacency about the democracy, which is often implicitly premised on the assumption that authoritarianism is the only alternative to giving democratic majorities a virtual blank check to rule as they please.

In sum, Democracy: A Guided Tour is a great overview of various longstanding debates about democracy. But it leaves room for a broader tour that more fully considers non-democratic alternatives to democracy and institutional fixes for various democratic pathologies.

Go here to read the rest:
Jason Brennan's "Democracy: A Guided Tour" - Reason

Spillane serves as Senior Advisor to Power the Polls and Director of the Civic Responsibility Project.

As our country celebrates Womens History Month and looks ahead to local elections this fall, its important for us to celebrate the everyday heroines in communities across the country who are the essential workers of our democracy: poll workers.

In recent years, new challenges have tested these workersfrom the COVID-19 pandemic to concerns around the threat of violencebut poll workers have continued to show up and ensure that everyone in their communities has an opportunity to make their voice heard in our democracy.

I know how critical their work is through my role at Power the Polls, a nonpartisan initiative that was founded early in the COVID-19 pandemic to recruit more poll workers. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Power the Polls recruited over 275,000 potential poll workers and coordinated with Secretaries of State and local elections officials from both sides of the aisle to fill anticipated gaps in local municipalities. Over half of the people who raised their hands to work the polls were women. Although the next election on many peoples minds isnt until 2024, critical local elections are taking place this year, and we cant slow down efforts to invest in and strengthen our democratic infrastructure, including recruiting more poll workers.

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In June of 2020, we launched Power the Polls to respond to the widespread concerns over a potential poll worker shortage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We set out to recruit a new generation of younger, more diverse poll workers to ensure that every polling site was adequately staffed and to build a future where poll workers reflect the communities they serve.

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, many feared a potential poll worker shortage for a different reason: threats to poll workers, like this one in Georgia, after the 2020 election. Yet peopleespecially womenstepped up. In fact, polling places across the U.S. are overwhelmingly overseen by women. Despite initial concerns, the 2022 election ran smoothly, thanks in part to the hard work and dedication of poll workers.

Not only have these new poll workers pushed through challenges in recent years, but they also overwhelmingly found their experience to be rewarding and have expressed excitement about working again in the future. A new survey of people who signed up through Power the Polls shows that 88 percent said theyd be interested in working in future elections. Additionally, 95 percent of survey respondents reported satisfaction in their work.

The 2020 and 2022 elections have shown us how critical poll workers are to keeping our democracy runningand we need to make sure we continue to recruit a new generation of poll workers for elections to come, including women, young people, people of color, and others who have historically been underrepresented among poll workers.

Poll workers are the essential workers of our democracy. Every year, we rely on the time and energy of poll workers in our local communities to staff elections. While weve made progress in recruiting a new wave of younger poll workers, the average age of poll workers remains over 60. In some states, poll workers can serve as young as 16, and weve seen teens sign up through Power the Polls to serve their communities before they can even cast their own ballots, setting them up for a lifetime of civic engagement.

While important strides have been made through our recruitment, we all must do more in future election cycles to ensure that poll workers better reflect the communities they serve, including across age, race, and gender. Between now and 2024, Power the Polls will continue this work. We will support election officials managing local elections, and we will continue to promote civic engagement, voting, and serving as a poll worker as lifelong commitmentsnot just something for big election years.

Womens History Month is an exciting time to uplift the contributions of womenand a reminder that we can, and should, be celebrating womens contributions throughout the rest of the year as well. Similarly, promoting civic engagement isnt just for big election years. There may be years with fewer elections, yes, but our commitment to supporting election administrators, recruiting poll workers, and building a thriving democracy must be ongoing and steadfast.

Original post:
Democracy has no off-years - The Fulcrum

When I try to explain why suburban sprawl is not the result of the free market, arguments often start like this:

Other person: You can complain all you want about sprawl, but it's what people want.

Me: Sprawl isnt the result of the free market, its the result of government policy. Your tax dollars paid for the highways that opened up suburbia to development, zoning codes and minimum parking requirements made suburbia car-dependent, and the failure of school desegregation ensured that cities had stigmatized schools and suburbs had prestigious ones. (I explain these policies in more detail here).

Other person: But we live in a democracy! If the government did it, it's what the people want!

Whats wrong with the other persons conclusion? The most obvious flaw is that what government does is not always what the people want. This is so for three reasons. First, the government doesnt always know what (if anything) the people want. On some issues, public opinion polling is so common that what most Americans want is fairly obvious: for example, there are many polls on abortion, and it seems pretty clear that most Americans think abortion should be legal some of the time but not all of the time.

But issues like transportation and land use are not heavily polled, so politicians dont necessarily know much about public opinion. For example, pollingreport.com, a website that compiles the results of national polls, includes over a dozen 2022 polls on abortion. By contrast, the websites most recent national poll focusing on transportation was in 2018. Thus, even a politician who really wants to know what the average citizen thinks might have some difficulty figuring this out.

Instead of relying on the opinions of the public as a whole, politicians understandably listen to the people who lobby them and give them money. So, if the loudest voices they hear want highways, the politicians fund highways. Government gives money to road-builders to build highways, and they use that money to lobby politicians and make campaign contributions. That lobbying causes politicians to support even more highway spending, ad infinitum. By contrast, public transit agencies cant give campaign contributions, which limits their appeal to politicians.

Similarly, in the land use context, zoning laws might reflect the views of a few dozen people who speak at public hearings rather than the views of the average person. If there are no loudmouths to shift the dialogue, zoning laws might reflect the views of unelected planners, or the views of one or two council members who have stronger opinions on zoning than the rest of the council.

Second, even if politicians knew what the average citizen thought, they might not give much weight to that hypothetical citizens views because the average citizen might just vote on party lines or based on other issues. National polls suggest that issues such as transportation and zoning are rarely voting issues. For example, Gallup regularly asks Americans what the most important problem facing the country is; typically only 3 or 4 percent pick environmental issues, and infrastructure is even less important.

Third, sprawl doesnt reflect todays electorate as much as it reflects the electorate of the 1920s (when zoning was created), the 1950s and 1960s (when a highway-building boom caused cities to lose population to suburbs), and the 1970s (when zoning began becoming much more restrictive in coastal states). In those days, public polling was far less frequent than it is today, so even if todays state legislator can guess what the average person thinks about public transit or housing policy, that might not have been true when the United States was set on its current car-dependent path.

Fourth, not all policies affecting urban development were even created by elected legislators. For example, minimum parking requirements are often created by planners who look at what other cities are doing, and school desegregation policies (which made urban schools in affluent neighborhoods unattractive to whites by requiring those schools to diversity while suburban schools were allowed to stay all-white) was rammed down Americans throats by the Supreme Court.

But lets assume for the sake of argument that every anti-urban 20th-century policy would have been endorsed by the average citizen. (In fairness, I do think some, if not all, of these policies were probably popular). Does that mean that these policies reflect popular will more than the free market would?

Not necessarily. If public policy reflects the will of the majority, the minority gets shut out. By contrast, the free market creates unanimity without conformity; the majority gets what it wants, but the minority gets what it wants.

For example, suppose that 60 percent of people in a town want a big house, and 40 percent want a small house or an apartment. The 60 percent could use zoning laws to impose their preferences, ensuring that the entire town is zoned for big houses. The 40 percent would either have to move or pay for more house than they want. By contrast, in a city without land use regulation, 100 percent of people get what they want: the big house people get big houses, the small house people get small houses. (I realize that empirical reality is somewhere in between these extremes; nevertheless, the collapse of apartment construction over the past several decades suggests that the first scenario matches reality more than the second). Thus, even the most democratic government only reflects the preferences of a majority.

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Sprawl and Democracy - Planetizen