Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term "crowdsourced deliberation" to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on "deliberative systems."

Can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?

“…Crowdsourcing platforms may help to aggregate distributed citizen input (Bott and Young 2012;Brabham 2013;Aitamurto and Chen 2017;Liu 2017;Taeihagh 2017). Participation or deliberation platforms may foster citizen participation in policy deliberation (Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014;Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;Aragón et al 2017;Garard et al 2018;Sørensen and Torfing 2018;De Blasio and Selva 2019). Co-production platforms may enable public authorities to engage citizens in improving the delivery of government services (Linders 2012;Falco and Kleinhans 2018a;Janowski et al 2018) and multi-stakeholder platforms may allow diverse groups to engage in productive exchange (Steins and Edwards 1999;Selsky and Parker 2010;Adekunle and Fatunbi 2012).…”

“…Participation platforms have been developed to generate citizen discussion about specific problems and policies, particularly at the local level (Hilgers and Ihl 2010; Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014;Aragón et al 2017;De Blasio and Selva 2019). With the help of information and communication technologies, local authorities have created online platforms to experiment with 'crowdsourced deliberation' and 'crowdsourced policymaking', intended to enhance the input, throughput and output legitimacy of such processes (Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;Aitamurto and Chen 2017).…”

Open Governance: A New Paradigm for Understanding Urban Governance in an Information Age

“…This case shows that citizens can be the leading subject to generate public data. Aitamurto and Landemore (2016) introduce the concept of "crowdsourced deliberation" to indicate an "open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process." The authors use the case of online crowdsourcing on the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland to demonstrate the knowledge search and the deliberation value of crowdsourcing value on a large scale.…”

Working toward Empowering a Community

“…These in-depth discussions about issues and politics among NPOs, political stakeholders, community members, and other interested parties may serve as a form of crowdsourced policymaking [1]. In prior work, crowdsourcing policymaking is shown to enable governments to access people's needs efficiently [12,45] and encourage exchange of deliberative arguments and reasoning [2]. To support such crowdsourced policymaking process on social media, an engaging, trustworthy environment must be provided [15].…”