e-Participation and Decision Analysis

Abstract

D ecision analytic methods are being increasingly used to help to articulate and structure debate and deliberations among citizens and stakeholders in societal decisions. Methods vary, but, essentially, a public authority or agency, when faced with a significant set of issues, may organise one or more workshops with stakeholders and citizens as participants. Such methods of public engagement and participation are, by and large, conducted face to face. However, the advent of the World Wide Web brings the possibility of conducting citizen and stakeholder interactions in a distributed, possibly asynchronous fashion. In this paper we discuss the challenges that have to be addressed and overcome if such e-participation is to be a valid tool within a modern democracy. The difficulties are many and varied, but the pressures towards e-government, and better regulation in general, mean that such methods will be used in the near future. Thus, we outline a program of research and debate in which we believe that the professional decision analysis community should engage.

Towards decision support for participatory democracy

“…From an operational point of view, French et al (2007) suggest categorizing decision analytic methodologies for group decision support into five modes with somewhat fuzzy boundaries. Here, we adapt this taxonomy for the purpose of participatory democracy support, noting that our focus is on modeling and supporting citizens as decision makers in both individual and group settings, rather than analyzing, structuring, and representing the decision problem(s).…”

“…Many rely on the decomposition principle and use analysis as the method of inquiry. For instance, see French and Rios Insua (2000) or Raiffa (2002). Others rely on intuition, reductionism, holistic approaches, or partially or ill-defined methods including muddling through or garbage-can approaches (Lindblom 1959;March 1978).…”

“…The Bayesian approach to this problem (Morris 1977) is based on Bayes' rule, but requires difficult assessments. In practice, there are still many complex modeling challenges and questions about the effectiveness of various combination procedures (Clemen and Winkler 1990;French and Rios Insua 2000).…”

IMP: A decision aid for multiattribute evaluation using imprecise weight estimates

“…The difficulty is well captured by Williamson [21] who writes that "precise assertions … are more likely to be false, but more useful if true" but that "vagueness is a precondition of the flexibility of ordinary language". It is this tension between the desire for decisiveness and the ambiguity of language which complicates attempts at elicitation and interpretation, a difficulty compounded in group decision making when the words may have "local and cultural meanings which some participants may not understand" [22].…”

From the Editors—Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk

“…The papers from the First Symposium on GDRR appeared in a special issue (http:/ /onlinelibrary.wiley .com/doi/10.1002/asmb.v27.2/issuetoc) of the journal Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry. French et al (2007) on "e-participation" in democratic systems. Refik Soyer's research focuses on statistical and decision theoretic aspects of reliability analysis and Bayesian statistics.…”