Post 3 in the Guest Blog Series Preserving Public Values in The Automated State by Marco Almada and Estela Lopes

In modern democracies, citizen participation is not limited to elections. Lawmakers and administrators are often expected—and at times obliged—to involve citizen perspectives in their work. For example, Article 11 of the Treaty on European Union obliges the EU institutions to dialogue with citizens and civil society, including public consultations on EU actions. But what does participation mean when a growing number of public services are supplied through digital technologies? This post presents some reflections based on the work of the ‘Preserving Public Values in Privatised Digital Systems’ (DigiPublicValues) project, which examined the role of private actors in providing digitised public services.

Participation as a Public Value

Governments have long experimented with public participation to improve the delivery of public services and better serve the public interest. Many of those experiences occur during the planning of public services, such involving individuals in the management of urban spaces or of local government budgets. But, over the past decades, a growing trend casts citizens as co-producers of the final services, for example by involving them in the maintenance of public infrastructures. 

Participation can contribute to public service delivery in two main ways. It can improve the quality and effectiveness of service delivery, or it can boost other public values. Regarding the former, participation offers a platform for the public to express their opinions and concerns, serving as a source of information for public service providers about the public preferences. Furthermore, it allows citizens to scrutinise public decision-making, while promoting self-determination among the participants. Accordingly, participation fosters greater acceptance of decisions even when people do not get their way.

Beyond improving the quality of services, involving individuals and organisations in public decision-making procedures strengthens transparency, promotes more equitable decisions, and increases public accountability. Most importantly, public participation can further legitimise the choices made by public authorities in delivering public services.

However, despite the prophesied blessings, the realities of public participation are not always entirely positive. The involvement of individuals and organisations in public decision-making can reinforce power asymmetries and the marginalisation of poorer and less educated communities and minorities. As past experiences of public participation have demonstrated, calls for public participation in decision-making are often dominated by big economic players, people from privileged backgrounds, and interest groups. 

Even when civil society organisations and associations advocating for public causes or specific groups of citizens are involved, there is an underlying risk of capture of those organisations and associations by elites and economic powers. This large-scale approach to participation ultimately eliminates the real opportunities for ordinary individuals—notably the underprivileged and pertaining to minority groups—to be meaningfully involved in public decision-making, potentially giving rise to a phenomenon of ‘participatory-washing’. Participation in the delivery of public services must, accordingly, ensure that the benefits it provides are not swamped by its potential side effects.

Participation in Software-Driven Processes

In the three domains studied in the DigiPublicValues project—education, border control, and the administration of justice—we found that participation is rarely, if ever, mentioned as a factor in the arrangements between public bodies and private providers. This result flies in contrast to the fact that participation is sometimes used to legitimize privatised public services in local contexts. It also clashes with the widespread idea that digitalisation can boost the involvement of citizens in the production of public services. What explains those differences?

One might argue that participation becomes unfeasible when services are delivered through (or by) large ICT systems such as large platforms or AI technologies. Beyond the verified challenges of participation discussed above, the complexity and opaqueness of those systems, due to their technical arrangements and sophisticated supply chains, create an additional layer of difficulty in implementing participation. Even with technological literacy initiatives such as Finland’s Elements of AI course, citizens are unlikely to have the technical skills or the time needed to closely examine how those systems work. This issue is compounded by the digital divide, as citizens cannot be expected to participate in platforms they cannot even use. Therefore, this line of thought goes, participation of an uninformed citizenry would not improve digitised public services. 

These barriers to participation are indeed substantial. But they are surmountable. There are established approaches that can be used to include the perspectives of the demos rather than letting software design be guided just by the interests of software developing organisations. For instance, participatory design approaches can be used to engage affected populations in the development of computer systems. The possibilities are various and can occur at different stages of the life cycle of digital tools, from their inception to their evaluation. 

The main obstacle to participation in digitised public services, therefore, is not feasibility but a lack of incentive. Without explicit requirements for participation, the corporations supplying the systems analysed by DigiPublicValues retain the discretion to decide whether and how to gather citizen opinions. So, in practice, the design of systems employed to supply public services remains mostly outside the reach of public participation. 

In addition, participation is also reduced in stages that are not related to technical decisions. None of our case studies featured any substantial effort to involve citizens in public decisions about whether a digitalised service should be privatised, or in the assessment of those informal and formal partnerships. Given that those discussions deal with the impact of digitised public services and the factors associated with them, they do not require technical expertise. Hence, the decision to exclude citizens from those deliberations is a political choice, not a technical one.

Conclusion

In conclusion, public participation can be an effective and useful tool to better digitalise public services and reinforce public acceptance of digitalisation, especially when it involves private contractors. Moreover, there are numerous ways to engage citizens in digital transformation. However, the DigiPublicValues project revealed a blatant gap in opportunities for the public to take part in the digitisation of public services managed by private entities. Therefore, public authorities should experiment with adding the ‘public-in-loop’ when delegating the provision of digitised public services to private contractors in order to reap the many benefits associated with public participation. But a word of caution is necessary: more participation is needed, but it is crucial to ensure that the mechanisms for participation are well-designed. 

About the authors

Marco Almada

Marco Almada recently completed his PhD at the European University Institute, with a thesis on technology-neutral regulation and artificial intelligence. Email: Marco.Almada@eui.eu

Estela Lopes

Estela Lopes is a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute, working on participatory procedures for public administrations to develop artificial intelligence systems. Email: MariaEstela.Lopes@eui.eu