Peer Production in Politics: Democracy vs. Governance

As Andrew Chadwick noted in 2006, ???The issue is no longer whether politics is online, but in what forms and with what consequences???? Governments use the Internet for many reasons, including informing the public, facilitating voting, and communicating with constituents. Similarly, citizens engage with political institutions online in a variety of ways. William Dutton, who terms this engagement of citizenry with government the ???Fifth Estate???, delineates two institutional arenas: the use of ???the Internet and related ICTs to enhance existing democratic institutions and processes???and the networking of individuals to enable the public to hold all institutions of government and politics more accountable???. This poster will contrast websites that use the internet to facilitate representation (e.g., the Sunlight Foundation, Wikileaks) with those that focus on governance (e.g., Community Patent Review, SeeClickFix). These organizations differ in their fundamental objectives: the first type uses the Internet to influence democracy itself while the second engages citizens to do work they have already delegated to government. There are many examples of both types of organizations, both in the United States and abroad. Some use crowdsourcing to create or organize information; others present information to users but do not allow them to contribute. This poster will focus on organizations that operate in the US and use peer production; it will highlight their use of online collaboration, as well as their impact on issues of government transparency, democratic representation, and peer production of knowledge. The mission of the Sunlight Foundation is to ???using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens.??? As such, it sponsors online tools that allow the public to watch and contribute to knowledge about government spending, the legislative process, and the influence of lobbyists. One project of the Sunlight Foundation, PublicMarkup.org, allows the public to annotate bills before they are passed by Congress. Several 2008 bills were posted on the site, including the act that authorized the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The Sunlight Foundation also sponsors projects that do not use peer production, such as MAPLight.org, which allows combines data on campaign contributions and voting records for legislators. Wikileaks.org allows users to upload ???leaks??? -- information about corrupt officials, scandals, and other misbehavior ??? in an anonymous manner. Wikileaks thus crowdsources the whistle-blower role in government (as well as other areas) and also the fact-checking of whistles blown. Wikileaks operates in nearly every country (as it is a wiki, countries can be added very easily), but is represented by Australian Hacker Julian Assange. Situated between journalism and governance, Wikileaks is more difficult to classify, but as an example of whistle-blowing on government corruption, it aims to improve the democratic process. Community Patent Review is a striking example an organization that uses peer production for governance. Community Patent Review is a ???web-based application that allows third parties to comment on patents before they are issued. Large patent holders, including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, have agreed to be part of the pilot, and the patent office has agreed to waive the usual fee for third party comment submissions and give the patents of pilot participants expedited review.??? This provides a public adjunct to the Constitutionally designated function of the Patent Office; this citizen participation does not follow the chain-of-command of the patent office, but instead involves citizens (and non-citizens) in a new way, as users and collaborators. SeeClickFix operates at the local level. SeeClickFix ???allows anyone to report and track non-emergency issues anywhere in the world via the internet. This empowers citizens, community groups, media organizations and governments to take care of and improve their neighborhoods.??? Users post local maintenance issues (e.g., potholes, vandalism), and others can volunteer to fix them. This enhances the role of existing local government functions (e.g., the parks department, the roads department) by again involving the public directly in a non-democratic capacity. Each of these organizations uses a different method to apply peer production to the task of improving democracy or of improving governance. Sometimes these tasks are mixed: MySociety, a UK organization similar to the Sunlight Foundation, creators of FixMyStreet (which inspired SeeClickFix in the US), hosts an e-petition process, which facilitates, instead of street fixing, the development of petitions that are sent directly to the Prime Minister. Organizations can be difficult to classify by these criteria. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, uses open licensing to bypass the more restrictive features of copyright law. Although it is not technically ???crowdsourced???, it does rely on the network effects of its many users who can build on each others??? creations as long as they are all licensed under Creative Commons. In this aspect, it is an example of the second type of organization. Instead of lobbying to change copyright law, it bypasses the structure chosen by democratically elected representatives and instead uses a ???Fifth Estate???, user-governance model. People decide for themselves what kind of copyright they would like to have and share that with others. Similarly, SeeClickFix does not try to recall local parks officials, but instead points out where citizens can do local maintenance themselves; Community Patent Review does not aim to reform the US Patent Office, but instead facilitates public input. The subject of the first group is representation; the subject of the second is a social issue, such as property rights in innovation or local property damage. Both approaches involve transparency, but the second approach involves further transparency as the citizens are full participants in the entire process. For example, what a government does with Wikileaks information or how the annotations on laws are processed is not necessarily transparent. Whether or not a problem ahs been fixed on SeeClickFix is transparent. In other words, the first category still involves representation, which naturally decreases transparency, while the second does not. These two approaches are in some degree of tension: if, in the extreme case, all government functions were handled directly by citizens, there would be no need for representative democracy. On the other hand, if transparency is all that democracy needs, then perhaps the more communitarian approach would not be necessary. In some ways, these two approaches are, to use an economic term, substitutable goods. Both of these approaches are simply the result of applying peer production to public goods, such as well-maintained public spaces, efficient patent issuance, or well-formulated laws. As these organizations grow, they will necessarily blur these lines and create further emergent forms of online democracy and online governance

How Community Institutions Create Economic Advantage: Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York

This paper argues that Jewish merchants have historically dominated the diamond industry because of their ability to reliably implement diamond credit sales. Success in the industry requires enforcing executory agreements that are beyond the reach of public courts, and Jewish diamond merchants enforce such contracts with a reputation mechanism supported by a distinctive set of industry, family, and community institutions. An industry arbitration system publicizes promises that are not kept. Intergenerational legacies induce merchants to deal honestly through their very last transaction, so that their children may inherit valuable livelihoods. And ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom participation in their communities is paramount, provide important value-added services to the industry without posing the threat of theft and flight

Antitrust and Nonprofit Hospital Mergers: A Return to Basics

Courts reviewing proposed mergers of nonprofit hospitals have too often abandoned the bedrock principles of antitrust law, failing to pay heed to the most elemental hallmarks of socially beneficial competition. This Article suggests that courts’ misapplication of antitrust law in these cases reflects a failure to understand the structural details of the American health care market. After reviewing recent cases in which courts have rejected challenges to proposed mergers between nonprofit hospitals, it documents how courts have engaged in a faulty analysis that ultimately protects nonprofit hospitals from the rigors of standard antitrust scrutiny. It then identifies the core principles of antitrust law—preventing supracompetitive prices, optimizing output, and maximizing allocative efficiency—that have been absent from, if not violated by, the rulings in these merger cases

The Antitrust of Reputation Mechanisms: Institutional Economics and Concerted Refusals to Deal

An agreement among competitors to refuse to deal with another party is traditionally per se illegal under the antitrust laws. But coordinated refusals to deal are often necessary to punish wrongdoers, and thus to deter undesirable behavior that state-sponsored courts cannot reach. When viewed as a mechanism to govern transactions and induce socially desirable cooperative behavior, coordinated refusals to deal can sustain valuable reputation mechanisms. This paper employs institutional economics to understand the role of coordinated refusals to deal in merchant circles and to evaluate the economic desirability of permitting such coordinated actions among competitors. It concludes that if the objective of antitrust law is to promote economic efficiency, then per se treatment-or any heightened presumption of illegality-of reputation mechanisms with coordinated punishments is misplaced

Community Enforcement of Informal Contracts: Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York

The diamond industry is home to many unusual features: the predominance of an ethnically homogeneous community of merchants, the norm of intergenerational family businesses, and a rejection of public courts in favor of private contract enforcement. This paper explains that the diamond industry\u27s unique attributes arise specifically to meet the particularly rigorous hazards of transacting in diamonds. Since diamonds are portable, easily concealable, and extremely valuable, the risk associated with a credit sale can be especially costly. However, the industry enjoys valuable organizational efficiencies if transactions occur on credit between independent, fully incentivized agents. Thus, an efficient system of exchange will find ways to induce merchants who purchase on credit to fulfill their payment obligations. The very features that give the diamond industry an unusual profile are responsible for providing institutions to support credit sales. A system of private arbitration spreads information regarding merchants\u27 past dealings, so a reputation mechanism to monitor merchants can take hold. Intergenerational legacies, though restricting entry only to those who can inherit good reputations from family members, resolve an end-game problem and induce merchants to deal honestly through their very last transaction. And the participation of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom inclusion and participation in their communities is equally paramount to their material wealth, serve important value-added services as diamond cutters and brokers without posing the threat of theft and flight

When is an exploration exploratory? A comparative analysis of geometry lessons

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two textbook lessons on the same topic from U.S. textbooks to learn how differently - designed “exploratory” lessons may structure content to enable or constrain student inquiry. One lesson, representative of a “reform - based” textbook, contains investigations of conditions of triangle congruence. The second is a “technology lab” on triangle congruence fro m a "traditional" textbook, the design of which is atypical for that textbook. Framing a lesson as a mathematical story, this analysis exposes three distinct ways that these lessons are different: (a) the proportion of the lesson in which mathematical questions remain unanswered, (b) the manner in which content unfolds to address each question, and (c) the way in which open mathematical questions overlap to increase the dynamically - changing number of questions that are pursued. This contrast of the two lessons illuminates how a lesson structure can prevent an "exploration" from being exploratory

Norms and Law: Putting the Horse Before the Cart

Law and society scholars have long been fascinated with the interplay of formal legal and informal extralegal procedures. Unfortunately, the fascination has been accompanied by imprecision, and scholars have conceptually conflated two very different mechanisms that extralegally resolve disputes. One set of mechanisms might be described as the shadow of the law, made famous by seminal works by Professors Stewart Macaulay and Marc Galanter, in which social coercion and custom have force because formal legal rights are credible and reasonably defined. The other set of mechanisms, recently explored by economic historians and legal institutionalists, might be described as order without law, borrowing from Professor Robert Ellickson\u27s famous work.1 In this second mechanism, extralegal mechanisms—whether organized shunning, violence, or social disdain—replace legal coercion to bring social order and are an alternative to, not an extension of, formal legal sanctions. One victim of conflating these mechanisms has been our understanding of industry-wide systems of private law and private adjudication, or private legal systems. Recent examinations of private legal systems have chiefly understood those systems as efforts to economize on litigation and dispute-resolution costs, but private legal systems are better understood as mechanisms that economize on enforcement costs. This is not a small mischaracterization. Instead, it reveals a deep misunderstanding of when and why private enforcement systems arise in a modern economy. This Essay provides a taxonomy for the various mechanisms of private ordering. These assorted mechanisms, despite their important differences, have been conflated in large part because there has been a poor understanding of the particular institutional efficiencies and costs of the alternative systems. Specifically, enforcement costs have often been inadequately distinguished from procedural or disputeresolution costs, and this imprecision has produced theories that inaccurately predict when private ordering will thrive and when the costs of private ordering overwhelm corresponding efficiencies. The implications for institutional theory are significant, as confusion in the literature has led to overappreciation of private ordering, underappreciation of social institutions, and Panglossian attitudes toward both lawlessness and legal development

Changing the Tax Code to Create Consumer-Driven Health Insurance Competition

Because current tax laws exclude employer-paid health insurance premiums from employees’ taxable wages and income, employer-sponsored insurance remains the primary source of health insurance for most employed Americans. Economists have long blamed the employer-based insurance tax exclusion for inflating health care costs, and, more recently, for constraining income growth and exacerbating income inequality. We execute a simulation to test the effect of permitting employees to receive their employers’ premium contribution directly and then purchase health insurance themselves, using tax-free funds. Employees could deduct for income tax purposes the amount used for insurance and, if they spend less than the amount transferred, take the remainder as taxed income. Our simulation indicates that in this consumer-driven system many workers would trade some insurance dollars for higher income, even if the latter is taxed. Our alternative tax treatment causes annual after-tax household income to grow by more than $160 billion and federal tax revenues by more than$46 billion. Along the way, take-home pay inequality is reduced, and the greater take-up of slimmed down policies could lead to greater cost control. We conclude that a simple change in the tax treatment of employer-sponsored health insurance can give workers the flexibility to economize on health insurance purchases. With this flexibility, many workers will select health plans that are less expensive than those now chosen for them. This will inject much-needed price competition in health insurance markets. It will also allow workers to enjoy more take-home pay, thereby counteracting the negative and regressive effects of escalating health care inflation. These results cannot be achieved from granting tax credits for the purchase of health insurance because such credits do not permit workers to trade insurance dollars for wages

N.C. Medicaid Reform: A Bipartisan Path Forward

The North Carolina Medicaid program currently constitutes 32% of the state budget and provides insurance coverage to 18% of the state’s population. At the same time, 13% of North Carolinians remain uninsured, and even among the insured, significant health disparities persist across income, geography, education, and race. The Duke University Bass Connections Medicaid Reform project gathered to consider how North Carolina could use its limited Medicaid dollars more effectively to reduce the incidence of poor health, improve access to healthcare, and reduce budgetary pressures on the state’s taxpayers. This report is submitted to North Carolina’s policymakers and citizens. It assesses the current Medicaid landscape in North Carolina, and it offers recommendations to North Carolina policymakers concerning: (1) the construction of Medicaid Managed Care markets, (2) the potential and dangers of instituting consumer-driven financial incentives in Medicaid benefits, (3) special hotspotting strategies to address the needs and escalating costs of Medicaid\u27s high-utilizers and dual-eligibles, (4) the emerging benefits of pursuing telemedicine and associated reforms to reimbursement, regulation, and Graduate Medical Education programs that could fuel telemedicine solutions to improve access and delivery. The NC Medicaid Reform Advisory Team includes: Deanna Befus, Duke School of Nursing, PhD ‘17Madhulika Vulimiri, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, MPP ‘18Patrick O’Shea, UNC School of Medicine/Fuqua School of Business, MD/MBA \u2717Shanna Rifkin, Duke Law School, JD ‘17Trey Sinyard, Duke School of Medicine/Fuqua School of Business, MD/MBA \u2717Brandon Yan, Duke Public Policy, BA \u2718Brooke Bekoff, UNC Political Science, BA \u2719Graeme Peterson, Duke Public Policy, BA ‘17Haley Hedrick, Duke Psychology, BS ‘19Jackie Lin, Duke Biology, BS \u2718Kushal Kadakia, Duke Biology and Public Policy, BS ‘19Leah Yao, Duke Psychology, BS ‘19Shivani Shah, Duke Biology and Public Policy, BS ‘18Sonia Hernandez, Duke Economics, BS \u2719Riley Herrmann, Duke Public Policy, BA \u271