Decide Madrid: Enhancing Citizen Participation in Democratic Processes through E-Government
Background
Following the election of Manuela Carmena as Mayor of Madrid in 2015, the City Council of Madrid was tasked with developing new, intelligent mechanisms for engaging citizens in democratic processes, overseen by a new division called the Government Area of Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government. Inspired by existing models and tools for direct democracy, such as the civic initiative in Switzerland, government researchers developed Decide Madrid, an online platform for citizens to participate in a variety of democratic processes. Following its core development, Yago Abati, an independent consultant, and others from the Collective Intelligence Laboratory for Democratic Participation helped design and implement new features for the platform.
After its launch, the model for Decide Madrid was released through the CONSUL application — open-source, e-government software used by 33 countries, 130 institutions, and over 90 million citizens, globally. Some examples include Buenos Aires, Turin, and Montevideo.
Goals
Decide Madrid was developed with the citizens of Madrid in mind, seeking ultimately to renovate and streamline the mechanisms through which participation could occur, and to enhance representation through bottom-up proposals. Thus, the underlying goal of Decide Madrid was to collect, organize, and scale citizen proposals for enhancing government services.
Furthermore, because the Madrid City Council requires a threshold of support (1%) from citizens within the municipality for referenda to reach legislators, Decide Madrid was also released to overcome this hurdle by providing an alternative avenue through which citizens may provide support for various initiatives.
Process
Launched on September 15, 2015, Decide Madrid was designed to function as an online discussion-based forum, accessed via web and mobile browser, through which the citizens of Madrid may create and contribute to debate threads and proposals. Comparable to the commenting structure of Reddit, the Decide Madrid platform allows for continuous threads of discussion and opinion-sharing, which helps shape the final form of proposals. In addition to engaging in discussion, citizens may also rank debates and proposals through a simple ‘liking’ system, similar to that of other social media.
Another service provided through Decide Madrid is access to participatory municipal budgeting, for which citizens may pitch and vote on $30 million worth of projects for the City of Madrid, and another $70 million for local projects in city districts. While this system is similar to the general citizen proposals, different stages of the participatory budgeting process are available only during specific periods of each fiscal year (e.g., presentation, initial review, final vote, etc.).
Since its launch in 2015, Decide Madrid has been highly successful, with over 500,000 users, 30,000 citizen initiative proposals, and more than 15,000 participatory budgeting proposals logged. In 2019 alone, the site has been accessed more than 11 million times, resulting in thousands of new proposals and debates, making Decide Madrid one of the most active platforms for democratic participation in the world.
Lessons and challenges
One of the most important lessons learned through the development and implementation of Decide Madrid was the capacity to enact direct democracy through a simple, forum-based digital platform, as was demonstrated by its success. However, as Yago and other researchers at the Collective Intelligence Lab suggest, the ranking process through which citizens voted on various proposals (via ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’) could be a limitation, as its simplicity may enable populist-style campaigning.
For instance, it is easy for citizens to advance proposals via complaints, spamming, or reverberating previous or similar proposals en masse. Moreover, because the structure of Decide Madrid affords a relatively superficial style of ranking, it could be manipulated by marketing campaigns and fundraising initiatives, which further demonstrates the relationship between direct democracy and populism.
Next, there is commonly a lack of expertise within citizen proposals, which could otherwise mitigate the replication of proposals that have already pitched or failed in the past. This highlights the need for communities of deliberation to connect with experts and professionals and for infrastructure to better gather citizens around similar topics in cohesive deliberation and proposal creation that circumvents these limitations (i.e., facilitating connections with experts with busy schedules or barriers to access).
Next steps
Since the government of Madrid has changed, work with Decide Madrid has largely ended; however, the platform itself remains in use. Thus, researchers such as Yago Abati are looking to leverage their experiences with this platform to enhance similar systems of civic participation.
With the limitations of Decide Madrid in mind, next steps will include developing more intelligent forms of ranking for citizen proposals and debate threads. One possible method includes utilizing a pairwise comparison, whereby users are prompted to choose between two proposals at a time as opposed to ‘liking’ or ranking all proposals at once. Another method includes utilizing natural language processing and topic modeling to better organize citizen proposals around particular issues or topics.
Building on pilot testing conducted through Decide Madrid, future initiatives will also focus on connecting citizens with experts throughout the proposal and deliberation processes.
Additional materials and resources
Publications:
Cantador, I., Bellogín, A., Cortés-Cediel, M. E., & Gil, O. (2017). Personalized recommendations in e-participation: Offline experiments for the ‘Decide Madrid’ platform. Proceedings from CitRec ’17.
Other resources:
Report on Decide Madrid from Future Democracies; Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy
Contact
Yago Bermejo Abati, Independent Consultant
Email: iagobam@gmail.com