CrowdLaw: Towards a More Inclusive Lawmaking Through Technology

ended

With rates of trust in government at all-time lows, the legitimacy of traditional representative models of lawmaking, typically dominated by political party agendas and conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind closed doors, is called into question. But technology offers the promise of opening how parliaments and local legislatures work, creating new challenges and dangers for individual rights and democracy, but also generating unprecedented opportunities for improving the legitimacy and, more generally, the quality of law and decision-making in our political systems. CrowdLaw refers to the use of technology to engage the public in all stages of the lawmaking process, from problem identification to solution identification, proposal drafting, ratification, implementation and assessment. This research project deals with CrowdLaw in order to understand (theoretically and empirically) its impact on legislative institutions, the public and political culture. By exploiting technology to engage a broader and more diverse constituency in the lawmaking process, CrowdLaw has the potential to enhance the quality of lawmaking practices and to transform fundamentally the source of authority undergirding the legislative process. In this sense, three broad hypotheses will guide my work to measure the impact of digital democracy on individual participation, information quality and legislative outcomes. To do so, I am planning to: 1) Develop a taxonomy to organize and analyse CrowdLaw practices; 2) Conduct mixed-methods research to evaluate different CrowdLaw modalities and their legal frameworks and 3) Transform two local legislatures (Barcelona and Madrid) into CrowdLaw living labs to be able to conduct experiments that allow me to test how CrowdLaw initiatives impact the legitimacy and quality of lawmaking. The final goal of this research is to support legislatures, especially city councils, in designing more participatory lawmaking practices.