Updating democracy in Taïwan
By: Mauricio Mejia
Tags: Civictech

By BARBARA TEIXEIRA DE SOUSA SENECAUT

In a time of weakened and polarised democracies, Taiwan is re-inventing its democracy with a tool infamous for deepening divisions.

The 1990s in Taiwan were characterised by a wave of democratic reforms following the abolition of Martial Law, and by the information revolution that came hand in hand with the new and emerging technologies. The combination of these two developments set the precedent for the transformation of the Taiwanese social and political landscape.

However, two decades later, Taiwan still lacked institutionalized policy making spaces and open consultation processes. The Ma Ying-jeou administration saw social movement after social movement, and the climate of discontent reached its climax in the Sunflower Movement. In the spring of 2014, the Taiwanese people took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with the lack the legislative transparency. Initial protests centered around the

passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) — perceived to be damaging to the local economy and increasing its vulnerability to political pressure from Beijing — without clause-by clause review. The protests culminated in the weeks-long occupation of the national parliament by students, academics, civic organisations and others.

G0v (gov-zero), an already established movement of citizen activists or as they call themselves ‘civic hackers’, gained a lot of visibility and public trust for providing tech infrastructure during the protests. The Taiwanese government, understanding that this discontent needed to be tackled head-on in order to prevent it from recurring, decided to work with g0v and collaboratively conceive the vTaiwan project. This experiment in participatory democracy embarked on an endeavour of open consultation processes with the citizens.

The genuine buy-in from government stakeholders, institutionalised participation of officials and the fact that it runs parallel to and partners with official institutions has made it one of the more effective processes of digital democracy. To date, 26 national issues have been discussed via vTaiwan and more than 80% have impacted policy outcomes and led to decisive government action.

This graph illustrates perfectly how the vTaiwan process goes through the four stages (proposal, opinion, reflection and legislation) to provide meaningful citizen-government engagement following their principles of transparency, collaboration, self-organisation and distributed responsibility. If the issue at hand requires the involvement of few stakeholders then face-to-face conversations are held, otherwise vTaiwan uses the crowdsourced

consensus-mining platform Pol.is.

The majority of online platforms where political debate occurs function on

divisiveness while Pol.is aims to identify common ground in public agreements and disagreements. This consensus-generating mechanism sorts participants into like-minded clusters, then identifies ‘consensus statements’ which have a high level of agreement across multiple clusters. Thanks to this platform, “people spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole” said Audrey Tang, the g0v ‘civic hacker’ turned Digital Minister of Taiwan.

Thanks to the consensus generated, the government could accordingly make decisions on the issues debated. The results of the vTaiwan process have been at the core of 11 laws and regulations. Its most famous case is the regulation of Uber. Throughout the world Uber has caused problems for taxi companies and government regulators. In Taiwan, Uber people were perceived as criminals by the political elite and no Ministry wanted to go head to head

with the company. Consequently, vTaiwan decided to engage uber drivers, taxi drivers and their passengers to tackle this issue. Opinions were split on its convenience or illegality, but over time the polarized statements lost support and suggestions generated over 80% consensus, the cut-off point to go into subsequent deliberation. The debate ended with concessions for Uber; they could operate, but only with licenced drivers, whom had to be provided insurance, and they had to submit ride data to the Taiwanese authorities.

In an era marked by strong political disagreements online and offline all around the world, this shows how we can put our differences aside and agree on the things that matter. It is remarkable that a movement that grew out of dissatisfaction with transparency in government could actually find common ground with government and work together on a process like vTaiwan. Its current form is not so much a model to be replicated given its current limitations, particular with regards to tackling controversial issues, and the fluctuating engagement of institutions, but it holds lessons for us and our perception of collective governance. By making citizens key to decision making through a consensus mining platform, we could go a long way towards creating a better democracy.

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