Civic participation in the datafied society: Towards democratic auditing?

Hintz, Arne ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9902-4736, Dencik, Lina, Redden, Joanna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9480-0951, Trere, Emiliano ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-4571, Brand, Jess and Warne, Harry 2022. Civic participation in the datafied society: Towards democratic auditing? [Project Report]. Cardiff: Data Justice Lab. Available at: https://datajusticelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2022...

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Abstract

Digital infrastructure increasingly enables the extraction, exploitation, processing and analysis of personal and behavioural data. Data analytics have not just become the core of the digital economy but also constitute a growing feature of the public sector. Wide areas of public administration are now based on, or at least informed by, the aggregation of data for the purpose of profiling, categorising, sorting, rating, ranking and segmenting populations, and then treating them distinctly. Scoring systems and other forms of predictive analytics are prime means to assess citizens yet these systems are applied mostly without the knowledge of those being analysed and the exact mechanisms of data analytics remain obscure. Citizens are classified according to criteria that are not transparent, with consequences they do not know about, and without an open way of redress. As citizens are continuously profiled and evaluated, there is a power shift from citizens to the state. All this raises fundamental questions regarding the quality of democracy in a context of datafied administration and governance. Whereas a democracy requires that the people adopt the role of the sovereign, in a datafied society this sovereign does not have much knowledge, understanding, or say in how it is treated. Key questions arise: What are avenues for people to participate in decisions about the use of predictive analytics by public institutions? How can they intervene into an increasingly automated state? How can the datafied society be democratised? To investigate these questions, this report addresses six themes: 1. Institutional dynamics; 2. Initiatives of civic engagement; 3. Oversight and advisory bodies; 4. Civil society strategies; 5. Alternative Imaginaries and Infrastructures; 6. Data literacy.

Item Type:	Monograph (Project Report)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Data Justice Lab
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	31 August 2022
Last Modified:	17 Feb 2025 09:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176162

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