I recently wrote about why a service I use needs to be simplified so I want to dig a bit deeper into what simplification can mean for citizens. This post weighs the important balance between simplification and variation. I overall posit that simplification is not always inherently good. In delivering government as a platform, it is important to consider if governments are prioritizing the right processes for standardization.
Standardizing Syllabi
A few weeks ago, our digital government class at the Harvard Kennedy School analyzed our various syllabi to assess how well the faculty were responding to student-user needs. We drew a conclusion that fits well with what students studying government would say: we wanted standardization!
We want standards so that we know where to go to find what we need when we need it. We suggested that the school should give faculty a set of standards that they must abide by — maybe even a template? This would ensure that whether I was looking for due-dates in my public finance syllabus or my strategizing for human rights syllabus, I would know where in the document to go.
After class, I started to wonder if uniformity is really what we wanted — after all, don’t different syllabi inform us of the quieter, albeit valuable, personality traits of a class? The variety of styles, fonts, even formats all equip us with information that helps us make decisions about the class and that maybe even helps us interact with our professors in more personalized ways. For example, our digital government syllabus is in a google doc — we didn’t even have to open the document before this told us an important story about the class.
During the class exercise, my neighbor Huy explained to me that in the country he studied in, professors did not provide students with syllabi. Maybe the fact that each professor at HKS is required to provide this service is standardization enough. It is, upon reflection, interesting to see what different professors do with the standard assignment.
I mention this exercise because it made me ponder the value of variation and the role of pluralism in our democracy. How might the concept of digital government support or threaten pluralism?
Pluralism & Democracy
In Federalist Paper №10, Madison pitches the new U.S. constitution to his readers as being designed to mediate competing interests amongst different groups by allowing competing groups to equally (ha) participate in democracy. Pluralism became a hallmark of American democracy.
Interestingly, pluralism was “vigorously” promoted by early 20th century English writers in reaction to “the alienation of the individual under conditions of unrestrained capitalism.” As pluralists, they argued for “economic and administrative decentralization” that stressed high variability across society’s decision-making structures (guilds, villages, churches, etc.) whereby individuals could choose to participate and shape social norms and outcomes.
Indeed, the definition of pluralism is “advocating devolution and autonomy for individual bodies in preference to monolithic state control.” The preference for platform over monolith is embedded in our modern foundations and realizations of democracy. A monolith describes a vertical relationship between government and citizen whereby interactions are uniform, typically top-down, and often repetitive as the citizen must interact with monolith after monolith to be served. A platform describes horizontally shared infrastructure that enables high variability services and decision-making structures, allowing government and citizen to interact in a streamlined yet customizable manner. While monolithic government services benefit from a single management system for clearer accountability, “government as a platform” ideally enables a more iterative feedback loop between citizen and service-provider.
When government engages in standardization for the sake of standardization, it runs the risk of layering monolith on top of monolith. Delivering responsive platforms requires not the standardization of everything, but rather the standardization of the right things. When done right, government as a platform simplifies the low-variability infrastructure to power high-variability services, preserving pluralism by making it easier to create diverse services for diverse needs.
Thoughtful analysis on the prioritization of which processes should be standardized and simplified is of paramount importance: the wrong decisions will not only result in more entrenched monolithic systems but can also have unintended consequences regarding state control and the health of democratic governance.
Order & Control: A Thin-Line
In class, we have explored how some of the best information standardization efforts can give rise to the variability of products and services. When we standardize information systems, however, we also typically concentrate power. Some of the most renowned government as a platform players are making constant design choices around the concentration of power. Often those choices have blurry lines.
For example, Estonia has a solid reputation as a pioneer in delivering government as a platform. It has developed a centralized information infrastructure to improve a variety of service delivery systems. In reviewing the model’s many positive attributes, Helen Margetts and Andre Naumann excitedly explain that the standardized interface also allows the government to design a choice architecture that “nudges” citizens towards socially optimal choices. What happens, though, if those in power start confusing what is socially optimal with what is politically optimal?
The power that comes with standardization is further highlighted by James C. Scott who underscores how “state simplification” systems such as last-names, addresses, and maps “promised to reward those who complied with its logic and to penalize those who ignored it.” These standardized systems make government services easier to deliver and make people easier to control. The modern state, he explains, works to reduce chaos and disorder by changing reality to an administrative grid. The civilizing mission is what he evocatively calls “internal colonization.”
Scott starts to indirectly make an interesting case for preserving some “chaos” to resist control. When we simplify certain systems, we not only concentrate state power, we make sweeping changes easier. Public servants should be tasked with engaging in rigorous analysis to determine when standardization serves or harms citizens.
Simplifying the Release of Incarcerated Individuals
Scott’s reminder that standardization can be controlling reminded me of a project I worked on this Summer for a state government in the U.S. The state was in the news for over-detaining individuals given the confusing felony sentencing structure in the state — if you were sentenced in a certain year, chances were that your sentence would be much different from the sentence someone was serving for the same crime committed in a different year. To respond to the confusion, I was tasked with analyzing if the state should create a felony class system. The outlined objections of this proposed system were “standardization, simplification, and decarceration.”
In projecting the impact of classifying felonies against those three objectives, I found that classifying felonies into various groups would absolutely meet standardization and simplification measures. Yet such a function would make it easier for the legislature to make sweeping, politically ripe, regressive changes that were historically used to increase the rate of excessive incarceration. We had to make the hard decision to forgo simplification for human rights protections. When presenting this analysis to the Governor, he mirrored back the understanding that the chaos and confusion in the system had a protective function — protecting people from the state exerting even more control than it already had.
We, however, still wanted to solve the problem of over-detention. Our next task was to look at the layers of processes above and below the sentencing process. Upon further analysis, we found a different bug in the system: documentation between police, courts, county jails, state prisons, were duplicative and contradictory. Reports outlined how certain offices refused to digitize such documentation, requiring them to drive paper forms to other entities, a major source of delays. This incompetent data management system was the true root cause of over-detention and was political but comparatively less political than the proposed felony class system. In the end, the state essentially needed a centralized excel spreadsheet, embedded with standard formulas for calculating release dates.
Better yet, such standardization would actually provide the state with critical data that could enable more aggressive decarceration efforts. In the end, by standardizing release calculation processes rather than sentencing processes, we enabled higher variability of policy proposals for reducing excessive sentences and better served all three outcomes.
It is also important to note that the felony class system solution was proposed by expert albeit outsider consultants while discussions with individuals in contact with the legal system uncovered this better (and lower cost) idea.
Choosing change
Starting with standardization for the sake of standardization mirrors the same problem of starting with the solution. Starting with citizen needs instead, how can the right processes be standardized? How can basic infrastructure be simplified to enable variability and a plurality of ideas, innovations, and services that help democracy thrive? These are the questions public servants should regularly ask themselves as it becomes increasingly easier to simplify, standardize, and centralize information and services. We should be aware that some preservation of chaos or disorder may even be for the public good.
The suggestion to slow certain simplification processes down should not be taken as a suggestion to embody a bureaucrat unwilling to change. On the contrary, this is a suggestion for public servants to engage in a more critical analysis for choosing what gets changed, when. As is usually the case with good analytical processes, it requires more thought, more outreach, more work. All the thought, outreach, and work worth driving diverse and innovative service delivery with a side of preserving democracy.
This post was written as an assignment for DPI-662 Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation (2021)
