In Iceland, a more direct democracy is already the “new normal”
A Pirate Party takeover has been years in the making, and Icelanders have already embraced the Pirates’ brand of more direct democracy.
Update 30 October 2016: The votes are in, and the Pirates came in third with 14.5% of the vote, a lower percentage than recent polls suggested. Voter turnout was a historic low. This is still a massive success for the young party, leaving the Pirates with control of 10 of the parliament’s 66 seats.
As Icelanders prepare to elect a new parliament today, it appears probable that the Pirate Party will gain sufficient seats to head the new government. Although their name may ring a bit whimsical to outsiders, the Pirates’ call for “direct democracy, transparency, civil rights, the right to self-determination, public access to information and responsible decision making” has been widely embraced by Icelanders. The new government will lead a nation that has largely recovered from a catastrophic financial crisis, but that still bears economic, social, and political scars from an ill-fated experiment with financial deregulation in the early 2000s. Although the Icelandic Pirate Party was founded in 2012, and quickly put a handful of activists into national and local government, the roots of the movement go back to the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
The first Pirate Party was born over a decade ago in Sweden, partially as a reaction to the perceived overreach by US government and industry groups in their attempts to shut down the Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. The new party promoted a focus on digital civil liberties, arguing that the online surveillance necessary to combat online copyright infringement — “piracy” — was incompatible with the basic freedoms necessary for democracy. The party enjoyed moderate success in Sweden, and inspired the formation of other national parties in Europe and elsewhere. In the post-Snowden era, the Pirates’ focus and concerns have become far less arcane to citizens of advanced democracies.
Following the economic crisis in 2008 which swept away much of their wealth, international regard, and trust in established political institutions, Icelanders were in a unique position to experiment with radical new approaches to governance and citizenship. As one of the world’s most highly developed nations (95 percent of Icelanders are “regular users” of the Internet, the highest percentage in Europe), several Icelandic grassroots initiatives attempted to leverage digital platforms to improve governmental access, transparency, and accountability. I’ve argued that some of this civic and political experimentation is among the most progressive (and successful) digital democracy the world has ever seen. Following is a brief overview of the Icelandic context for democratic innovation, and an introduction to a project I find particularly interesting: the municipal social innovation platform Better Reykjavik.
A context of crisis and innovation
Iceland, an island nation of approximately 315,000 citizens, rocketed to the top of the world’s development indices in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 2008, however, three of its banks collapsed, sending the national economy into a tailspin and heralding the global recession. The impacts of the kreppa (crisis) were immediate and profound. 2009 witnessed an 18% drop in per capita income and the average real pay of Icelanders fell by as much as 28.7%. The population of Iceland declined by about 1% in 2009, with net emigration of 4,835 individuals. In April 2010, the so-called Black Report was released. Commissioned by the Icelandic Parliament, the report detailed the results of an investigation into the causes of the financial collapse. Among other findings, it revealed that corrupt and criminal activity on the part of politicians and business moguls was significantly to blame. This did not come as news to most Icelanders, who had already identified cronyism as a primary factor in their nation’s woes. An annual survey of Icelanders’ trust in different institutions indicated that trust in Parliament, for example, plummeted from 40% in 2008 to 11% in 2011, and trust in most other institutions decreased as well.
Given this context, it is not surprising that many initiatives that emerged in response to the kreppa originated among grassroots political activists, and not from official political institutions. One Saturday after the collapse of the banks, songwriter Hörð Torfason brought a microphone to a square outside of Parliament and invited fellow citizens to voice their confusion and frustration. Over a period of months, the weekly protests of the “Kitchenware Revolution” (named for the protesters’ noisemakers of choice) grew to several thousand participants and culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Geir Haarde in January 2009.
This grassroots protest context was supported by several projects and initiatives that brought political and policy discussions online. The weekly protests outside the Parliament building, for example, were initially spontaneous and later coordinated via Facebook. When clashes between protesters and police threatened to become violent, a Facebook campaign led to protesters wearing the color orange to indicate their intention to remain peaceful. Some activists, however, channeled their frustration into not only coordinating action online, but into building new platforms for political engagement. The development of bottom-up, grassroots approaches to online politics represents a novel development, showing how a fast, open, iterative technical development process can lead to social and political impact.
Rebooting Iceland
A unique characteristic of many Icelandic political initiatives is that individuals and groups without direct policymaking authority developed them: not politicians and government officials, but grassroots activists, hackers, and entrepreneurs. The “interfaces” between these projects and Icelandic policymaking institutions were not pre-defined, but evolved following popular adoption and engagement. Most of these projects have attempted to integrate more citizens, more directly, into various political processes. Many observers (including me) have noted the theme of “crowdsourcing” that seems to orient the majority of these initiatives, although I find the term imprecise and potentially confusing.
Much Icelandic attention has focused on allowing citizens easier and more-effective ways to make their opinions, and more importantly, their ideas, apparent to politicians. A 2009 “National Assembly” was organized by tech entrepreneurs and activists, and brought together 1,500 Icelanders for a multimodal “envisioning” summit focused on the future of the country — the results of which were subsequently endorsed by the national parliament. A second, similar, assembly in 2010 with 950 participants launched the nation’s (in)famous “crowdsourced” constitution-crafting project.
Better Reykjavik (Betri Reykjavík) is an initiative designed to promote citizen participation and collaborative problem solving in city governance. Better Reykjavik is a website that allows citizens to submit policy proposals to the municipal government. These ideas are publicly accessible, and may be debated by other participants and revised. The public is also encouraged to make a simple vote on each proposal — support or oppose. Over time, a body of proposals emerges, each idea refined by debate, with the aggregate list ordered by the number of votes it has received. Better Reykjavik is an “e-petition” or “open innovation” website that enables citizens to submit, debate, and prioritize policy proposals and ideas.
Better Reykjavik has several qualities that distinguish it from similar projects: it (1) is developed and maintained by a grassroots nonprofit organization, and not by a government, (2) rapidly achieved significant buy-in from citizens, policymakers, and public administrators, and (3) has been normalized as an ongoing channel for citizen-government interaction. The citizen engagement and policy development process it facilitates more closely resembles crowdsourcing and aggregation platforms like Reddit than established e-petition sites such as the Obama administration’s We The People site or the German Bundestag’s e-petitions site.
We are the Best
Better Reykjavik evolved from a previous social innovation platform from developers Robert Bjarnason and Gunnar Grímsson called the Shadow City (Skuggaborg), which was launched shortly before the Reykjavik municipal elections in 2010. Each of the eight political parties vying for seats on the council was provided with a “branded” section of the site to use to connect with potential voters and learn about voters’ political priorities. Few of the parties made use of the site, with the exception of a new party calling itself the “Best Party.” Actor and comedian Jón Gnarr had founded the party a few months earlier, making outlandish campaign promises that satirized the entire political process (the party promised voters a Disneyland, a polar bear in the zoo, and free towels, among other things). When it became apparent that the Best Party was actually leading most polls, Gnarr realized the Shadow City could be a way to connect with potential voters and develop a more realistic party platform that reflected constituents’ interests.
On May 29, 2010, the Best Party won the city council election, and subsequently entered into coalition talks with the Social Democrats. A new section of the Shadow City website called Better Reykjavik was opened, and the coalition partners encouraged citizens to use the site to share their priorities for the new government. Soon over 5,000 users were participating on the site — an impressive figure in a municipality where 56,897 votes were cast in total. Within months, several of the highest-rated ideas from the Better Reykjavik site had been placed at the top of the policy agenda listed on the Best Party website, and many were soon implemented.
Following completion of the coalition talks, citizens continued to use the Better Reykjavik site to petition the new government. In October 2011, the City of Reykjavik entered into a formal partnership with the Citizens Foundation. One component of this partnership was a commitment by the city council to address the top five priorities posted to the site each month, as well as the top priorities in each of the topical categories on this site (e.g., “environment,” “transportation,” “education”). Over the next several years, tens of thousands of participants engaged with the site. Reykjavik city committees formally evaluated and processed hundreds of these citizen-submitted ideas, issued an official response to each, and implemented those deemed feasible. When I spoke with him in 2012, Gnarr enthused about the potential of technologies to help solve his city’s civic challenges, particularly those that enabled more direct democracy:
“I think the best democracy from now on will be direct democracy. We have tried all kinds of democracy, but we have never really tried direct democracy. The timing is right, because we have the technology to make it more user-friendly and simple.”
A context of democratic innovation
The popularity of the project with residents and city administrators alike led to further initiatives for innovative governance. In 2012, Reykjavik started using the Better Reykjavik site to support its participatory budgeting initiative Better Neighborhoods (Betri Hverfi). Each year, citizens of ten Reykjavik neighborhoods determine how to allocate 300 million ISK ($2.6 million) for neighborhood improvement. Residents with digitally verified residential addresses propose ideas and cast their votes on the site to select projects to implement in their neighborhoods.
In May 2014, a municipal election ushered in a new government, and the Better Reykjavik initiative easily survived the transition. Jón Gnarr decided not to seek a second term in government, and his Best Party was disbanded. When the new coalition released its policy agenda statement, the first section of the document (Icelandic) listed “transparency and increased democracy” as the government’s primary goal. Reflecting the presence of the Pirate Party in the coalition, a new standing committee — the “Administration and Democracy Council” — was formed. The committee, headed by Pirate councilperson Halldór Auðar Svansson, was charged with tasks such as improving access to information, increasing the participation of citizens in decision-making, and promoting the use of open-source and free software. Better Reykjavik found a new administrative home under the auspices of this committee.
The new mayor, Dagur B. Eggertsson, remained a supporter of the initiative. In our 2014 interview, he suggested the need for deeper evaluation of the project by the city:
“To what extent is this a new channel for those who are already active and having their voice heard, and to what extent this tool engaged new groups and new voices that we weren’t hearing before?”
Eggertsson’s desire to not just maintain the function of the platform in his government, but to improve its ability to engage ever broader groups of citizens, clearly reflects how such digital democracy initiatives have been “normalized” in Icelandic politics.
Enter the Pirates
By 2013, the economic mood in Iceland was beginning to brighten. A recovery of sorts was underway, and observers lauded the nation’s decisions and applauded its luck. At the national level, voters reinstated the two center-right parties whose policies had led to the financial crisis, but also gave the Pirates three seats in parliament, currently Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Helgi Hrafn Guðmundsson, and Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir. Following strong Pirate leadership on freedom of expression issues support for the party began to explode, surprising even the Pirates themselves. When the Prime Minister was forced to resign in April 2016 as a result of a tax evasion scandal exposed by the Panama Papers leaks, the Pirates’ calls for government transparency and accountability became even more salient.
Icelanders have become enviably accustomed to concepts of digital direct democracy thanks to projects like Better Reykjavik, and are receptive to the vision of society espoused by the Pirates. The Icelandic community is small and close-knit, and most of the current Pirates have been collaborating for years. Birgitta Jónsdóttir was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Better Reykjavik. Smári McCarthy was an early advisor on the Better Reykjavik initiative, and is now the lead candidate to represent Reykjavik’s Southern Constituency. Gunnar Grímsson left his executive role at Citizens Foundation over the summer to join the Executive Board of the Pirate Party.
The Icelandic Pirates are thus uniquely positioned to put an ambitious new social and digital agenda into action. Simply put, digital democracy has been in the Icelandic air for years.
The world is watching. Good luck.
Notes
Thanks to all those Icelanders who have discussed these issues with me over the years. “Team iceMedia,” a group of Elon University iMedia students, accompanied me to Iceland in 2012 and produced two of the videos embedded above. Most of this article is derived from my previously published research; take a look if you would like to read further:
Lackaff, D. (2015). Escaping the Middleman Paradox: Better Reykjavik and open policy innovation. Journal of eDemocracy & Open Government, 7(2), 137–161.
Lackaff, D. (2016). Better Reykjavik: Open municipal policymaking. In E. Gordon & P. Mahailidis, (Eds.). Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (pp. 229–234). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Also available at http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/better-reykjavik
