Citizen participation in Iceland, a success?

BY AMBRE LE RAY
Since the start of the decade, Iceland is well-known around the world for the innovations that its citizens developed in terms of digital democracy and participation.

Context

The island of 315,000 inhabitants always had a democratic culture. In fact, the capital Reykjavik hosts the oldest surviving parliament in the world. Moreover, Icelanders are a very connected population and there is a very present tech culture in the country. These last years, these two dimensions helped to accelerate the process of citizens’ participation.

Iceland suffered from the 2008 world financial crisis. It had economic consequences with the collapse of the three major banks of Iceland or the rise of unemployment but also political consequences with scandals of corruption increasing the distrust of citizens for their political representatives.

Not trusting the political class, the civil society decided to retake the power in their own hands and brings politics closer to the Icelanders. Celebrities using their influence and engineers using their knowledge exploited technologies and digital tools to promote this new democratic participation online.

Better Reykjavik

Two Icelanders, Gunnar Grímsson and Robert Bjarnason, founded the non-profit organization Citizens Foundation in 2008 after the crisis. Their first project was to build the platform Your Priorities to relay policy suggestions from citizens to policymakers. The Best Party of the humorist Jón Gnarr started first to use this platform for their campaign for the 2010 municipal elections by asking citizens to propose some policies they wanted to see implemented. After being elected, they decided to keep using Better Reykjavik for citizens to participate in the policy-making of their city. The website was a success with 5,000 users in the first months and 70,000 to these days, a high proportion of the population considering the fact that there are just 120,000 inhabitants in the icelandic capital.

Nowadays, around 10 to 15 propositions written by citizens on the website are studied each month in the Reykjavik City Council. On Better Reykjavik , citizens can make different propositions depending on the type of action they want to be involved in. The first action enabled by the website is the agenda-setting : some propositions determine the future policies implemented in the city. The second is the policy-making : until 2030, the Reykjavik City Council is asking Icelanders to give their thoughts about what should be the education system in a decade, to write propositions for a future education system. Finally, since 2011, “My Neighbourhood” is the place for the participatory budgeting, where 5% of the city construction budget is allocated to projects proposed on the website by the inhabitants. In each of these three sections, for each proposition made, Better Reykjavik has a system of “up” and “down” vote. It is also possible to leave an argued comment either in the “for the proposition” column or “against the proposition” column. This system of two columns avoids any discussion that could become personal and thus irrelevant to the topic. Thanks to these systems of vote and comments, Better Reykjavik is self-prioritizing the propositions that should be studied by the city council.

What can be learn?

To my mind, Better Reykjavik is a perfect illustration of the success and limits that digital democracy faces today. Helped by the high tech culture present in Iceland, the digital platform and digital tools are well integrated in the decision making process of the city council. Moreover, they enabled a renewed trust between citizens and their representatives and involved more citizens to participate in the policy-making system. However, the goal to have a diverse population is still not achieved. Women participate more in Better Reykjavik, especially the participatory budgeting. For example, in “My Neighbourhood” 2018, there were 62% of female users, only 38% were male. Better Reykjavik is currently working on reducing this gender gap. The participation of the youth (under 26 years old) is also lacking compared to their older counterparts. Even if the youth is likely to use more digital technologies than older citizens, their lack of interest for the political life is still strong. These findings could question the democratization of these digital processes. The significant impact of digital democracy is nuanced if these digital tools are primarily used by the citizens that already were the most involved before the creation of the platform and if they fail to involve some parts of the population that were already not participating, even if they use digital technologies daily. Furthermore, Better Reykjavik has some success at the local level but this kind of process at a much bigger scale are only starting to happen and results are thus still uncertain.

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