Study Group: Putting the Public Back in Government Session 3

Date: 

Monday, April 29, 2019, 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

124 Mt Auburn, Suite 100N, Room 106

Social Auditing in the Chilean Parliament: Using collective intelligence to evaluate legislation

Join Ash Center Democracy Fellows, Victoria Alsina and Maria Maroto, as they debate how civic engagement can improve the lawmaking process and the quality of policies in government. This session specifically spotlights the Chilean Congress’ use of citizen focus groups to understand the effectiveness of new laws post-implementation. Chile has used this participatory evaluation approach, also referred to as “social auditing” or “civic auditing,” since 2011. Traditionally, academic researchers and think tanks have led evaluations on whether new regulatory frameworks achieve their desired objectives and are well implemented. However, policy evaluation increasingly presents an opportunity for public engagement, such as leveraging the public to define impact measures, monitor program implementation, and gather on-the-ground evidence to improve existing service delivery and inform future policy formulation. The session will also touch upon how new technology is enabling this larger-scale and real-time citizen crowdsourcing of feedback to policymakers.
 
This event is connected to a research project co-lead by HKS Professor Archon Fung and Victoria Alsina, Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center, in collaboration with Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, NYU GovLab, and with the generous support from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Lunch will be served. Study groups are open to students, university affiliates, and the broader community. Space is available on a first come, first served basis.

RCC logoThis group is cosponored by Real Colegio Complutense. 

About the Study Group Series
Putting the Public Back in Government is a spring semester 2019 study group hosted by Victoria Alsina, a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. At Ash she leads research on CrowdLaw, the practice of using technology to open parliaments, governments, and public institutions to collective intelligence at each stage of the law and policymaking cycle to improve the quality, effectiveness and legitimacy of the resulting laws and policies.