Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland

Aitamurto, T. and Landemore, H. (2016), Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland. Policy & Internet, doi: 10.1002/poi3.115

Posted: 23 May 2016

Date Written: May 1, 2016

Abstract

In this paper we examine the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term “crowdsourced deliberation” to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on “deliberative systems.”

Keywords: crowdsourcing, crowdlaw, deliberative systems, online deliberation, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, policymaking, democratic innovations

Suggested Citation

Aitamurto, Tanja and Landemore, Helene E., Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland (May 1, 2016). Aitamurto, T. and Landemore, H. (2016), Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland. Policy & Internet, doi: 10.1002/poi3.115, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2782948

Tanja Aitamurto (Contact Author)

Stanford University ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305
United States

Helene E. Landemore

Yale University ( email )

493 College St
New Haven, CT CT 06520
United States

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