Socio-economic-environmental-political science

Introduction

A naive and far from complete argument is presented here to suggest that political decisions should be backed by more elaborate, open, and transparent studies that guide policy makers today. This specific art form is defined here as socio-economic-environmental-political science. At the end of the post the respective Belgian context is briefly illustrated as an example.

What is socio-economic-environmental-political science?

I am sure this definition is used literally in other places as well, but let's define it clearly for this post:

The act of transparently and openly estimating, monitoring and evaluating the social, environmental and economical impact of legislation.

I would argue that this encompasses an in depth study of the interactions between economics, sociology, the environment and politics. Typical questions I would like to see being addressed could be

What is the socio-economic return of extending a ring road in a densely populated urban area? What are the environmental and public health issues, and how do they relate to any economic return? What is the required political capital considering a range of opinions of interested parties, and what type of solution is supported by how many people?

This is what I would call an impossible question to answer with great detail. However, this is in reality a very typical problem encountered by politicians. There is no way even a fraction of the solution space can be explored since so many people's opinions are involved. Also, modelling the impact of certain measures can not be done accurately within a short time frame. Yet during such a decision making process many studies will be ordered and paid for. The results of different studies will usually vary significantly.

I am not saying that these kinds of problems are not being investigated by politicians. The point I try to make is that currently the performed studies are islands, and their methodologies and data sets are not always clearly shared and motivated. The term reproducibility is nowhere to be found. A profound debate on assumptions, boundary conditions, data sets, and governing equations only takes place behind closed doors of the paid consultants executing the study. Yet these decisions are important and shape the outcome of the study significantly. If a decision process is supposed to be democratic (which I clearly think it should), then the studies supporting this process should be as open and transparent as possible. Additionally, this could encourage democratic participation from many different actors and organisations who have an interest in either the process in itself or the outcome. For instance, mobility experts and engineers can review methodologies used assessing mobility impacts, while economics can argue about the corresponding economic impact, and environmental scientists contribute correspondingly. This widens the in origin political debate significantly to other layers of society and that is a good thing. In openly and transparently doing so, a broadly carried consensus is more likely to be found. Additionally, it is often cheap to denounce studies ordered and paid by certain political families or interest groups due to the assumed bias. If studies carry a more neutral weight, such a political move might be expensive in terms of public support.

Politics needs its own Github: an open collaborative space where studies, data, results, analysis can be shared, and discussed. How decisions are formed should be tracked, pros and cons need to be clear at all times, and who's in favour and against can be on display.

Needless to say, creating such an environment is a huge challenge. Although far from trivial, the technical aspects are not the real problem as the social internet industry (Github, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, ...) demonstrates every day. Heck, people are already building an open source infrastructure as we speak that could support such work flows, see for instance: adhocracy (code is on Github) and loomio.

The most difficult problem to tackle is to convince policy makers that absolute transparency in the decision making process (including the studies on which it bases itself) is the only way forward to lift the democratic process to the next level.

Very short primer on Belgian politics

Belgian politics are a mess. I would assume politics are messy by definition, but I am more familiar with the Belgian political scene than any other. Growing up as a native in a country usually has that effect. What particularly makes Belgium such a mess is that we have close to 11 million inhabitants spread over 3 semi independent small regions governed by no less than six governments and parliaments. However, the technicalities of the Belgian political scene and structure are not the focus of this post. If you want to learn more about Belgium's political structure, you can start browsing Wikipedia here, here, and here.

Independent review of promises made during election time

And now to the Belgian context. When political parties layout their campaigns and mark their priorities for the upcoming legislation, the implications of proposed legislative measures on the budget and society are at best guestimates. These guestimates are usually created by in-house study groups employed by the respective political parties. Often these people have political ambitions as well, and it implies that the presented studies are likely to be biased. For example, party A will present their studies in support of the presented action plan. Parties C to Z will show exactly the same positive results for wildly varying policies. In politics the solution space for societal problems approaches infinity, and in the end it all boils down to making choices and compromises, marking priorities and making decisions. The downsides of these promised legislative choices are hardly emphasized during campaigning, if at all. No transparent fact checking on the proposals is performed, and used calculation methods and data sets are not shared openly.

In The Netherlands the "Central Planning Bureau" (CPB) acts as a third party arbiter during election times verifying the economic context of the political claims. In Belgium there is no such thing, there is no organised fact checking on what political parties promise while seducing voters before the elections. Applying a solid open and transparent socio-economic-environmental-political science framework would in my opinion help the quality of the public debate.

For the upcoming 2014 elections in Belgium, two parties have raised exactly these concerns. You can read their brief statements as reported by Flemish newspaper The Standaard here and here. Not all is lost, and at least some politicians agree at least partly with some of the statements placed here.