Crowdsourcing Crisis Management and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

In situations of crisis, governments must make decisions under a great uncertainty, complexity, urgency, high social pressure, and great scarcity of resources. We need to maximize the quality of decisions and ensure that we find practical and effective solutions for our problems. The stakes are simply too high. The risk, however, is to give up democratic legitimacy for, in the best case, some form of output legitimacy or technocracy. On the other hand, decisions made in times of emergency are tremendously consequential for our citizens, affecting their fundamental rights and welfare, and it is for decisions like this that democratic legitimacy seems to be crucial. We may be in the apparent dilemma of having to choose between the quality of public decision-making and its democratic legitimacy. This article claims that this is a false dilemma, at least if we take it as an either/or choice. Rather than choosing one value or the other, what we need is to find a proper balance between them on a case-by-case basis. And the article argues that one very promising way to do it is by applying the ideas of crowdlaw and crowdsourcing crisis management based on the potential of collective intelligence, which in turn grounds an ideal of participatory, deliberative, and collaborative democracy.