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1. Why Does the Global Spyware Industry Continue to Thrive? Trends, Explanations, and Responses

Author:
Steven Feldstein and Brian (Chun Hey) Kot
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
The global spyware and digital forensics industry continues to grow despite public backlash following an array of surveillance scandals, many linked to NSO Group’s Pegasus program. This paper explores the resilience of the commercial spyware market and offers ideas about how to limit the spread of invasive cyber surveillance tools. It highlights several factors driving the industry, including elevated demand for intrusion technology from government clients and private customers, as well as inconsistent political will from democratic governments to crack down on these technologies.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Democracy, Surveillance, Industry, Forensic Science, and Autocracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Democratizing International Relations

Author:
Antonio de Aguiar Patriota
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Institution:
School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University in Cairo
Abstract:
Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali deserves to be remembered for his defense of the application of democratic principles to the international order. Today, the multipolarity of the contemporary world can help further Botrous-Ghali’s vision
Topic:
International Relations, International Cooperation, United Nations, Democracy, Multilateralism, and International Order
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. An Economic Defense of Multiple Antitrust Goals: Reversing Income Inequality and Promoting Political Democracy

Author:
Mark Glick
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Two recent papers by prominent antitrust scholars argue that a revived antitrust movement can help reverse the dramatic rise in economic inequality and the erosion of political democracy in the United States. Both papers rely on the legislative history of the key antitrust statutes to support their case. Not surprisingly, their recommendations have been met with alarm in some quarters and with skepticism in others. Such proposals by antitrust reformers are often contrasted with the Consumer Welfare Standard that pervades antitrust policy today. The Consumer Welfare Standard suffers from several defects: (1) It employs a narrow, unworkable measure of welfare; (2) It excludes important sources of welfare based on the assumption that antitrust seeks only to maximize wealth; (3) It assumes a constant and equal individual marginal utility of money; and (4) It is often combined with extraneous ideological goals. Even with these defects, however, if applied consistent with its theoretical underpinnings, the consideration of the transfer of labor rents resulting from a merger or dominant firm conduct is supported by the Consumer Welfare Standard. Moreover, even when only consumers (and not producers) are deemed relevant, the welfare of labor still should consistently be considered part of consumer welfare. In contrast, fostering political democracy—a prominent traditional antitrust goal that was jettisoned by the Chicago School—falls outside the Consumer Welfare Standard in any of its constructs. To undergird such important broader goals requires that the Consumer Welfare Standard be replaced with the General Welfare Standard. The General Welfare Standard consists of modern welfare economics modified to accommodate objective analyses of human welfare and purged of inconsistencies.
Topic:
Economics, Democracy, Income Inequality, and Antitrust Law
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. AI Startups and the Fight Against Mis/Disinformation Online: An Update

Author:
Anya Schiffrin, Hiba Beg, Pablo Eyzaguirre, Zachey Kliger, Tianyu Mao, Aditi Rukhaiyar, Kristen Saldarini, and Ojani Walthrust
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
The events following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have shown again the power of online mis/disinformation. As it continues to grow and spread, there are new and continuing attempts to address this problem. These include supply-side and demand-side fixes (including media-literacy programs, fact-checking and, in Europe, new regulations) but few of these have scaled. This paper looks at one kind of supply-side attempt to tackle the prevalence of online mis/disinformation: the market for tech-based solutions that use some form of artificial intelligence (AI) machine/deep learning for content moderation, media integrity, and verification. This paper presents the findings of interviews of 20 niche firms that use AI to identify online mis/disinformation, many of which were previously surveyed for a 2019 paper on the role of AI startups in the fight against disinformation. These companies did not release their revenue figures but it seems that the market for their services is smaller than many entrepreneurs had originally hoped, and that Google and Facebook are not relying on such firms for help in identifying online mis/disinformation. The cost of the services provided by these startups and the desire to keep things in-house and protect their activities from outside scrutiny are part of why the tech giants do not rely on small startups for help with screening online mis/disinformation. This may be why funding for these startups does not seem to have grown significantly and so more than half of them are now focusing on the business-to-business market, selling mis/disinformation mitigation services to, for example, insurance companies, large public entities, and governments, among others. There also appears to be a limited market for business-to-consumer solutions for detecting mis/disinformation. However, continuing advances in AI as well as forthcoming regulation by the European Union and the United Kingdom will continue to spur innovation, which may stimulate demand. University initiatives, academics, journalism organizations, and cybersecurity experts are all also trying to come up with ways to identify and control the spread of mis/disinformation. Ultimately, despite its advances, technology alone will not solve the online mis/disinformation problem. Giant social media platforms have few financial incentives to crack down on this—quite the opposite, in fact. To push social media platforms to act against online mis/disinformation and illegal speech, regulation must deftly address the issue while preserving freedom of expression. There is a further problem in the form of the political polarization that has intensified in the United States and other parts of the world. Fixing this is likely to be well beyond the role of business and technologists.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Democracy, Artificial Intelligence, Disinformation, Misinformation, and Startup
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. AI Audit-Washing and Accountability

Author:
Ellen P. Goodman
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
We are still some distance from a worldwide robot takeover, but artificial intelligence (AI)—the training of computer systems with large data sets to make decisions and solve problems—is revolutionizing the way governments and societies function. AI has enormous potential: accelerating innovation, unlocking new value from data, and increasing productivity by freeing us from mundane tasks. AI can draw new inferences from health data to foster breakthroughs in cancer screening or improve climate modeling and early-warning systems for extreme weather or emergency situations. As we seek solutions to today’s vexing problems—climate disruption, social inequality, health crises—AI will be central. Its centrality requires that stakeholders exercise greater governance over AI and hold AI systems accountable for their potential harms, including discriminatory impact, opacity, error, insecurity, privacy violations, and disempowerment. In this context, calls for audits to assess the impact of algorithmic decision-making systems and expose and mitigate related harms are proliferating1 , accompanied by the rise of an algorithmic auditing industry and legal codification. These are welcome developments. Audits can provide a flexible co-regulatory solution, allowing necessary innovation in AI while increasing transparency and accountability. AI is a crucial element of the growing tech competition between authoritarian and democratic states—and ensuring that AI is accountable and trusted is a key part of ensuring democratic advantage. Clear standards for trustworthy AI will help the United States remain a center of innovation and shape technology to democratic values. The “algorithmic audit” nevertheless remains ill-defined and inexact, whether concerning social media platforms or AI systems generally. The risk is significant that inadequate audits will obscure problems with algorithmic systems and create a permission structure around poorly designed or implemented AI. A poorly designed or executed audit is at best meaningless and at worst even excuses harms that the audits claim to mitigate. Inadequate audits or those without clear standards provide false assurance of compliance with norms and laws, “audit-washing” problematic or illegal practices. Like green-washing and ethics-washing before, the audited entity can claim credit without doing the work. To address these risks, this paper identifies the core questions that need answering to make algorithmic audits a reliable AI accountability mechanism. The “who” of audits includes the person or organization conducting the audit, with clearly defined qualifications, conditions for data access, and guardrails for internal audits. The “what” includes the type and scope of audit, including its position within a larger sociotechnical system. The “why” covers audit objectives, whether narrow legal standards or broader ethical goals, essential for audit comparison. Finally, the “how” includes a clear articulation of audit standards, an important baseline for the development of audit certification mechanisms and to guard against audit-washing. Algorithmic audits have the potential to transform the way technology works in the 21st century, much as financial audits transformed the way businesses operated in the 20th century. They will take different forms, either within a sector or across sectors, especially for systems which pose the highest risk. But as algorithmic audits are encoded into law or adopted voluntarily as part of corporate social responsibility, the audit industry must arrive at shared understandings and expectations of audit goals and procedures. This paper provides such an outline so that truly meaningful algorithmic audits can take their deserved place in AI governance frameworks.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Democracy, Regulation, Accountability, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Aid’s impact on democracy

Author:
Miguel Niño-Zarazúa, Ana Horigoshi, and Rachel M. Gisselquist
Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on democratic outcomes using a panel of countries for the period between 1995 and 2018. In so doing, it speaks to a major critique of foreign aid, which is that it negatively impacts democratic governance. The analysis distinguishes between developmental aid and democracy aid, and examines democracy aid to specific sectors, in order to explore variation across different aid types. It draws on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) data on foreign aid and indices of democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project, employing a combination of a maximum likelihood estimation and structural equation modelling (ML-SEM) model and fixed effects models. Overall, using a more extensive set of data and methods than previous analyses, we offer comprehensive evidence pointing to aid having a positive if modest impact on democratic outcomes. Our analysis suggests this effect is more significant for democracy aid than developmental aid, but there is no evidence of negative impact for either. These results are robust to multiple specifications.
Topic:
Development, Foreign Aid, and Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. How Populism Dies: Political Weaknesses of Personalistic Plebiscitarian Leadership

Author:
Kurt Weyland
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Kurt Weyland examines the weaknesses of populist leadership. He argues that populist leaders are prone to errors and misdeeds, have difficulty dealing with other political forces, and face institutional and external constraints. Consequently, he concludes, they damage and suffocate democracy not as easily and frequently as recent observers have feared.
Topic:
Democracy, Leadership, Populism, and Political Science
Political Geography:
Global Focus

8. U.S. Democracy Aid and the Conditional Effects of Donor Interests, Media Attention and Democratic Change, 1975-2010

Author:
James M. Scott, Charles M. Rowling, and Timothy M. Jones
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
Institution:
Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
Abstract:
Democracy promotion emerged as a US foreign policy priority during the late 20th century, especially after the Cold War. Scarce resources, however, require policymakers to make difficult choices about which countries should receive democracy aid and which ones should not. Previous studies indicate that a variety of factors shape democracy aid allocations, including donor strategic interests and democratic openings within potential recipient states. Research has also shown that media coverage plays a significant role in these decisions. We model the conditional effects of media attention and regime shifts on US democracy aid decisions, controlling for other recipient and donor variables. We argue that these factors are contingent on the salience, in terms of broad interest profiles, of a particular country for policymakers. The donor’s overall level of interest in a potential recipient systematically shapes the effects of media attention on democracy assistance. Broadly speaking, low-interest conditions elevate the agenda-setting impact of media attention and regime conditions/shifts while high-interest conditions reduce that effect. To assess these contingent relationships, we examine US democracy aid from 1975-2010. Our results support our argument and present a more nuanced explanation of the relationship between the media’s agenda-setting role, recipient characteristics and donor interests.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Democracy, Media, and Donors
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

9. People or Technology: What Drives Democracy

Author:
Paul Nemitz
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Turkish Policy Quarterly (TPQ)
Institution:
Turkish Policy Quarterly (TPQ)
Abstract:
There is no doubt that technology has shaped democracy. However, it is also the legal rules concerning technology which have shaped and have been shaped by democracy. Developing and using technologies according to democratic rules is what we need. There are libertarians today who deliberately design technological systems in a way that makes control by democratic states increasingly difficult. However, there is sufficient counter power and engagement, at least in Europe, to ensure that democracy functions and we work together to produce rules that are sensible for the future of democracy and confirm the supremacy of democracy over technology and business interests.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Democracy, Business, and Rule of Law
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. AI Challenging Sovereignty and Democracy

Author:
Paul Timmers
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Turkish Policy Quarterly (TPQ)
Institution:
Turkish Policy Quarterly (TPQ)
Abstract:
AI is wonderful. AI is scary. AI is the path to paradise. AI is the path to hell. What do we make of these contradictory images when, in a world of AI, we seek to both protect sovereignty and respect democratic values? Neither a techno-utopian nor a dystopian view of AI is helpful. The direction of travel must be global guidance and national or regional AI law that stresses end-to-end accountability and AI transparency, while recognizing practical and fundamental limits. We also need a deeper understanding of tensions between AI and sovereignty and democratic values, in order to address them in the interplay of the social construction of sovereignty and democracy and the technological construction of AI
Topic:
Science and Technology, Sovereignty, Democracy, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:
Global Focus