LIST OF PANELS

This panel proposes to comparatively investigate and explain the way public policies are designed and enforced for governing societal problems associated with digital technologies. We seek to develop a comparative understanding on the extent to which traditional public policy theories can explain the policy gaps and failures witnessed in this space. We are also interested in understanding whether digital risks require new forms of governance or should we acknowledge that empirical observations point to the same-old public policy challenges.

The exponential creation, flow, storage, and use of digital information is rapidly affecting individuals, nations, and societies. They face increased risks to cybersecurity, privacy, discrimination, bias, and manipulation aspects, that undermine individual rights, risk our infrastructures, alter democratic principles, and can sway social order. These pressing issues, however, have been mostly studied by sociologists, law scholars, computer scientists, business researchers, and media experts. These problems have received only little attention from public policy & administration scholars, or from political scientists interested in public policy. Consequently, we are curious if this attention deficit allows for a lack in theoretical models that can explain some of the alarming public policy failures of our time. Puzzles include, but are not limited to, questions such as:

Why do very few corporations control most of the digital space (Hill, 2020)? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Why do cyber threats and data breaches keep expanding without an effective public policy response (Siboni and Sivan-Sevilla, 2018)? How can we explain the narrow framing of privacy vis-à-vis other policy objectives in the policy process (Regan, 1995; Sivan-Sevilla, 2018)? How come platforms have nearly no liabilities for the content they facilitate (Lee, 2020)? Why have the blunt violations of European data protection laws by the digital advertising industry are not leading to significant enforcement (ICO, 2019; Sivan-Sevilla, 2020b)?

On one hand, creating public policies for digital risks may seem like a unique governance challenge. The fact that data is an increasingly important commodity (e.g. Cohen, 2016), the argument goes, changes the way traditional policymaking should work in this space. For instance, digital policy issues can cut across various institutional policy settings, with a wide variety of regulatory ideologies, in ways that are threatening traditional administrative boundaries (Sivan-Sevilla, 2018; Zanfir-Fortuna & Ianc, 2018). Expertise is almost exclusively in the hands of the regulated instead of the bureaucracy and political institutions. Regulated entities hold intimate knowledge about their networks and services, with certain private intermediaries (e.g. cloud services, vendor-controlled platforms) becoming increasingly important governance actors. This requires government officials to find the delicate balance between relying on market forces and intervening for the public interest. Jurisdictional boundaries are also barriers to national policymaking. Governing problems that arise from technologies that are global in nature requires a response that is sometimes beyond the reach of the regulator. This creates tension and introduces friction in governance efforts (e.g. EU-US data transfers, GDPR implementation in the EU, the inability to address global cyber threats).

On the other hand, empirical observations on the creation of public policies for digital risks show that traditional mechanisms are in fact in play, such as the politics of harmonization in the EU (Sivan-Sevilla, 2020a), path-dependency in policymaking (Sivan-Sevilla, 2018), significant private lobbying impact (Atikcan and Chalmers, 2019), or ideational institutionalism (Seidl, 2020). So perhaps the same old traditional drivers for public policy can still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space?

We invite papers seeking to advance research on the drivers of public policy outcomes (or non-outcomes) to govern digital risks, focusing on the political dynamics, interest groups, institutional dynamics, and ideational theories. We encourage papers that adopt a comparative approach to policy analysis (Peters and Fontaine, 2020) and seek to explain any kind of policy variation over time, across nations, or among sectors. We specifically do not want to limit papers to investigate a certain policy level and welcome research on the municipal, state, federal, or supra-national levels of policymaking.

Despite our desire to promote public policy theorization for issues of digital risk, we are open to papers from various disciplines (law, sociology, anthropology, business), as long as their unit of analysis is some aspect of a public policy ecosystem. Papers can adopt a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to explain what leads to certain outcomes over others.

Our goal is to start and build a research network of scholars that are interested in risks associated with digital technologies and aim to understand drivers for public policy outcomes, highlighting different trends and approaches of policymaking over digital issues. We hope to create a culture of fruitful exchange of ideas that would take us one step closer to a more empowering digital world to live in.

References

Atickan E. O., and Chalmers A. W. (2019). “Choosing lobbying sides: The general data
     protection regulation of the European Union.” Journal of Public Policy 39(4): 543-64

Cohen, J. E. (2016). “The Regulatory State in the Information Age” Theoretical Inquiries in
     Law 17(2): 369-413

Hill K. (2020). “I tried to live without the tech giants. It was impossible.” The New York
     Times, July 31. Available here:
     https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-tech-giants.html

Information Commissioner Office (ICO). (2019). “Update report into adtech and real time
     bidding.” June 20, available here: https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-
     ico/documents/2615156/adtech-real-time-bidding-report-201906.pdf

Lee T. B. (2020). “The Internet’s most important – and misunderstood – law, explained.”
     ArsTechnica, Oct 6, available here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/section-
     230-the-internet-law-politicians-love-to-hate-explained/

Peters G., and Fontaine G. (2020). Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in
     Comparative Policy Analysis. Edward Edgar Publishing

Regan, P. M. 1995. Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy.
     Chapel Hill: UNC Press.

Seidl T. (2020). “The politics of platform capitalism: A case study on regulation of Uber in
     New York.” Regulation & Governance. Early view. DOI: 10.1111/rego.12353

Siboni G. and I. Sivan-Sevilla. (2018). ‘The Role of the State in the Private-Sector
     Cybersecurity Challenge.’ The Blog of Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.  
     Available here.

Sivan-Sevilla, I. (2018). “Complementaries and Contradictions: National Security
     and Privacy Risks in U.S. Federal Policy, 1968-2018”, Policy & Internet 11(2): 172-214,
     DOI: 10.1002/poi3.189

Sivan-Sevilla, I. (2020a) “Europeanization on Demand: The EU Cybersecurity
     Certification Regime between Market Integration and Core State Powers [1997-2019].”
     Journal of Public Policy. DOI:10.1017/S0143814X20000173

Sivan-Sevilla, I. (2020b, forthcoming) “Artificial Intelligence without Data Protection? A
     Comparative Analysis of National Enforcement Styles vis-à-vis AdTech.” Special issue on
     AI Governance for the Journal of European Public Policy.

Zanfir-Fortuna G., and Ianc S. (2018) “Data Protection and Competition Law: The Dawn of
     ‘Uberprotection’” In Gloria González Fuster, Rosamunde van Brakel and Paul De Hert
     (eds.), Research Handbook on Privacy and Data Protection Law: Values, Norms and
     Global Politics. Edward Elgar Publishing.