New data-driven ideas of healthcare have increased pressures to reform existing data infrastructures. This article explores the role of data governing institutions during a reform of both secondary health data infrastructure and related legislation in Finland. The analysis elaborates on recent conceptual work on data journeys and data frictions, connecting them to institutional and regulatory issues. The study employs an interpretative approach, using interview and document data. The results show the stark contrast between the goals of open and Big Data inspired reforms and the existing institutional realities. The multiple tensions that emerged during the process indicate how data frictions emanate to the institutional level, and how mundane data practices and institutional dynamics are intertwined. The article argues that in the Finnish case, public institutions acted as sage-guards of public interest, preventing more controversial parts from passing. Finally, it argues that initiating regulatory and infrastructural reforms simultaneously was beneficial for solving the tensions of the initiative and analysing either side separately would have produced misleading accounts of the overall initiative. The results highlight the benefits of analysing institutional dynamics and data practices as connected issues.

Various ‘Data for Good’ and ‘AI for Good’ initiatives have emerged in recent years to promote and organise efforts to use new computational techniques to solve societal problems. The initiatives exercise ongoing influence on how the capabilities of computational techniques are understood as vehicles of social and political change. This paper analyses the development of the initiatives from a rhetorical slogan into a research program that understands itself as a ‘field’ of applications. It discusses recent academic literature on the topic to show a problematic entanglement between the promotion of initiatives and prescriptions of what ‘good’ ought to be. In contrast, we call researchers to take a practical and analytical step back. The paper provides a framework for future research by calling for descriptive research on the composition of the initiatives and critical research that draws from broader social science debates on computational techniques. The empirical part of the paper provides first steps towards this direction by positioning Data and AI for Good initiatives as part of a single continuum and situating it within a historical trajectory that has its immediate precursor in ICT for Development initiatives.

No abstract

This study analyses professional policy experts in political parties. While recent studies have described the characteristics of ‘unelected politicians’, the drivers for their emergence and impact on democracy have not yet been fully elaborated. We examine these aspects via Finnish party elite interviews (n=79). We challenge the traditional party professionalization narrative where parties’ increasing publicity management efforts diminish intra-party democracy (IPD) and parties’ political ambitions. We find that in addition to campaign, media, and democratic needs, political parties in Finland are concerned especially by their policymaking capacity that has shifted to experts of public administration and lobbyists, and which parties seek to strengthen with the recruitment of more political employees. This elevates the role of partisan policy professionals within political parties, a perspective that has been downplayed in party organisation literature. We call this the imperative of expertise and conclude that while it likely limits traditional IPD, it can improve representative democracy by enhancing parties’ policy control against the technocratic tendencies of contemporary democracy.

Scholarship on evidence-based policymaking (EBP) has long called for more a realistic understanding of how politicians use evidence, especially the ways that use of evidence is negotiated with political goals. This article offers a new perspective on this question by drawing from research on legislative organisations. It introduces a new framework for the study of evidence-based policy, developed by reviewing key insights from legislative studies and interpreting their relevance for the study of EBP. It then applies this framework in an interview-based case-study of the Parliament of Finland. Previous studies have identified timeliness and relevance as some of the key barriers to using evidence, and our data focus on how key actors in legislative organisations understand and manage timeliness. Our findings show that timeliness is dominated by short-term reactions to new bill proposals, but the window for timely evidence in the legislatures can vary from months to days. Our study identifies three strategies used in legislative organisations to overcome the problems of reactivity: programmatic work, specialisation and network building. Practices relating to these strategies are discussed across legislators, political parties and committees. Our findings suggest that it is important for research on EBP in a legislative context to go beyond the study of committees and individual legislators, to explore the role of political parties. This strategy allows researchers to discover the often non-linear and indirect ways that evidence can influence policy through political parties.