Data, trust, democracy and Covid-19: the first parliamentary assessment of the UK government’s approach to data during the pandemic

Ferry, Laurence; Hardy, Claire; Midgley, Henry

doi:10.1080/09540962.2021.1946311

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“… Citizen participation in and quality of online deliberation Our evidence indicates that deliberation can be resilient in a crisis. Ferry et al (2021) [ 119 ] United Kingdom How the UK government used data to legitimate policy and support implementation Parliamentary and public ability to understand government decisions and hold them to account The data connected the government to the governed and enabled democratic accountability. Ghosh (2021) India The process of policy-communication on the pandemic Degree of democratic accountability Government’s several omissions and commissions have defied the norms of democratic accountability Kwan (2021) Singapore Youth motivations, participation forms and how participation shapes future sociopolitical engagement.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and democracy: a scoping review

Sorsa,

Kivikoski

2023

BMC Public Health

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Background The resilience of democracy is tested under exogenous shocks such as crises. The COVID-19 pandemic has recently tested the resilience of democratic institutions and practices around the world. Aim The purpose of this article is to scope the early research literature that discusses democracy and the COVID-19 pandemic. We review scientific journal articles published during the first two years of the pandemic. We ask three research questions in scoping this body of literature: (1) what are the key topic areas of all published research that associates itself with both democracy and COVID-19, (2) what kinds of conceptual and theoretical contributions has research literature that more specifically discusses democracy under the pandemic produced, and (3) what are the impacts of democracy to the pandemic and vice versa according to empirical research? Methods The scoping review methodology draws on systematic literature search strategies, computational methods, and manual coding. The systematic Web of Science search produced 586 articles for which we conducted a Correlated Topic Model. After technical and manual screening, we identified 94 journal articles that were manually coded. Results The early research on democracy and the COVID-19 pandemic offers a versatile body of scholarship. The topic modeling shows that the scholarship discusses issues of crises, governance, rights, society, epidemiology, politics, electorate, technology, and media. The body of papers with conceptual and theoretical contributions has offered new insights on the difficulties, possibilities, and means to maintain democracy under a pandemic. Empirical research on democracy’s impact on the COVID-19 pandemic and vice versa varies in terms of methodology, geographical scope, and scientific contributions according to the direction of influence studied. Democracy appears to have a significant impact on some aspects of policy responses and epidemiological characteristics of the pandemic. In most parts of the world, the scope, franchise, and authenticity of democracy narrowed down due to the pandemic, albeit in most cases only temporarily. Conclusions A significant number of papers show that the pandemic has accentuated democratic backsliding but is unlikely to have undermined established democracies that have proved resilient in face of the pandemic. But empirical research has also made visible some weak signals of antidemocratic tendencies that may become more accentuated in the longer run.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and democracy: a scoping review

Sorsa,

Kivikoski

2023

BMC Public Health

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“…This is precisely the claim that the theorists of response through numbers as governance argue for: suggesting that more rapid lockdowns and restrictions enabled a better trade-off between the negative consequences of continued lockdown (for health and the economy) and the impact of rising infections and hospitalisations (Mitchell et al, 2021(Mitchell et al, , p. 1355. Christensen et al (2016) and Ferry et al (2021) suggest that even government accountability can be recruited as part of this approach to government.…”

Section: The Role Of Emergencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Christensen et al. (2016) and Ferry et al. (2021) suggest that even government accountability can be recruited as part of this approach to government.…”

Section: Liberty Emergency and Accountabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Accountability, emergency and liberty during COVID-19 in the UK 2020–22

Ferry

Midgley

Green

2023

AAAJ

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PurposeThe study explains why Parliamentarians in the United Kingdom (UK) focused on accountability through data during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on how data could be used to improve the government’s response to the pandemic.Design/methodology/approachUnderstanding the implications of accountability for COVID-19 is crucial to understanding how governments should respond to future pandemics. This article provides an account of what a select committee in the UK thought were the essential elements of these accountability relationships. To do so, the authors use a neo-Roman concept of liberty to show how Parliamentary oversight of the pandemic for accountability was crucial to maintaining the liberty of citizens during the crisis and to identify what lessons need to be learnt for future crises.FindingsThe study shows that Parliamentarians were concerned that the UK government was not meeting its obligations to report openly about the COVID-19 pandemic to them. It shows that the government did make progress in reporting during the pandemic but further advancements need to be made in future for restrictions to be compatible with the protection of liberty.Research limitations/implicationsThe study extends the concept of neo-Roman liberty showing how it is relevant in an emergency situation and provides an account of why accountability is necessary for the preservation of liberty when the government uses emergency powers.Practical implicationsGovernments and Parliaments need to think about how they preserve liberty during crises through enhanced accountability mechanisms and the publication of data.Originality/valueThe study extends previous work on liberty and calculation, providing a theorisation of the role of numbers in the protection of liberty.

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“…For example, there is a developing literature on the ways that governments have used social media during disasters to communicate, instruct, and organize the response (Ahrens & Ferry, 2021a, 2021bLeoni et al, 2021). The use of and publication of data during the COVID-19 pandemic has been important in building trust (Ferry et al, 2021;Leoni et al, 2021Leoni et al, , 2022.…”

Section: The When and How Of Public Auditmentioning

confidence: 99%

The future of public audit

2022

Self Cite

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Public sector audit is a vital activity within democratic states, which underpins the relationship between the government and the governed, the executive and the legislature, and different parts of the government. While there has been a lot of exceptional work in recent years on public sector audit, the sector faces new challenges. These challenges include regulatory space considerations, digitalization, the impact of service delivery design change, how audit and accountability arrangements address crises such as austerity, Brexit, black lives matter, climate change, disease in the form of COVID‐19 and war, and increased skepticism about the role of audit in society more generally. In this special issue, a group of scholars came together to describe this crisis in public audit, how the current literature addresses different facets of it and show how future research can contribute to analyzing it. This introductory article provides a brief summary of the current context of the “what, why, when, how, where and who” of public audit, before considering the contribution of each individual paper in this special issue to assisting in understanding the crisis of public audit, and finally setting out a conclusion and future directions.

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Data, trust, democracy and Covid-19: the first parliamentary assessment of the UK government’s approach to data during the pandemic

Cited by 8 publications

References 10 publications

COVID-19 and democracy: a scoping review

COVID-19 and democracy: a scoping review

Accountability, emergency and liberty during COVID-19 in the UK 2020–22

The future of public audit

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