New Digital Tools to Improve Democratic Quality
On March 11, as part of the parliamentary committee dedicated to improving democratic quality in the Basque Country, Gorka Espiau Idoiaga, director of the Agirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC), appeared before the Basque Parliament to share the key strategies and methodologies the organization has developed in the area of collaborative governance. The central objective of this presentation is to define new tools and frameworks for action that will strengthen Basque institutions and their connection with citizens.
ALC’s presentation focused on the need to bridge the gap between traditionally separate spheres, such as new digital tools and processes aimed at deepening democracy. In practice, we are building new scientific and technological infrastructures to address the most complex challenges facing our society, but these are not being developed as tools to improve democratic quality. These new infrastructures will serve to deepen our priorities in the area of knowledge and offer new technological solutions, but they will also allow us to better understand social issues and address them with greater scientific rigor. In practice, this involves connecting the complex social challenges that are priorities for Basque institutions (longevity, housing, inequalities…) with new scientific and technological infrastructures. This is the emerging field of Computational Social Sciences, which is developing rapidly on a global scale but has not yet been explicitly established in the Basque Country.
If we succeed in integrating these capabilities, we will be able to create new social data catalogs addressing the main challenges facing Basque society, combine scientific evidence with social perceptions, and conduct simulations based on artificial intelligence models (social digital twins) that will help Basque institutions make evidence-based decisions. This combination of science, technology, and deepening democracy can enable us to build the new infrastructure that Basque society needs for collaborative governance. Not only to regain our positions in the top innovation rankings but also to become an international benchmark for democratic quality. The size of our country, its social capital, the foundations laid in science and technology over the past decades, and our self-governance allow us to position ourselves as a major living lab that integrates science, technology, and democratic deepening.