Challenge prizes and democracy

Guest blog by Catriona Maclay

Helping young adults to engage with democracy

For Britain’s young adults to get involved with democracy we need well designed innovative tech solutions.

Only 19% of young British adults believe that democracy serves them well [PDF link p.23].

There’s a lot to unpack as to what’s going on. We think that at least PART of the problem with our democracy is an innovation problem.

The social and technological context in which our democracy functions is rapidly changing. There were already problems to tackle around patchy engagement and unequal turnout. And there are new challenges to face amidst a changing media landscape, international tech incursions, weakening trust and a changing civic culture.

Tech could and should have huge positive potential for enhancing civic engagement. Unfortunately its role in democracy is overshadowed by the negative impact of social media misinformation and social fragmentation. Our institutions are going to have to evolve if they are going to secure engagement and buy-in from all citizens. After exploring whether challenge prizes would be a useful tool, we’ve concluded that they can help identify and new accelerate urgently needed solutions.

We can broadly cluster potential innovation needs around three themes:

• electoral democracy (everything to do with voting at the ballot box);
• everyday democracy (engaging citizens in other civic activities between elections);
• news and media (so that citizens have access the information they need, want and trust).

We spoke informally with innovators, funders, and expert observers from across these sectors. Britain has a rich democratic tradition, well-embedded institutions, and an existing innovator community that can build on each of these areas.

A very real need for the future of British democracy

We wondered whether we would hear that there were solutions aplenty, and what was really lacking was socio-political will, consensus, leadership, and vision.

But loud and clear, we heard that those working at the frontline as officials, activists or policymakers see lots of areas where we need diverse cohorts of innovators to tackle problems afresh. Some of the areas we got most excited about were:

• Accessibility at the ballot box: supporting the innovations that will better support disabled voters to engage in democracy, building on our work on assistive tech
• Usable news: identifying the innovators and business models that can tackle news deserts, local information gaps and misinformation, building on our work on the Future News Fund
• Innovation for registration: As voting rules change, there’s huge opportunity to use prize models to incentivise innovation in how voters are reached and registered
• Paths to power: developing new mechanisms to identify, coordinate and support civic leaders from underrepresented groups

Challenge prizes often work best when there’s a tech element to them. There’s plenty of reasons to be careful – simplistic views that tech solutions can fix complex problems are unhelpful and frustrating. There are plenty of great existing tech innovations, and other ideas have failed for good reasons.

Collaboration creates a greater chance of success

Tech prizes need to be designed alongside users, innovators and the experts who’ve already spent decades understanding where the real gaps are. Structured partnership innovation can help, for example in the Affordable Credit Challenge when community lenders worked alongside fintech firms to develop solutions neither side could have developed alone. There are potential parallels across the democracy sector, grassroots experts need support and resources to work with carefully selected external innovators.

“Fixing democracy” obviously isn’t a matter for one competition, challenge prizes work best when extremely carefully targeted. We have over a decade of experience designing and leading high-profile prizes across diverse sectors and communities. By focusing attention on where new solutions are most urgently needed, it can attract in diverse new groups of innovators. All whilst shining a spotlight on each problem more broadly.

Let’s work together for democracy

We think government and philanthropists have significant opportunity for bold leadership. We focused our exploratory conversations on the UK, but there are similar issues across the world. Prizes work well when focused on one specific geographical area, or across a few countries where collaboration should be encouraged.

Thanks to all those who shared their expertise.

If you’re a potential partner interested in how challenge prizes could tackle your piece of our democratic puzzle

Get in touch

Contact us