Toward more participatory lawmaking: the promises and challenges of crowdlaw in Latin America
As legitimacy in representative democracies achieve a historic low, traditional forms of lawmaking – elaborated exclusively by experts and politicians, behind closed doors - are being put into question. With the promise of improving the policy-making process and policy outcomes, and ultimately enhancing participation, inclusiveness, transparency, legitimacy and accountability, a specific type of democratic innovation has grown in recent years: crowdlaw initiatives, or “authoring and annotation tools created specifically for online legislative purposes” (Noveck, 2015, p.13). In Latin America, a region where democratic innovations have found fertile ground, technology plays a substantial role in how the region’s citizens interact with their governments. Today it is the world’s third largest regional online market and is host to a high number of e-participation tools, including crowdlaw. Nonetheless, the implementation and broader use of these platforms face several challenges. Despite its potential benefits to democracy, crowdsourcing legislation is not highly institutionalized in parliamentary practices. Skepticism toward these tools, both from governments and citizens, derive from lack of effective communication, moderation and transparency present in some experiences, elements that add to the argument that these tools can rather result in harmful political disillusionment and in a wider digital divide between those who possess the skills and resources necessary for political engagement and those who do not, reinforcing existing inequalities in the most unequal region in the world. This paper aims to introduce the concept of crowdlaw and its potential benefits and challenges in Latin America through the collaboratively-elaborated Brazil Civil Rights Framework for the Internet and Democracy OS' pilot project (DEMOS) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through a literature review on crowdlaw and a documentary analysis of the cases, as well as interviews with their main stakeholders, this paper will delineate their aims, the actors involved in their development, the tools and activities implemented, the results achieved, and the elements that can potentially help improve such participatory initiatives in the future.