Data-owning democracy: Citizen empowerment through data ownership

• Published in: European journal of political theory Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 204 - 223
• Main Author: Fischli, Roberta
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.04.2024; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Citizens; Data; Democracy; Empowerment; Ownership; Political economy; Public works; Rights; Theory; Political theory; republican theory; property-owning democracy; data-owning democracy; political economy; digital economy; project decode; personal data
• ISSN: 1474-8851; 1741-2730
• DOI: 10.1177/14748851221110316

This article extends property-owning democracy to the digital realm and introduces “data-owning democracy,” a new political economic regime characterized by the wide distribution of data as capital among citizens. Drawing on republican theory and acknowledging data's unique role in the digital economy, it proposes a two-tier model that combines different modes of data ownership and corresponding rights. The first layer of “data-owning democracy” is characterized by a digital public infrastructure that enables citizens to collectively generate data and have a say in how their citizen data are used. In the second layer, individuals automatically receive machine-readable copies of their data whenever they are generated—a slightly more advanced form of the European Union's existing right to data portability (Art. 20). With its focus on empowerment, data-owning democracy is designed to be complementary to existing data protection regulations. It also illustrates how political theory more broadly, and republican theory specifically, can be instructive for specifying the normative components of a new political economy dealing with questions of empowerment and digital rights.