UCAM develops, together with other universities, the book titled ‘¿Política Confinada? Nuevas Tecnologías y Toma de Decisiones’
The work, which emerged in the context of the pandemic, was co-directed by Víctor Meseguer, director of the International Chair of Corporate Social Responsibility of UCAM
Under the title '¿Política confinada? Nuevas tecnologías y toma de decisiones’ [Confined Politics? New technologies and decision making], the publishing house Thomson Reuters-Aranzadi just published a collective work co-directed by Víctor Meseguer, director of the International Chair of Corporate Social Responsibility of UCAM and by the teacher of Political Sciences of the University of Barcelona, Josep María Reniu Vilamala. This initiative is framed within the first plan of research for projects related to COVID launched by UCAM after the State of Alarm was declared. The initiative allowed this publication and the development of high-level analyses and reflections on the transformation of politics and of government action due to coronavirus.
The work is the result of the collaboration between 26 researchers from ten universities (UCAM, Tallinn University [Estonia], University of Barcelona, University of Girona,
Complutense University of Madrid, Rovira i Virgili University, University of Valencia, University of León, Open University of Catalonia and University of Murcia). The 400-pages book contains 18 chapters and it analyses the conditioning that the pandemic entailed with regard to politics and decision making, the role played by new technologies, the modality to manage information and data on the health crisis, the influence it had on political communication and the reaction of the citizens to this new scenario.
In general, the book offers a perspective that allow to observe that the technological element has been fundamental in order to ease the continuation of the activities of the political institutions, although the process of adaptation has been slow, among other reasons, due to the fact that the regulation of the institutions is rigid and our political system was not adequately prepared for an equivalent situation. During this transition, it was possible to observe inefficiencies and that accountability and public information were affected by it. For this reason, the authors provide recommendations to improve the government action and the functioning of institutions in case of equivalent crises and for the perfection of the legal order, apart from reflecting on the consequences that will continue to take place in the medium term.