Vision · 04 — Policy & Politics
The parliamentary technology deficit.
Knowledge-based, cross-partisan, in the open. The next decade of decisions cannot be delegated to consultants — and the parliaments that try will discover this the expensive way.
- Parliaments need their own standing technical capacity. Cross-partisan technology literacy is a precondition for democratic control of the digital state.
- Technology files now decide on competition, security, public services, and rights. Without in-house capacity, parliaments depend on the bodies they are meant to scrutinise — and decisions drift toward whichever lobby briefs most fluently.
- Does each parliamentary group have at least one technically literate rapporteur per major file? Are committee staff resourced to read code and contracts, not only memos? Are the resulting positions written so a non-specialist citizen can follow them?
- Drafting and translating technology positions for parties and committees. Mentoring technically literate parliamentarians and staff. Cross-partisan briefings, training programmes, and the editorial work behind tietopolitiikka.fi.
The technology decisions of the next decade will not be primarily technology decisions. They will be political ones — about which infrastructure a society depends on, which capabilities stay inside democratic accountability, which regulatory burdens are accepted in exchange for which kinds of legitimacy. Those are parliamentary questions, not consultant questions.
The trouble is that most parliaments do not have the technical capacity to ask them well. That is the problem this pillar is about.
The parliamentary deficit
Parliaments lack technical capacity at almost every layer. Members get their tech briefings from the same lobbyists they then vote on. Staff capacity is concentrated in a few committees, which are usually the ones least likely to be assigned a fast-moving file. Civil-service technical capacity is patchy, often heroic at the individual level, and almost never reproducible at the institutional level when the relevant person leaves.
The result is a familiar pattern. A new technology arrives — generative AI, digital assets, post-quantum cryptography, sovereign cloud — and the parliamentary response cycles through the same three stages. First, surprise. Then, a flood of consultancy decks bought from the same five firms. Then, legislation drafted on the basis of those decks, modified by lobbyists, voted through by members who did not have the time to evaluate either the original text or the amendments.
This is not anyone's fault as individuals. It is a structural deficit. It can be closed.
Knowledge-based, not just evidence-based
The phrase "evidence-based policy" has been worn out. In its strongest version it is a discipline; in its weakest version it is a way to launder a preference by attaching a citation to it.
A more useful frame is knowledge-based. Knowledge-based policy includes evidence — the academic kind, peer-reviewed, methodologically scrupulous — but it also includes operational and tacit knowledge from the people who actually run the systems being legislated. The system administrator who knows how a regulatory reporting requirement actually maps to log files. The procurement officer who knows which clauses survive contact with a hyperscaler's standard contract. The maintainer of an open-source library who knows what would happen to half the European public sector if a single funding source disappeared.
That knowledge does not appear in journals. It does not appear in consultancy decks. It appears in conversations with people who have done the work, organised in formats that produce policy text rather than thought leadership. That is what a working knowledge-based policy practice looks like.
Why this cannot be a partisan issue
Technology literacy in parliaments is not a left-right question in any meaningful sense. The temptation to make AI-this or sovereignty-that into a wedge issue is bipartisan and almost always wrong — in the literal sense that it produces worse legislation.
This is not a call for false consensus. There are real disagreements about what the state should do with technology, who bears the costs of regulation, and what legitimate forms of public ownership of digital infrastructure look like. Those disagreements should be visible — but they should not prevent agreement on the underlying technical reality the disagreement is about.
The technology working group of the Social Democratic Party of Finland, which I serve as secretary, is structured to be cross-partisan in outputs even when it is single-party in origin. Draft positions are circulated quietly to counterparts in other parties' working groups before they are finalised — not to seek consensus, but to make sure the technical foundation is robust enough that the genuine political disagreement is conducted on accurate ground. Other parties have similar groups. The secretaries talk to each other.
tietopolitiikka.fi, the cross-partisan platform I co-founded, is the public-facing version of the same idea.
What gets delegated to consultants — and what shouldn't
A consultancy deck is a useful input. It is a dangerous output. The instinct in any under-resourced ministry is to procure a deck from a firm with a logo, close the procurement, and write the policy from a document nobody on the legislative side actually owns.
The decisions that have to be owned by people who can be voted out — what to legislate, what to regulate, what to procure, what to refuse to build — cannot be delegated to firms that outlive the next election. Otherwise the next election cannot change the policy. That is the operational meaning of democratic accountability in the technology domain.
What can be delegated is the legwork. What cannot be delegated is the brief itself.
How to do better
Hire technical advisors into the parliamentary services and party machines, not next to them. Build standing technology committees with continuity of staff across electoral cycles. Make sandbox regulation the default for fast-moving fields, with mandatory sunset clauses. Publish the technical foundation of every major legislative file alongside the legislative text, so other parties, civil society, and journalists can interrogate it directly.
And keep building the public, multilingual platforms where the cross-party technical conversation can happen in the open. Other European democracies need their own tietopolitiikka.fi.
What I work on
Drafting technology policy positions for the Social Democratic Party of Finland — the secretary writes the policy. Editing tietopolitiikka.fi. Advisory work for parliamentary services, party schools, and civil-service training. Lecturing for universities, executive programmes, and supervisory-authority academies.
For specific engagements — parliamentary briefings, party-political training, lectures, or speaking — please get in touch.