Are interactive media experts really improving the quality of democracy?

Tony Blair: A bit more concerned about controlling his party's message than his predecessors were.

OK, in recent posts, I’ve moaned about the demands for political transparency that are being fuelled by new interactive media applications. Let me try and put this into some perspective:

In my opening ‘defending political parties‘ post, I acknowledged that there are a few early knockout punches that could be delivered to the argument that political parties are a good thing.

Here are some examples: Firstly, all political parties ‘control their messages’ (unless they are an electorally unsuccessful party) and do anything they can within the law to silence opponents, discourage sceptics, and orchestrate the way that the public are seen to to receive their ideas.

Were you or I as boorish, the dinner-invitations would dry up fairly quickly. In this respect, politicians behave like successful commercial brands.

They conduct personal campaigns against their opponents, playing the man instead of the ball. They bully anyone that they need to in order to get their message across. They compete in the market for votes with the ruthlessness and cynicism with which businesses compete for customers.

If one of their number is caught with a hand in the till, they cover up or excuse it as far as they can. But if the alleged culprit is – in fact – innocent, they can still be expect to be abandoned without mercy if things get too hot.

The concerns that parties raise in opposition are often forgotten as soon as the ministerial backsides sink into the ministerial limo. They can play very fast-and-loose with the actualité at times. They are opaque where they could be transparent.

They are not consistent in their communications, and different audiences are routinely told what they want to hear. You can never trust a political party to do what it says it’s going to do, and you can expect manifesto pledges to be treated like clauses in a public-procurement contract: Things to be wriggled out of as soon as the deal is done.

But that’s enough about their virtues. No party could ever win an election, or govern effectively without committing all of the sins listed above, and few governments have ever been faced with an opposition that isn’t prepared to match them on these points. The alternative to strong political parties is a tyrany of Victors.

This is not to say that politicians don’t sometimes do bad things as well though. If they do all of the above, and introduce generally good legislation, I suspect that most of us would all forgive them.

But when they behave in ways that lead to poor legislation, it’s harder to pardon. When they are not conversational it leads to poor policymaking. Failing to be conversational results in unforced errors.

When they pack decision-making committees with their cronies and often favour blind loyalty over creativity, thoughtfulness or innovation, fearing adverse press reaction to division, the quality of deliberation goes down, bringing the quality of government down with it.

They over-react to challenges and they allow short-term political positioning to distort their judgement on policy. They refuse to acknowledge alternatives or the legitimate concerns of their own backbenchers.

They often introduce legislation – not for the purposes of actually changing the law – but to signal something to the electorate. They publish too many pieces of legislation and brush legitimate concerns aside by drive them through parliament too quickly. They are often drafting the next version before the bill in question has reached the statute book.

They are spectacularly risk averse, and they follow opinion polls where they could be offering leadership. They toady up to the most opportunistic and dishonest journalists and only take on pressure groups that they know they can defeat.

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In this post so far, I’ve listed the shortcomings of political parties in roughly the order that I think they should be listed. Using a Roman Catholic template, the venal sins are at the top, the mortal ones at the bottom. The further down we get, the closer we are towards what the late Bernard Crick referred to as the populist mode of democracy.

If political parties were to avoid the mortal sins lower down this post, I’d argue that they could be forgiven the venal sins at the top. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the venal sins are now pursued with a great deal more vigour by the media and public opinion while the mortal sins are largely ignored.

Political parties are undoubtedly failing us in this respect. The quality of governance is going down. The distributed moral wisdom that Tony McWalter called for is less in evidence today than it was in the past.

There are many of us who work with new interactive technologies in the belief that they can improve politics. From what I can see, a great deal of effort is concentrated upon the minor problems near the top of this list. Demands for trasparency often result in benefits to single-issue pressure groups and reinforce many of the centralising tendencies in the modern state.

I’d argue that we should instead be focusing on the major problems further down. How can we help politicians improve their deliberative processes? How can we drive up the quality of legislation?

If interactive tools have one acheiveable goal, it is to identify the causes of political centralisation and to counteract them.