Football phone-ins v consultation exercises

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here).

The thing is, on 606, because the BBC isn’t the Daily Mail, most of the more obnoxious racist bile gets filtered out. But we’re still left with a baying crowd – often led by a really annoying cheerleader (Alan Green). Why should it be easier to extract the distributed wisdom ’signal’ from the horde of shouty blokes ‘noise’ when the subject is football?

I’d argue that it is easier. And the reason for this is in the partisanship. Supporters of hundreds of different clubs converge on 606 and the big premiership clubs aren’t massively over-represented. At the end of it, you can leave with a picture of what the balance of opinion is on cheating or poor refereeing. It’s not a complex subject and few people are really excluded from the conversation. Everyone, apart from Arsenal fans think that Eduardo should be slapped down for his dive against Celtic.

Politics and public life just isn’t like that. On the one hand, it is at least as partisan as football, though most spectators would’t thinks so given the narrow pre-rehearsed set of positions that are used to discuss most issues. The clash of interests and perspectives is also at least as pronounced. But in public affairs, most sides of the argument never turn up. Low income groups, people who work long hours, and most importantly, people that don’t have a settled strong view on big issues – they will never turn up to a public meeting or dash off a frothing letter to the local rag.

What we are left with, in politics, is a handful of highly over-represented positions, curated by media owners that are both partisan and monopolistic.

In a society that has a wide range of low-level corruption and graft on offer, why have we spent most of 2009 preoccupied with MP’s failings? I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that this kind of corruption is very much on the radar of a highly unrepresentative portion of society – but one that can always be counted on to get their voice heard. It illustrates why it is so important that the ‘hard to reach’ groups are included in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a argument for making some decisions along the lines of Anthony Barnett’s lottery-based model of Athenian Democracy?