Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase….
In the UK …
- 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs.
- 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs.
- 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs.
The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the others, and this should be seen as a mark in their favour.
Seasoned political watchers, however, will have come away from the Lib-Dem conference last week with one abiding impression: Of a party that values it’s independence.
Where the leadership were keen to push populists lines of attack, they were very clearly clipped back by indignation from middle-ranking party figures complaining about top-down policymaking.
First question: Is there a correlation between the interactivity of a party’s grassroots and the relative lack of willingness within the party to adopt collegiate positions? I would suggest that there is.
Next question: In the current climate, is a willingness to adopt collegiate positions an essential pre-requisite to electoral success? Again, purely on personal experience, I’d say that there is.
Labour was blessed / cursed with a herd of independent minds rich diversity of internal debate in the 1980s – an experience that shaped the 1990s predilection for ‘control freakery’ in the party.
There is another way of looking at this though: David Herdson makes a strong case here, arguing that the Lib Dems steady progress – it’s slow upwards trajectory – is down to the party’s niceness – and that it is a fool’s errand to even try to behave like the Government-in-waiting.
Last question: Is Cllr Reid wise to be pleased about all of those lib-dem blogging Councillors?
Using the revealed preferences of the voters, I’ve been trying to compile the profile of local elected representatives that the public want – in the cops do in police procedural dramas. I’m not sure that they’re ready for interactivity.
As a further observation, is it the case that party division is really unpopular with the public? Or is that political journalists are so lazy that any easy-to-find evidence of a schism is likely to get a disproportionate amount of press-coverage – and that this issue then adds to the impression that open debate is electorally risky?
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
I suspect that the reason is that it’s easier to be a blogger in opposition than one in power. As the Lib Dems are more likely to be in opposition than Tories or Labour, they have more blogs. I think it’s also true to say that blogs lend themselves to local issues, which is a Lib Dem strongpoint.