Firstly, Catherine has an interesting post up here. No conclusions yet, but definitely worth following.
Secondly, Tom Watson – in one of the final votes of the last Parliamentary session – rebelled against the government for the first time in his career over the Digital Economy Bill. I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring Tom’s reluctance to break the Party Whip on anything, and I thought this tweet at the time reflected particularly well on him. Now he is crowdsourcing his personal manifesto on digital matters using Uservoice (read this post first though).
Thirdly, Anthony – an occasional star here – has established this site – Talk Issues – under the auspices of The Democratic Society to promote a less personality-led approach to the forthcoming election. I’m not sure that I fully buy this idea that elections should be polite issue-led exchanges. I’ve argued it before, but politics is not about niceness, presentation or honesty. It’s about the clash of material interests.Wanting elections to be about ishoos is, I suspect, slightly missing the point of what elections are.
Sure – a handful of votes will be switched in response to the handling of the wonkier questions that will come up over the next few weeks, but broadly, people are still voting on a combination of the staged competing characters of the leaders, a range of carefully-pitched bribes and a range of nebulous fears about the capacity of different candidates to govern.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
Thanks for the mention, Paul.
You’re quite right, of course, that people won’t generally vote on issues, and that there is a large element of theatre and street-fighting to this election campaign as with all others. We’re not trying to turn the down-and-dirty of electoral politics into a Regency salon.
However, there are two things I’d add.
First, there are some people *do* want to vote on the basis of what the issues are, or at least try to understand them better. I know a few likely non-voters who don’t want to be taken in by the spin, but feel that they don’t really understand what the parties stand for.
Second, and I think this is the more important motivation for me, the election campaign brings political issues to the fore, and makes more people think about them. We are looking to engage them now, while they’re interested in a particular issue or position, and keep that interest going post-election.
“I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring Tom’s reluctance to break the Party Whip on anything” – Wow. I’d hope so.