Local Democracy Notepad

Apologies for the light posting here. I’m mid-project on a few issues that I’d normally blog about here, so blogging will be a bit uneven for the time being.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

I started to write a second follow-up post on the Local Gov Camp data-visualisation session (I’ll probably finish it later today) when I stumbled on this post on conversational politics (in a very wide sense of the term) from my favourite US blogger – it made the point I was inching towards better than I could:

“It turns out (from a study of ethics rather than our topic, politics) that people “have a hard time offering an account of their moral reasoning that contains consistent substantive content.” They are “largely incapable of articulating their moral decision-making process in substantive, propositional terms.” Often, their responses to open-ended questions are rationalizations of what they have done, not reasons that will guide what they do.”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here on some of the thinking that casts doubt on the suitability of voters to …. er … vote – a sort of briefing for a ‘devil’s advocate’ – and I’ve been looking for way of articulating any of the powerful reasons why the political process matters.

Do read the whole post because it’s very interesting on the way we respond to multiple choice questions and how easy it is to predict our conclusions. But something else occurs to me.

Peter concludes:

“We ought to give good reasons to justify (or criticize) our own actions. We should be interested in other people’s reasons and their reactions to ours. The act of interpreting the public thoughts of working-class urban youth thus has a moral motivation, even if those reasons are not strongly influential in their own lives. I don’t think that current psychological research precludes the hope that good arguments can change people’s implicit stances or premises, which then affect their behaviors.

In short, we should strive to understand other people’s arguments in case they are right and to decide how to respond effectively if they are not.”

Surely there’s a bigger opportunity than understanding how people articulate and assert their political preferences? I’m really interested in the way that people go beyond this and collectively describe the problems that they face – particularly ones that aren’t well-trodden arguments that have gone mainstream.  It’s one step further away from the politics that Peter is writing about – but currently one that is monopolised by the small number of social forces that shape our perceptions and define our options so effectively.

Can’t think of a word for that collective entity – can I just refer to it as Babylon seeing as I’ve got Bob Marley playing in the next room at the moment?

Jeremy. Suffering in silence, as ever.....

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If you were to add one blog to your RSS reader at my request, please make it Chris Dillow’s Stumbling and Mumbling.

It’s about ‘Clarksonism.’ Why  tedious self-pitying rich white blokes on the telly the question of ‘subjective well-being’ is an important one to understand and why politicians often end up being forced to expend lots of energy on people with imaginary grievances while ignoring those with genuine ones:

“Almost a fifth of the poorest one-fifth of people – and these, remember, are the poorest in the world – say they are satisfied with their lives, whilst a third of the best-off fifth say they are dissatisfied.

This suggests that subjective indicators – how people feel, what they say – are an imperfect measure of actual inequality.”

This is another example of the way that highly visible citizens can often dominate debate at the expense of other – perhaps more deserving – cases. In another example of this, the Freethinking Economist gives us Theodore Dalrymple. It is the Jeremys, the Theodores and the Victors who are often – as Anthony observed here a while ago – the main beneficiaries of a good deal of outreach and consultation work.