Local Democracy Notepad

I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed.

Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that.

Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points to one country that stands out – Sweden.

“In Sweden 43.8% of people have a ‘rather favourable’ opinion of their politicians, compared with an EU average of 12.4%. And only 18.4% of Swedes have viagra aus usa a ‘rather unfavourable’ opinion, against the EU average of 55.4%.

Swedes are not foolish people, and are no more likely to be fooled by their politicians than anyone else, so what these results show is that Swedish politicians are simply better than any others. If their voters have a positive opinion of them it must be because they are more honest, more diligent, more representative and more efficient than any others. Read the rest of this entry »

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: Failed by the decline of democracy?

Tuning into the Personal Democracy Forum 2010 event in Washington, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com offered a nice quote from Alexis De Tocqueville:

“In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge”

It’s certainly true that state-sponsored organisations have even less of a monopoly over the ability to combine people with any efficiency. Heiferman gave an example of Seth Godin sending a

tweet urging free viagra sample people to use Meetup in order to discuss his work. Within days, hundreds of events were organised all over the world to do so.

John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation followed Heiferman to the podium and told us that Barack Obama deserved a good deal more credit than he was being given because he’d inherited the task of government – an idea that in itself was becoming broken thanks to the Internet.

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme – Doomed by Democracy (featuring our own Halina Ward) focused on the unwillingness of democracies to address the demands from the scientific consensus around climate change.

Mark Littlewood of the Institute for Economic Affairs argued that a good deal of the problem was down to over-spinning on the part of the scientific establishment. If they were to refrain from this, he argued, the public would be more likely to take their claims on face value. It’s an argument that entirely ignores the fact that commercial pressure groups will not limit themselves in the same way – in direct opposition to the general public interest. In a more direct democracy, the unequal ability to convene entirely undermines the notion that the quality of argument should be a deciding factor in a debate.

The Analysis programme was a bizarre one in which ‘democracy’ was taken to mean a debased variation on Direct Democracy. Here, the ability to combine (see the way that newspapers whipped up the anti road-pricing petition a few years ago) showed exactly what the challenge from those who have “knowledge of how to combine” means. It doesn’t mean that democracies are incapable of making decisions that are unpopular in the short-term.

I feel a post coming on along the lines of ‘how democracy can be saved by a rejection of direct democracy in all it’s forms’. At my current rate of posting here, though, don’t hold your breath willya?

Dr Ben Goldacre

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.

The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted against politicians and the very idea that government should tax (“steal from”) people and spend (“burn”) their money. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s LD’s co-blogger Anthony writing (or rather, quoting) from his main blog on the growing ‘pressure group industry’:

“The flourishing of associations is the denial of mediation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the slogan of the movement is: for each individual their own association, and by that very fact, no association at all.”

It’s often easy to forget that political parties are the counterweight to pressure groups. If the role of political parties were to diminish in the way that many would like them to do, would we (as individuals) have more influence over policy – or less?

Perhaps the key to this is a public education campaign that assures people that an equal say in policy making only provides us with the expectation of a tiny amount of influence – and this is the best possible outcome for all of us?

How far does the way that some politicians and organisations raise public expectations – the clarion call to Have Your Say – damage the quality of liberal democracy?

Party funding reform could put Labour and the Conservatives closer to the Lib-Dems funding model.

If there is a point at which most of the authors of this blog (I can’t speak for all of them) differ from most of the sites that we link to, and that link here, it may be on the queston of ‘active citizenship’.

Where it seeems to be an almost unexamined given to argue that we  need more active citizenship, and that it’s usually a good thing, I’d argue that there is a blessed equity in our current system where most people don’t get involved in decisionmaking most of the time.

I outlined the Victor Meldrew problem here a while ago, but a shorter, simplified and provocative version of it is this: Read the rest of this entry »

Clay Shirky: 'Second thoughts.'

I don’t know about you, but this term ‘Goverati’ makes me slightly nervous.

“What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.”

I was speaking to a friend recently about the education debate in Northern Ireland. We were discussing the idea of running an ‘unconference’ on the hugely complex issues involved.

He’s a good deal longer in the tooth than I am, and he has a huge amount of experience in the difficult political situations that we were discussing. He pointed out that there is a huge multifaceted divide between the kind of people that would operate well in an ‘unconference’ discussion, and the people and processes by which policies are made. Particularly in Northern Ireland. The kind of processes that we were talking about are not even being negotiated yet – there’s a huge presumptive sell going on here.

On the one hand, politically, I suspect that the ‘Governati’ would tend towards the progressive end of politics. I argue this on the assumption that this is not about getting the hidden hands of the markets to make decisions, but more about getting real participation from rational human beings expressing their rationality in the pursuit of good policy.There is, of course, the more regressive demagogic use of crowd sentiment, but I’ve never heard this being discussed approvingly in such circles.

But in the widespread enthusiasm for new ways of making policy, are we really seeing an attempt to solve existing problems without regard for the new ones such solutions would create?

Charlie Beckett has written up a recent seminar with Clay Shirky:

Discussing the impact of ‘Here Comes Everybody” on democracy, Clay is clearly having second thoughts about the purity of the democracy that the Internet can facilitate:

“But how do you distinguish between the campaign by Mysociety against MPs who tried to cover up their expense claims, with a bunch of potheads trying to get their spliff decriminalised? In Clay’s words, we “need to find an algorithm that works”.”

Regular visitors here will know that there are two sides to the question of the democratic value of MySociety’s campaign. But today we can see, again, the bigger question of how far it is in any way desirable to do anything that promotes direct democracy. There appears to be a genuine chance that the Swiss – in a referendum – will give legal expression to Matthew Parris’ view of what the public believe. Last year, the Swiss nearly decided to do something a good deal more sinister than the current proposal.

Parris argued that the public don’t believe in freedom of movement, and they don’t believe that an immigrant should be allowed to have a job where it may be done by the ‘indigenous workforce.’ I’d find it hard to disagree with him on any of these points.

This begs the question: Social media protagonists seem to generally have progressive views on most subjects. I say this from personal experience – going out and talking to people in this industry. But they are in danger of urging a system of governance upon us that has the potential to be profoundly regressive.

When someone as close to the top of the tree on this discussion is ‘having second thoughts’, (and could get a relatively free ride ignoring this question the first time around) perhaps this is cause for concern? There’s something about the sentence “we need an algorithm that works” that suggests a certain complacency – a sense that centuries of wisdom on how the public can legitimately participate in their own governance will not be taken very seriously.

This is not an implementation detail.

Bless me Father, I've been a bit certain about something...

In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood.

The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a Guardian reader rather that an Anglican traditionalist.

Jonathan Dimbleby asked him if it wasn’t the case that people needed a bit of certainty about big issues in order to live their lives. the response that the Archbishop gave stunned Dimbleby and Aaronovich. He said…

Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?

The whole programme is really worth listening to – I think that podcast subscribers get the option to download all of the archives and the transcript is here.

One of my favourite political bloggers, Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling has written a great deal about the curse that the apparent need for certainty places upon democratic politics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an allowance.

Meanwhile, the incorporation of social media into bureaucratic priorities gathers apace. A while ago, the Local Government Engagement Online blog has helpfully pulled together a set of guidelines from around the world, ones that can be added to the UK Civil Service Partipation Online guidelines.

Now, I’ve not read these all exhaustively, but I have put a fair bit of time in to scan them.

Given the size of the task, I may have not noticed something that I would suggest should be right at the top of each document – certainly each one that has been drafted by any governmental body. Read the rest of this entry »

Ding Dong! An argument can draw crowds. But can it solve anything?

Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by Peter Levine here:

“As I told the Christian Science Monitor in 2006, “Polarization tends to be a mobilizing factor in getting out the vote.” At CIRCLE, we helped to organize randomized experiments of voter outreach with the goal that the parties would learn new techniques and compete more effectively for our target population (youth). I believe we and our colleagues had some influence on the parties and thereby helped boost turnout. We also funded a study that found that parties were under-investing in their young members. Again, our goal was to persuade them to become more effective.”

There is, of course, the adversarial politics of Parliament and the media that we are all familiar with. These arguments are fairly well played out, though they are always worth revisiting. The obvious conclusion, for me is a somewhat muddy preference for a bit-of-both.

However, there is the often-overlooked challenge of ‘adversarial legalism’ towards a supposedly ‘elite-dominated’ form of representative democracy in which various minority groups seek to take a role in the political process using courts to secure rights that protect individuals and minorities. Read the rest of this entry »

Labour-leaning ginger-group Compass is inviting policy proposals to be submitted and debated on this site and at meetings around the country.

The site says that the proposals will then be voted on by the Compass membership – forming the policy priorities for the organisation to campaign on. The successful polices will sit alongside the narrative that the organisation will be promoting: How to Live in the 21st Century.

From what I can see, Compass went to a London-based company called Headshift to develop and run with this idea, and they couldn’t have gone to better people. Headshift have forgotten more than most comparable consultancies have learned about the effective promotion of interactivity.

I’d still be interested to see how the voting reflects pre-designed agendas and how valuable that part of the process can be. The key development for me, though, is that the Labour left is getting a little bit away from the formalised deliberations that have always dominated political caucuses.

Surely, in a representative democracy, no membership body can impose policies upon the Parliamentarians that it promotes to the legislature. All it can do is to hold a conversation that Parliamentarians deem to be worth eavesdropping upon? That – at least in part – is what Compass appear to be doing, and that can only be a good thing.