This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here: The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts: It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives [...]
Posts under ‘Democratic renewal’
Informed public = better democracy?
As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post [...]
Swedenise us!
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 [...]
Covering the Local Elections on Harringay Online
This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this [...]
Should ‘don’t knows’ be discouraged from voting?
There is nothing that annoys politicians more than people who just don’t get around to voting. For months, the parties are knocking doors and getting pledges. In a tight fight, every vote will be counted on, and a well-resourced team will manage to knock on doors a half-dozen times until the name is ticked off [...]
Centralisation: A turning point?
For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend. The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics: “Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – [...]
The Conservatives: £1 million prize for a public policy website
I saw this press release yesterday and it’s had a bit of take-up from the press. Sadly, none of the coverage that I’ve seen has addressed what seems to me to be a serious and interesting – though problematic – proposal. I’ll be writing something myself over the next few days, but in the meantime, [...]
Democratic, decentralised and difficult
I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services. The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet [...]
Usability, council websites and the obligation to promote democracy
It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago) Measuring usability may also be the key to [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
