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 [...]
Posts under ‘Obstacles for democrats to overcome’
Ballot design
Before politics stopped being fairly boring in the late summer last year, the book of the year looked like it was going to be Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge. It’s still worth a look when you need a break from Robert Peston – and one of their areas of interest has been ballot design [...]
2009 predictions from elsewhere (and one of my own)
My friend, former Hansard Society e-democracy watcher Ross Ferguson says: A local government will fall head-over-heels in love with the promise of eDemocracy and launch into an ambitious project to put digital front-and-centre of its democratic processes and service provision. It will be facilitated with next-generation municipal ICT and it will capture our imaginations but [...]
New rules on local government publicity?
If ever a review were overdue, it’s the one that Hazel Blears has just announced (though it was heavily trailed in the ‘Communities in Control’ White Paper) into the rules that determine what publicity councils can and can’t do. I’ve visited approximately 100 local authorities in the UK, trying to persuade councils to help councillors [...]
Fewer people agree with you than you think
Being a politician is a good deal harder than most of us realise. Recent posts here about cognitive polyphasia remind me that being a politician involves squaring a number of unsquareable circles. Here’s the RSA’s Matthew Taylor on cognitive dissonance and the rose coloured mirror. People – the voters (trans: you and I) don’t recognise [...]
Making participation a participation sport
Steph Gray asks a very good question: “…why aren’t advocates of public participation and engagement more successful in engaging the policymakers who design consultations?“
Cognitive polyphasia
These couple of sentences leaped out of an article by Polly Toynbee recently: It was pollster Ben Page who first used the phrase “cognitive polyphasia” to describe what pollsters find all the time: most people hold several entirely contradictory beliefs at once. They want local decision-making but are adamantly opposed to a postcode lottery…. Another [...]
How can politicians resist the pressures that stop them from governing well?
This time last year, Sir Christopher Foster – a long-standing government adviser on economic policy was much in evidence. There was this interview in the Telegraph, and I heard him on BBC Radio 4. The link to the programme is no longer available, but I made notes at the time. The Telegraph piece makes some [...]
Is the decline of conversational local democracy really a big problem?
Here’s former New Statesman & Society editor Stuart Weir (now with Democratic Audit) on the dangers that arise as a result of the BNP being allowed a toehold in local politics. “Wilks-Heeg analyses electoral data research findings from Burnley to argue convincingly that the BNP’s breakthrough constitutes a stark warning about the “advanced state of [...]
MPs websites – politics on the rates?
As there are a couple of good posts in the mainstream political blogosphere touching upon the qualities that are needed to promote an effective representative democracy, today is a good day to start a blog on the subject. This post will focus on the most topical: Both Puffbox and Spartakan are chewing over the fact [...]
