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 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?

The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut.

It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today.

• Shift Delete
• Command backspace
• SysRq F12
• Home PgDn
• Escape End

I’m looking forward to reading a few crits of what has made the final cut, but in the meantime, here’s a purely personal observation on this:

I’m no Tory myself, and it would be unfair of me to present myself as any kind of neutral on this question, but the Tories’ plans for local government are easily the most worrying aspect of their policy development in recent years. Sir Jeremy Beecham highlighted the threat that this has presented to representative democracy at the time:

The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.

For me, one of the biggest local policy foul-ups has been the implementation of choice in local schools – where pushy-parents can game the system to ensure that their kids end up in schools that are more socially exclusive than the old Grammar Schools. As far as I can see, so many of aspects of public policy today seem to be about finding ways of getting people who could be paying tax into a position where they aren’t – and where they are the key beneficiaries of those who do pay it.

Is every aspect of local public spending going to be gamed in this way? I think that this is what the Tories have in mind, and we should be worried about that.

I’m surprised that it’s taken so long, but someone has finally launched a web-based candidacy for the election. In this case, the deal is that – if he wins, he will put every issue to the vote on his website and vote accordingly. There are some issues where he outlines exceptions to this rule, and he seems quite hung up on issues of individual liberty and he says he’s in favour of positive democratic reform. His slogan is “Whatever the majority vote is, I will vote that way.”

I’ve addressed this issue here in the past at some length [most recent related rant here] but I think I can leave it to Lolcats to explain the trade-off problem that presents one of the biggest challenges to this direct democracy approach:

I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the risk accordingly)

Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

Two things.

This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data:

Secondly, further to Andrew’s Poblish posts, I’ve just revisited Debatepedia. I met one of the Debatepedia team last year at the WeMedia conference and I had to say at the time that it didn’t seem to be quite there as an idea. The site looks a good deal more useful now – here’s a useful primer on direct v representative democracy for you.

Click for picture credit

I meant to pick this up a few days ago – I’ve been too busy to blog as diligently as I’d like to.

In the Times, Greenpeace’s Joss Garman says:

“Imagine if, instead of 60 years ago, the Labour Party was trying to create a National Health Service today. The right-wing campaign to scupper the formation of an NHS would be run against the backdrop of UK media coverage of America’s simultaneous healthcare debate. Every “death panel” and “compulsory abortion” myth concocted on K Street would soon be digested by British correspondents in Washington before being tailored for a UK audience as an insight into the fallout from the introduction of “socialised medicine”.

….you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Over the coming months climate legislation will be discussed before the Senate. A vote is expected next year and a hurricane of hysteria is already forming, with Britain’s climate debate likely to be caught in the vicious tailwinds.”

I’d be interested to know how Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell would see this issue being dealt with in the fantasy direct democracy that they would like lead us into. Everyone with a political bone in their body likes to foist the ‘worse than Hitler’ charge upon their political opponents. It’s usually inadvisable and rash.

But if the worst fears of climate change scientists come to pass, our grandchildren may well have the advocates of populism and direct democracy right up there with the brownshirts in their demonology.

Just a thought….

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: One Swiss national who probably would have been a bit annoyed by the Minaret ban.

The recent outcome of a Swiss referendum in which a majority have voted in favour of a minaret ban has helped to highlight a few important issue around the question of direct democracy.

Dan Hannan says that – while direct democracy is a great idea, this particular result is regrettable.

Make of that what you will. For me, the more interesting point is Chris Dillow’s return to his advocacy of Direct Democracy. He starts with a point that is, I believe, instantly problematic:

“There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy.” The Swiss decision to ban minarets illustrates this perfectly.

That’s too strong. As Norberto Bobbio argued, there is “a dialectical interplay between liberty and democracy.” But conflict? Only when you get an unmediated vote in which the majority get to impose their will upon a minority.

There is, undoubtedly an actual full-blooded conflict between liberty and the outcomes one could expect from the crudest forms of direct democracy. But the contrast between liberty and what Anthony calls ‘the larger view of democracy’ is less clear – indeed I’d argue – as Anthony does – that the larger view of democracy is the most effective guarantor of those liberties that Dan Hannan claims to be so fond of.

A while ago, Conor Gearty illustrated why democratic ‘impositions’ are clearly preferable to the tyranny of structurelessness that Dan Hannan generally advocates:

“…early democrats knew the value of government and well appreciated how the most resistant to regulation were those whose wealth and privilege were likely to be reined in by proper democratic government. To camouflage their self-interest in morality, these forces of conservatism described themselves as libertarian, in other words as committed to freedom and on that account opposed to governmental intrusion into their lives.”

… and

“If we fetishise individual freedom at the expense of our wider struggle for transformative change, we play into the hands of the right who use libertarianism as a shield with which to resist change.”

In many cases, the advocacy of crude direct democracy is simply a populist cloak for deep conservatism – or worse.

Chris Dillow’s arguments are, however, a good deal more sophisticated than ‘one-vote-per-person-on-everything’. He’s very keen (keener than I am!) on the idea that democratic decision-making often results in bad decisions. Instead, he advances the possible solution of demand revealing referendums. And Shuggy has taken issue with his ideas at length and has too many arguments against the proposition to list here.

I’d not dismiss this idea as quickly as Shuggy does though, for a number of reasons.

Firstly Shuggy is right: It’s an untried, undetailed argument with a few obvious flaws. I can’t imagine that it is a workable idea. But representative democracy has flaws as well. My hasty round up includes….

• Five years is a long time to be bound by one decision
• Emergence of remote elites – often almost a caste with various inappropriate biases
• Five years allows organisations to consolidate and monopolise – to create huge entry barriers
• Groupthink
• Crude trade-offs forced by political parties

If you lose the term ‘referendum’, demand revealing exercises may not be a bad idea. You don’t have to fully buy into the Wisdom of Crowds thesis that a large number of ironically detached stabs at a correct answer result in better judgments than those made by experts. You only need to go as far as the Clay Shirky-ish assertion that the knowledge outside your organisation is generally greater than that inside it.

It is in Burke’s often-overlooked notion that an elected representative should be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents” that I think that new communications tools offer the greatest possibilities. There are reasons that representative government is the least worst option open to us. Our politicians understand trade-offs and they get together to get a more complete picture of a problem. New communications tools mean that they can involve us – and be seen to involve us – in doing all of this more effectively.

I’d suggest that, in reaching for an alternative to representative democracy, it looks to me as if Chris is actually acknowledging that direct democracy will only work if it approximates what representative democracy does while avoiding some of the flaws. Surely it would be easier to switch the argument round and say that some of the more creative direct democracy tools could overcome the flaws of our current system?

Today, politicians could actively solicit detailed descriptions of the problems that they want to solve from the general public. A partnership with the people rather than purely delegated responsibility for five years. The semantic web is gradually grappling with the question of how people may be prepared to collaborate to describe problems and propose solutions and there are dozens of emerging applications such as Google Wave, MixedInk, and Debategraph to name but a few that are beginning to try to crack this nut. It’s a long way from leaving the geeky-ghetto, but the day will come.

And there are a number of reasons why this is so exciting. Because – unlike the use of focus groups – its not about mapping our sensory perceptions in order to sell us a bill of goods. It’s about presenting us with a structured set of trade offs – what do you really want more? This or that? And how much more do you want it?

In the late 1980s, I remember looking at a survey of public attitudes in the Irish Republic and found that the cost of phone bills was a matter of acute concern while the partition of that island was one of acute indifference. It taught me more about Irish nationalism that a bookshelf of Tim Pat Coogans.

Also, it breaks the dominance of the mass media. You can reflect a package back to people and say (as Microsoft laughably are trying to do at the moment) ‘You made this.’

Unlike petitions, participatory budgeting creates processes that politicians can ride along with – rather than be steamrollered by. They genuinely learn something from it – it’s not a process that is gamed by pressure groups and busy-bodies. But – and here is the most exciting bit – if politicians can crowdsource this judgment directly from the public, there is a chance that it could revive good old partisan politics.

At the moment, public judgment is provoked and marshaled in a slightly demagogic way by the media. We have a range of poles that few of us would recognise in our own circles – the mushy even-handedness of the BBC, the shrill reaction of The Mail or …. well you get the picture. The media focus upon general concerns. My newspaper is always full of the coverage of international football and the big clubs- England, Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool. Never the coverage of Nottingham Forest, D*rby County and Fester Leicester City that every cell in my being yearns to read.

Similarly, the mediated politics that dominates public life focuses on abstractions and issues that people actually hold relatively lightly in their own scheme of things. If politicians were dealing with us more directly – understanding our real interests and being able to challenge and respond to us in a direct way – surely a new set of political contours would emerge quite rapidly?

When politicians can say to us ‘we asked people like you to think about this problem and describe it to us’ or ‘we asked people like you to tell us what their priorities are’ elections could become more transparent and meaningful again. In government, of course, MPs will always seek to demonstrate their willingness to represent all of the people. But elections should be about the resolution of social tensions.

Finding sophisticated ways of involving people in supporting decision-making processes can reinforce representative democracy – not challenge it.

Just a quick response to Tim Davies’ verygood post about ‘The Myth of Easy Engagement’.

There is one argument that supports his general position that, I think, he misses. I’m sure that sooner or later, some will come up with a frivolous law (like ‘Godwin’s Law‘ or ‘Muphry’s Law‘) but if they don’t, let me dibs it:

Evans’ Law

The value of anyone’s opinion is in inverse proportion to their willingness, ability and opportunity to express it effectively.

I think that I’ve outlined this argument here, here, here and here already so I won’t bore you with it again. Chris Dillow has covered it nicely here as well.

A sketch of anti-healthcare reform protests in the US – from Rolling Stone magazine:

“The threat of violence was thinly veiled: One agitator held aloft a tombstone with the name Doggett. Screaming, “Just say no!” the mob chased Doggett through the parking lot to an aide’s car — roaring with approval as he fled the scene.

Conservatives were quick to insist that the near-riot — the first of many town-hall mobs that would dominate the headlines in August — was completely spontaneous. The protesters didn’t show up “because of some organized group,” Rick Scott, the head of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, told reporters…..

In fact, Scott’s own group had played an integral role in mobilizing the protesters. According to internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights had been working closely for weeks as a “coalition partner” with three other right-wing groups in a plot to unleash irate mobs at town-hall meetings just like Doggett’s. Far from representing a spontaneous upwelling of populist rage, the protests were tightly orchestrated from the top down by corporate-funded front groups as well as top lobbyists for the health care industry.”

Here’s the question that’s being asked over at the Personal Democracy Forum:

Let’s see what answers we get here.