This is a bit of a rehearsal of the ‘what is a good government – and is it democratic? question. It’s also more of a set of bookmarks than a proper post, but I hope someone finds it useful.

Click pic for credit

I think we would all like to find ourselves in a situation where the public – by voting – get a government that delivers The General Will – and that, by this, we understand that it does it efficiently as well.

If someone could demonstrate that we could have this without votes or public participation, we’d have to face a tough question: Do we actually want a democracy at all?

So, for example, take the notion of The General Will.  As an example, lets take something that the public have a settled preference on. For example, lets say (for the sake of argument) that we want everybody to be able to have access to, and the ability participate in, a particular activity – no matter what their social or ethnic status may be. This will not just require rules to prevent discrimination – it will also require society to be organised in such a way as to make it possible for someone to provide such a service.

The example that springs to mind is that of a golf club.

To appease this General Will, it is not enough for a golf club to remove it’s ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Travellers’ sign from the main gate. A good society, surely, decides that golf is, to some extent, a good thing and it does a few things to make it possible for everyone who really wants to (subject perhaps to some rationing and a few trade-offs – i.e. “you can’t have subsidised golf-club membership and subsidised membership of the Polo Club!”)

That country, after all, wants the national pride of having a few top-class golfers – and if only 1% of the population can set foot on a golf course, that won’t happen. So we take steps.

It may do this by a tax and planning regime that makes it affordable to set up a golf club, by opening municipal courses, by subsidising fees out of general taxation or by imposing some rules on the owners forcing them to offer conscessions of some kind or other.

So this society strives for more than just fairness. It is aware that the freedom of the beggar to drink champagne is no freedom at all.

But it is also for this reason that it resists the temptation to meet every public demand. It is bounded by reality. It can only marshall the resources that it has. It has to be efficient in what it does.  Wasting resources makes it harder to comply with the many demands that the public have.

If the government takes a ‘hang the cost’ approach to golf, it won’t be able to do other things.

The government have to be a competent administrator that is good at incentivising people to comply with the the public’s desires promptly and cheaply. But the voters have to play ball as well.

We have to be prepared to elect people who are able to do this well instead of those who offer improbable bribes. If I were to stand for office offering a French standard of health service funded from Dubai’s tax regime, and you were to vote for me, you would get the rotten govenment that you deserve.

This brings us to the suitability of voters. How far do we go along with our side of the bargain? Are we fair? Are we rational? Do we sidestep cognitive biases and logical fallacies? Do we put the interests of the nation ahead of our own short term desires? Do we detect dishonesty well? Do we compensate for media dishonesty or disregard the self-serving agendas of pressure groups? Do we select the right blend of idealists and technocrats?

There’s no short answer to those questions (apart from the near-perfect one-word reply – NO!). My own view is that we lose a lot of those imperfections by electing people who then bring the distributed moral wisdom of Parliament to bear. But it’s a recurring theme in my recent reading – so here’s a few links.

Firstly, Peter Levine on efficiency v fairness.

Then there’s The Political Brain and Don’t Think of an Elephant. And we shouldn’t forget The Myth of the Rational Voter either (which I admit to having only skim-read).

As a counterweight, there’s The Wisdom of Crowds (where public ignorance gets smoothed out in the wash).

Can anyone think of any obvious texts or titles that I’ve missed here?

Update – 16th June 2011: Further evidence that our political beleifs aren’t formed rationally (this one says that childhood trauma makes people more left-wing – it recalls the adage that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested”)

My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways.

Are 4iP working to re-articulate what public service media is for?

I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC acts as a hugely important counterbalance.

My own hasty list of ways that it currently does this would include the following:

• Providing a balanced alternative to the biases of commercial media in news reporting and current affairs (acknowledging right-wing suspicions of metropolitan liberal bias here…)
• Acting as a British expression of the Cultural Exception (updated to a more politically fashionable role as the guardians of cultural diversity) and providing other counterbalances to market failure within the media – creating a shelter from the monopolistic content-production ecology that is dominated by US producers, etc
• Giving us an alternative to the bloody awful tedium of ad-driven TV (both the distortions to the schedules and the actual ads themselves) and providing a hugely efficient provider of value-for-money at the same time in return for the minor loss-of-liberty that arises out of a near-tax imposition
• Providing a counterbalance to the increasing fragmentation of the media to provide a shared national platform that can promote a sense of citizenship

Personally, I’ve bought most of these arguments for most of my adult life. Increasingly, though, the first one is starting to look like an impoverished objective for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, there’s the question of how far pluralism is preferable to neutrality. I’d make this case in more detail, but Mick did so a while ago on Slugger O’Toole.

Secondly, there’s the question of how far the relationship between political structures and the media is a single adversarial one. Sure, there’s a role for the media in holding the political establishment to account. But there is also the task of the ‘candid friend’ – helping innovators know what will work, broadening the adversarial fire away from just the elected political establishment and focussing some of it on its unelected rivals.

The media is extremely good at bringing the low-hanging fruit to the attention of the political class. A quick perusal of the spaces in which the public are invited to sound off shows that it is very easy to get at the public minorities (trans: The Silent Majority) who know exactly what they think and are passionate about their beliefs. But the tougher – but more important – task is how you can tap into the sentiments of the larger body of people with mild preferences. Twitter’s business model appears to be based upon the creation of a space where a wide range of easy sentiment is exhibited – and then monetising that data in one way or another by selling it to search engines.

Is there a role for a public service media in creating quick light conversations on a wide range of issues and then mining them – using sentiment analysis or – much less cleverly – simply flushing out routine conversations expressly for the purpose of listening to them? Getting conversations going is something that Mick at Slugger or Hugh at Harringay Online are very good at (but few others are quite as adept…)

Is this something that a public service broadcaster could do? Is it something that a commercial media organisation could ever be trusted to do? My preference is with the public service broadcaster.

Taking this one step further (and I apologise now for linking to more of my own posts) is it perhaps the role of public service media to destroy the monopoly that public sector communications staff have in describing their own services?

Is it possible that the future role for public service media is to be a trusted intermediary – a detached and independent ears and mouth that helps the state? Is this what the final destination of 4iP projects such as MyPolice and HelpMeInvestigate (among others) could be?

I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look.

Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in itself.

What is interesting is Sunstein’s discussion of how that polarisation happens and what the consequences of it are. He’s also very good on the question of  how extremism isn’t always a bad thing.

More of that another time though. The reason I’m drawing attention to it is that I think Cass would be interested in this exercise that I kicked off yesterday – almost on a whim.

Slugger O’Toole is a site that I contribute to occasionally, as well as working with it’s founder on some offline projects. The site is largely devoted to issues in Northern Ireland’s politics, and Mick has often noted a phenomenon called ‘Whataboutery.’

It’s something of a conversation killer.  A recent example that I found was where someone from Sinn Féin outlined views on violence against women. One of the first comments that appeared under the blog-post discussing this was that Sinn Féin members had no place discussing violence against women – after all, hadn’t the IRA killed lots of women in it’s time?

As points go, it’s not irrelevant, but neither was it designed to take the conversation about domestic violence to a productive place. (A clever commenter replied that Protestants had no grounds to speak about violence against women either – after all, Henry VIII beheaded two of his wives!)

Therefore, the reason I thought it would be a good idea to use debategraph to map ‘Whataboutery’ is because all of that enthusiasm for presenting one narrow exclusive point of view could be used to create something that the rest of us can use. Use the ‘hive mind’ comprised of the users of a large-ish website to construct a working model of a complex problem.

It also illustrates, I think, how active citizenship can be harnessed for the greater good. In the past, I’ve argued that consultations are often objectively undemocratic because they massively over-represent the views of people who feel strongly on specific issues and / or have more time on their hands than the rest of us.

The self-styled classical liberal blogger Tim Worstall has coined ‘Worstall’s Law of Organizations: “All and any organizations will in the end be run by those who stay awake in committee …”

But active citizenship works – I would suggest – when these people – often time-rich fanatics – have to compete with each other for the privilege of representing us for a few years at a time. As this debategraph illustrates, they may also be useful recruits to a hive mind mapping exercise. Perhaps we can learn a lot by listening to their general buzz of fanatics and busybodies even if we’d prefer to ignore their individual voices?

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.

From TechPresident:

“Indiana Univeristy’s Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or “commons,” that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take place in ad hoc organizations. Her work is part of a body of knowledge that underlies what people are looking for and considering as they design Gov 2.0 systems of participation and new models for democracy, which makes her of particular interest to those of us interested in thinking through a distributed view of the world.”

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here).

The thing is, on 606, because the BBC isn’t the Daily Mail, most of the more obnoxious racist bile gets filtered out. But we’re still left with a baying crowd – often led by a really annoying cheerleader (Alan Green). Why should it be easier to extract the distributed wisdom ‘signal’ from the horde of shouty blokes ‘noise’ when the subject is football?

I’d argue that it is easier. And the reason for this is in the partisanship. Supporters of hundreds of different clubs converge on 606 and the big premiership clubs aren’t massively over-represented. At the end of it, you can leave with a picture of what the balance of opinion is on cheating or poor refereeing. It’s not a complex subject and few people are really excluded from the conversation. Everyone, apart from Arsenal fans think that Eduardo should be slapped down for his dive against Celtic.

Politics and public life just isn’t like that. On the one hand, it is at least as partisan as football, though most spectators would’t thinks so given the narrow pre-rehearsed set of positions that are used to discuss most issues. The clash of interests and perspectives is also at least as pronounced. But in public affairs, most sides of the argument never turn up. Low income groups, people who work long hours, and most importantly, people that don’t have a settled strong view on big issues – they will never turn up to a public meeting or dash off a frothing letter to the local rag.

What we are left with, in politics, is a handful of highly over-represented positions, curated by media owners that are both partisan and monopolistic.

In a society that has a wide range of low-level corruption and graft on offer, why have we spent most of 2009 preoccupied with MP’s failings? I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that this kind of corruption is very much on the radar of a highly unrepresentative portion of society – but one that can always be counted on to get their voice heard. It illustrates why it is so important that the ‘hard to reach’ groups are included in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a argument for making some decisions along the lines of Anthony Barnett’s lottery-based model of Athenian Democracy?

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.With raw material from the Taxpayers Alliance, a cornucopia of sites have blossomed attacking the symptoms of ‘big government’ while rarely actually making the case for the kind of minarchy that is implied by their position.

The end result has been – it is no exageration to say – the near-total demoralisaton of the political class with MPs openly saying that they hate their job and that their families are begging them to take a job stacking shelves in the local supermarket rather than having to put up with the hyper-scrutiny that they appear to be under at the moment.

On the other side of the fence, though, we’re seeing the institutions that compete with a more left-libertarian notion of democracy being taken to peices by rationalist bloggers. Great oak trees from little acorns grow, and it you don’t like the sight of an organisation being taken apart because of it’s attempts to surpress debate, then don’t go and look at this article now.

Those of us that are rather keen on representative democracy may have a happy couple of years to look forward to, watching all of the organisations that rival elected politicians getting their comeuppance.

MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.

Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.

“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

One possible fly in this ointment is that it’s quite hard to make the case for public spending on usability testing. If I were a minister, I like to thing that I’d sign it off, but I’d expect to be given a hard time for doing it. MySociety’s rejoinder to this would probably be to (correctly) point out that they’ve managed to get volunteer hackers to build gov-related sites that knock the spots of gov-financed ones at a fraction of the cost, and follow it up with the view that the best gov-info sites aren’t built on a .gov domain.

The rest of Tom’s peice outlines how every stage in the deliberation process can be made more transparent.

I’ve always had some concerns about MySociety’s approach to this – and this line in Tom’s article…

One can imagine in future that the moment such a vote is tabled, all around the country activists would be immediately informed and able to mobilise even if they don’t know each other…

… foresees a scenario that may chill many advocates of representative democracy to the bone. Imagine the way that the Daily Mail was able to deep-six the very idea of road-pricing, and then think about it happening every day… it has capital P-political implications, promoting a right-wing populism over a more reflective and rational deliberative process.

However, I find myself in the rare situation of suggesting that there is a form of transparency and openness that Tom hasn’t suggested first, and one that could transform parliament. Regular readers here can change channel now……

The Virtual Researcher

One of the features of political centralisation is the accumulation of resources to a handful of nodes. For thirty years now, the British PM has been able to call upon a personal Think Tank stocked with paid political posts and a cluster of elite civil servants.

With an independent civil service, a cabinet that is picked by the PM (rather than the other way around) and a team of Special Advisers who owe at least half of their loyalty to the PM rather than the minister who hired them, the top of the political ladder is very well resourced.

Think Tanks are paid to service the needs of this office, journalists write with at least one eye on the reaction from that one office … if you could put a price on the amount of money that is spent upon supporting the thought processes of that one office, I’d guess that it runs into seven figures – and possibly eight.

Contrast this with the description of the average MP that Jenni Russell provided the other day – social workers for constituents – and you have a parliament that is almost entirely supine. If Russell’s article has one failing, it doesn’t recognise the near-futility of MPs behaving in any other way than the way they do.

When they’re not carefully indexing their paperclip receipts and providing a paralegal service for their constituents, MPs need to be able to, in Burke’s words, be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents.”

If constituents were prepared to collaborate with each other to provide detailed briefings to MPs, giving them the answers they need to rebuff the party whips, that would be a distinct improvement upon representative democracy.

I mentioned this idea to a few friends with a social-media orientation and their minds immediately raced off on the various clever possibilities that this idea suggested. Life’s too short to mention the tangled web of bootstrapped XML and existing applications that was proposed, but the bottom line is this:

So far, social media has been added to the armoury of sticks that are used to beat local elected representatives. I can’t think of a single social media / democracy project that hasn’t objectively bulwarked political centralisation.

But if MPs and councillors could be the beneficiary, this table could be turned dramatically.

It’s about time they were armed against their political leadership elites, pressure groups, newspaper proprietors and civil servants.

That could go further than making our slightly broken system chugg along in a more transparent way – it could actually fix it.

Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest.

According to a piece on the When Saturday Comes blog, the experiment is not doing so well. Apart from a decline in membership, which is having an effect on the club’s already shaky budget, many of the democracy elements of the operation have been junked. The website members no longer pick the team, and now have ceded some power over transfers to the management, which is appointed by the MyFC website owners.

When Saturday Comes opines:

you have to wonder what the future holds for MyFC if the power afforded to members keeps being eroded. With Daish regaining some control of transfer policy, and the headline grabbing – but ridiculous – concept of fans picking the team having long been consigned to the dustbin, there is little incentive to persuade new investors to part with £35 per year, especially as the club look set for another season at the wrong end of the table.

A site commenter makes the best point of all – that an operation like MyFootballClub, started on the Internet without a particular club in mind, was never going to create a common bond strong enough to keep people participating through the bad times:

If it had been a supporters’ trust that bought the club, then perhaps this could have all been avoided. By going from internet-concept first, and THEN casting about for a team after members had been brought onboard, the erosion of support has been swift but not unforeseeable–how is a “member” in California or Australia supposed to feel any sort of bond with this side? After clicking yes/no a few times, how likely would they be to stay engaged? In their world of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, surely the same denizens couldn’t be expected to focus on a mere non-league football team in little old England for too long.