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 [...]
Posts under ‘Pressure groups’
Convening power and direct 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 [...]
Positive Political Blogging: Distributed Intelligence vs. interest groups and think tanks
Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved [...]
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change. I work for [...]
Transparency for lobbyists
Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif – the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out, I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power. This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis [...]
Bloggers and transparency
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 [...]
Campaigns
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 [...]
Political parties & active citizens
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 [...]
"We need an algorithm that works"
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 [...]
The lust for certainty – a sin?
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 [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
