Apologies for the light posting here lately – even bloggers go on holiday, y’know? I’ve not collected my thoughts for any original posts yet, though the ‘Duty to Promote Democracy’ and the obligation to offer petitions will be on the statute book shortly providing plenty of new material in the coming weeks. For now, Dave [...]
Posts under ‘Being a politician’
The birth of cool?
Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well. Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political [...]
Never place 100% of the blame for failure upon the shoulders of someone with a veto.
Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago: Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those [...]
Should MPs and councillors take up cases on behalf of individuals?
Chewing over Parliamentary reforms, here’s Jenni Russell from the Guardian last week: “One experienced Commons civil servant is blisteringly critical of the way in which most MPs have accepted the culture in which they now operate. While some committees and chairs are excellent, many MPs can’t be bothered. “They’re just not interested in the core [...]
A think tank of your own
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point: Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers [...]
Reputaton management
Conall McDevitt has an interesting post up about CEO reputations: “Communicating frequently with their employees. Certainly with their customers too, but not to forget their employees. At a time of uncertainty employees are hungry for information. CEOs need to take responsibility. Apologize if they are wrong. If they don’t know the answer, say they don’t [...]
Optimal identities, tastes and fashions -v- projecting 'conviction'
Further to the post about the way that we have high expectations about the civic virtues of politicians, here’s Will Davies comparing the way that we portray ourselves on social media platforms like Facebook as cultural beings, and – by contrast – the way that politicians have to present themselves: “Gordon Brown’s central problem is [...]
Human beings
A short follow-up to yesterday’s post on politicians who are ….. er …. politicians. Conor Ryan – a senior New Labour veteran says: “MPs Wanted: No human beings need apply.” “What we are now likely to get as a result of the relentless assault of the last month are humourless self-righteous sorts who are, of [...]
The consequence of a retreat from politics?
It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want? So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who [...]
As long as they're our scoundrels….
In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to tease out what kind of politicians that we want. So far, I’ve covered the posibility that we want them to behave in much the same way as jurors do, or that we want a paragon of virtue (in an expensive white suit). With Esther Rantzen and The Jury [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
