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 [...]
Posts under ‘Being a politician’
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 [...]
Politicians as jurors?
The BBC website has a nice post up about how the question of politicians being ‘in touch’ isn’t a straightforward one. It sort-of reprises a few points that I made in this post here a while ago – that no-body really agrees with anyone else about very much, and that – under such circumstances, politicians [...]
Whiter than white?
Do we really want politicians to be public paragons of virtue? A good deal of what I read tends to work on the assumption that we do. Take this, for example: “As technology evolves, the same public information laws create novel and in some cases previously unimaginable levels of transparency. In many cases, particularly those [...]
We know what you don't want. Now what DO you want?
The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett is right to be worried about the impact that a climate of hypercommentary on personal tics will have on politics: “With the internet demanding ever-improving performance skills from its principal actors, Westminster can only become less hospitable to people who look more like Menzies Campbell than Ant and Dec. Unless, that [...]
Policy v Character
Chris Dillow is probably the best political blogger in the UK. Here he asks whether we should judge politicians by their policies or their characters? More on this here shortly.
