“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Through the Political Innovation project, I’m helping to promote a meetup tomorrow evening between people who have experience and interests in gaming, and those of us who are very focussed on political issues.

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

• Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
• Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
• As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
• Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

• Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
• Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as their main focus?
• Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?

Since I looked at the calculations from We Love Local Government on Councillors’ iPads the other day, I’ve had a few conversations with people working in democratic services at various local authorities.

Click pic for credit

It seems that the big worry is less that Councillor’s iPads will cost/save money or have any productivity/accountability gains, than that Councillors will spend council meetings futzing with their new toys instead of paying attention to procedings properly.

A few quick thoughts on this:

• Are we worried that tweeting councillors will be interacting with the public when they should be focussing only upon the views of other elected members? And aren’t the more savvy ones doing this already with their phones?
• Is there an upside to Councillors being able to do quick lookups and on-the-hoof research during council meetings? Will the quality of deliberation go up?
• Are there small-c constitutional issues here? An elected councillor has legitimacy that unelected interlopers don’t have. Should it be that the only evidence that could/should be considered at a council meeting should be tabled by – or through – an elected councillor? Do councillors have a quasi-jurist role (not a new suggestion around here)?

Either way, I’d suggest that a revolution has happened in the last fifteen years – not just in how we communicate but in how we think. I think that the parable of declining spam illustrates this perfectly, and we need to start thinking about the whole question of representation in the light of it.

It’s not that small a question, but one that has profound implications for our governance.

It’s a good question that tells us a lot about some of the bigger issues in local government.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post:

• These tools should never become a perk of being a Councillor. So to ensure they are tools, a business case for why Councillors need them should be put forward that shows how they can be used as tools to further the Councillor’s work.
• Use some procurement sense. As with a contract, work out your options and find the model that offers value for money for the Council.  So would another tablet Computer be able to do the required job, instead of the fancy and fashionable I-pad?
• If the Councillor breaks it, through misuse by them, then they cover the costs. At the end of the day its the Council’s property not theirs.
• This one is not a rule, more a suggestion/question. I’m not sure it would work but could the Council do a similar thing with I-pads that the Cycle to work scheme does? So the Council buys the I-pad and slowly the Councillor buys off the Council, if they want it.  Though I suppose it wouldn’t be tax-free like the cycle scheme.

I’d suggest that this represents a triumph of a grumpy anti-politics that ultimately diminishes the legitimacy of local government itself. It’s a populist starting point that negates so many other important considerations. It’s almost as though we can’t clear our throats without acknowledging the Tax Payers Alliance agenda.

I’m not blaming the good bloggers at WLLG here – it is, after all, endemic. It’s largely unchallenged by any of the main political parties that all claim ownership of the term ‘localism’.

There’s a two way compact between us voters and Councillors (as with all elected representatives): They strive for the highest standards in terms of civic representation (the stuff this blog bores on about all the time) and, in return, we give them a high social status and reasonable compensation to cover the opportunity cost of being a Councillor.

I don’t think either side of this compact is being met – I’d be interested to see how many councillors would be able to write a half-decent A-Level essay on what good representation entails – but I do think it’s time to put a bit of dignity back into local government. Someone has to make the first move.

Where I live, the council is no longer based in a granite monument to municipal values (the Town Hall), it’s on some campus in a part of the borough that’s awkward to get to without a car. I’m sure there’s an excellent business case for this, but there’s no way you can build a case for political decentralisation on the back of an institution that has a purely utilitarian approach to it’s democratic and administrative functions.

Decentralisation doesn’t happen because of some localism agenda that is dreamed up in the the think-tanks of That London. It happens because the core tensions that diminish the legitimacy of local democracy are being addressed. I see no sign of this happening any time soon.

The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

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 Rt Hon. David Laws MP. Click pic for credit

There was an interesting review of a study around politically connected firms on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed programme recently asking how far different countries find their governance effected by the relationships politicians have with previous (or current!) employers.

The early coalition-casualty, David Laws – for example – is a former Vice President of JP Morgan and Alan Duncan used to work for Royal Dutch Shell.

The programme quotes a recent article from Mara Faccio, a US-based Italian economist whose work on politically-connected firms (lots of links from her homepage here) is, in part, er…. inspired … by a desire to understand Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian state.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a direct correlation between press freedom and low levels of corruption. In the UK, 150 firms have connections to MPs – the highest level of interpenetration anywhere in the world. It’s quite a surprising statistic initially, but in the UK, politicians are offered opportunities to join boards rather than the other way around – where businesses put their people into politics (the strong contrast with Italy). As a result, the benefits to the firms were, according to Faccio, negligible.

It does put all of the recent expenses scandal into perspective though, doesn’t it?

Listen to the whole thing though if you can?

The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties.

It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in the public sector for ideas on how they can curb costs. It is a fairly standard site developed originally – as it happens – by my mate Simon (who deserved more credit than he got for it), built to invite ideas but not to publish them unmoderated.

The treasury site’s findings will prove to be a slow burn, but as far as I can see, the idea of saying ‘OK, you work here, what could we do better’ has to have an appeal that goes beyond the small-state fixations of the governing coalition. No-one who is critical of British management standards can fail to see that there must be some benefit in asking the  workers what they would do better.

As my friend Big Pete put it in the context of postal workers a while ago….

“Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them.”

Your Freedom is a different matter. It uses a standard tool -the Dialogue App – developed by those good people at Delib.

Firstly, a bit of disclosure: I’ve found the meme that we have, somehow, been stripped of our liberties to be very problematic and I said why here a while ago. I’d go further. I suspect that the Conservatives will soon tire of it once their feet are fully under the table in the same way that they tired of the notion that we were an elective dictatorship at some point between Lord Hailsham’s pronouncement on the subject in the late 1970s (under a Labour government) and Mrs Thatcher’s massively-centralising rate-capping reforms of the 1980s.

All of that said, how have they done, and what could they have done better? Well Chris Applegate rather lays the boot in here, effectively endorsing the treasury’s approach rather than the ‘Your Freedom‘ one. Some of his suggestions raise way too high a bar:

“If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000?.”

Surely the point of doing this is to circumvent the way that well-heeled pressure groups dominate public discourse? You’d need a team of savvy researchers to be able to meet that bar.

On the other hand, Chris also offers a load of good practical suggestions for weeding out the Clarksonism and his ideas on moderation and de-duplication are good ones. But I think that the real problem here is that it is the bolting-on of interactive tools to a government that isn’t fundamentally interactive in the first place. This isn’t a particular criticism of the Lib-Servatives either – Labour were significantly worse at this than the new crowd.

However, it has to be said that the government are trying – they’re doing something innovative that they will learn from – and that can only be a good thing. When I first saw the site, I used Twitter to float the idea that it would be better to create a tool that promoted collaborative authoring,  allowing a large-ish number of people to collectively describe the problem rather than to propose solutions. Replies suggested that this was too high a bar. They’re right, of course. I can’t point to many successful examples of people using collaborative authoring tools to describe a problem.

But there are some, and they show what is needed to succeed.

MixedInk has had a number of successes crowdsourcing a single description of something. They used weight of numbers plus fanaticism (in different cases) to get a good single document out of a lot of people – one where strong points were promoted and weak ones were exorcised. I like this idea because it is a good use of active citizens – it makes them the servants – rather than the masters – of elected politicians.

If a government minister were to find the right way to introduce a narrow-ish subject, I’m confident that a useable outcome would result.

Similarly, Debategraph has made a start doing similar things, but it is still in need of development in terms of usability. On the one hand, MixedInk, Debategraph and the various wiki tools (including MediaWiki – the tool behind Wikipedia) are no-where near as usable and accessible as Delib’s tool, and any politician who were to put all of their chips on following my advice – ‘crowdsource a description of the problem using collaborative authoring tool’ – they’d probably not last the week out.

But – on the other hand – if the government were prepared to invest a portion of that £1m that it offered for a public-policy website on usability specialists that would make collaborative authoring more attractive – perhaps it would be make enough of a difference. It may even be enough to simply signal that ‘a crowdsourced description of problems’ is their preferred means of consultation – perhaps that sort of clarity would unlock the necessary investment?

One of the best examples I’ve seen was the one introduced in advance of The Interactive Charter last year by Tim Davies. He managed to crowdsource the ‘50 barriers‘ wiki. Tim is a savvy guy who knows how to use participative tools.

As an individual, Tim knows how to do it and has developed the a range of personal skills that he needs. There are lots of ways of weeding out useless commentary, but the bottom line is that the best application for doing it isn’t any kind of script: It is, instead, a carbon-based lifeform – one that has been elected and has the executive power to take high-quality input from the public and do something useful with it.

At the end of the day, there is no substitute for getting actual politicians to develop interactive skills and do this themselves. So many initiatives will only back-fill until the time that this is accepted.

Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere).

I really don't know if Niccolò would endorse this advice...

Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been working on that I’d like to offer – in beta – that are intended to help people who are already politicians adapt to the way that interactivity has changed the way that public life is conducted.

There are new possibilities, pitfalls and expectations that need to be met. Here are my ten (draft) ground rules for interactive public representation.

Some of them involve a fundamental rethinking of the standard advice that has been offered to young politicians through the ages:

1. Cut your workload by effective listening. A lack of thinking-time results in indecision and procrastination. Find ways of asking for solutions to small problems and internalising the answers without it disrupting your work. Establish a network of informers – people who will give you short summaries of the key questions that you are facing and answers to little questions. A briefing on how you consume shared information will help here. This is what Twitter can do for you.
2. Build a network of people that you deal with. Social networks are important – they ensure that you have a well of goodwill to draw upon. New technologies allow you to stay in the peripheral vision of large numbers of people. You can even approach a sub-set of your networks and invite them to take very simple steps that will promote your work more widely. To join your ‘relay team’.
3. Find ways of keeping that network informed without doing any extra work. Increasingly, you can show your networks that you’ve read / done / attended something by adapting your personal systems. Many effective communicators use social networking tools effortlessly once they’ve investigated how some APIs and RSS feeds work (you can ask a social media geek to spend a short time sorting this out for you if you need to). This can effortlessly solicit useful recommendations and let the people who work with you know what you’re really interested in. Remember, we all vastly overestimate how much the people we need to know about us actually do know.
4. Switch ‘broadcast’ off. There are ways of effortlessly providing your network of informers with positive feedback and evidence that you have heard them. This will motivate them to provide you with more, better information. The really valuable thing that social networks offer is a cluster of articulate people that you can eavesdrop upon (in a non-sinister, non-intrusive way, naturally). Broadcast is becoming less useful to you anyway for reasons that I’ll come to shortly.
5. Don’t ask for solutions – ask for descriptions of problems. To do the former will attract lobbyists and force you into a frustrating auction of promises. Doing the latter will give you time to think, allow rival pressure groups to neutralise each other, and help build a consensus around any decisions that you ultimately make. Your network of informers and staff need to understand that you expect high standards from those who brief you but this often encourages rather than discourages them. Psychiatrists never tell you what do to. They tell you to talk through your problems. The right answers suggest themselves. That’s ‘the talking cure’.
6. Show your working. By making decisions in a more transparent way, you can explain trade-offs, enhance your reputation for inclusivity and avoid accusations of partiality. The ‘crowdsource a description of the problem’ advice helps here. In the past, this involved bureaucracies and checks and balances. It created monopolies and gatekeepers. It is so much easier to do this now in a highly visible, productive and human way. This is what a blog can help you with.
7. Certainty stops you thinking and silences your advisors. Projecting an air of open-mindedness and a willingness to be persuaded results in better decisions and fewer unintended consequences.
8. Avoid unnecessary partisanship. Politicians always overestimate how much it impresses others. It creates unwanted enemies and cuts off the valuable flow of information that your networks can bring you. Politicians often confess that their best advice sometimes comes from candid and not-unfriendly opponents
9. The ‘big idea’ is dead. Think about it. When is the last time that a politician or organisation ‘unveiled’ a ‘solution’ or a ‘Big Idea’ that no-one had thought of before? Remember how well that was received? Forget it. People don’t want to read your prescriptions. They want to work with you to write them. Your problem – indeed, this may be the biggest ethical challenge that you face – is how you ensure that your interactivity doesn’t skew your decisions in favour of the interests of ‘active citizens’ and away from those of people with mild preferences or those who are unable or unwilling to interact with you when you’re framing your policies.
10. Be good. There was a time that politicians could inhabit a closed order in which they were only judged by the standards of their caste. Those days are over. By being open and interactive, by building a network of friends and informers, by showing your working and being inclusive in the way you make decisions, you will be able to take your place among the more trusted and respected associates that the public encounter every day.

OK, OK, they’re not finished. And none of them ar

(Note: A minor edit was added at 9.58am to point 9)

So what mandate does the new government have? K-punk (in a wider, very good post) quotes Melanie Phillips saying that “no-one voted for a hung parliament.”

Slavoj Žižek - click for credit

Before the election, there was a persistent rumbling around Gordon Brown’s legitimacy as PM (he didn’t win a general election) that seems strangely lacking around David Cameron – arguably less legitimate than Brown by the same arguments.

All of this demonstrates the dangers inherent in the way that the UK’s constitutional arrangements are reified into … well … a constitution. As the press coverage in the days following the election confirmed, our constitution appears to be whatever newspaper editors think that they would like it to be.

Dealing with this, K-Punk quotes extensively from an article by the Slovenian Marxist writer, Slavoj Žižek in which a similarly reified concept – the market – is debunked:

“Each individual perceives market as an objective system confronting him, although there is no objective market but just the interaction of the multitude of individuals – so that, although each individual knows very well that there is no objective market, just the interaction of individuals, the specter of ‘objective’ market is this same individual’s fact-of-experience, determining his beliefs and acts. Not only market, but our entire social life is determined by such reified mechanisms……”

Continuing….

“Prosopopoeia is usually perceived as a mystification to which naïve consciousness is prone, i.e., as something to be demystified…. Dupuy recalls how sociologists interpret electoral results: for example, when the government retains its majority, but barely does so, the result is read as ‘the voters prolonged their trust into the government, but with a warning that it should do its work better’, as if the electoral result was the outcome of the decision of a single meta-Subject (voters) who wanted to deliver a ‘message’ to those in power.”

This helps us to look at the 2010 election afresh and determine what we actually know about it.

We know that it returned 650 MPs, all of whom received the largest number of votes in their constituencies (though many failed to receive a majority).

We know that every vote that those MPs received was cast for slightly different reasons and with slightly different levels of conviction. Many voters hadn’t made up their minds until they lowered their pencil onto the ballot paper. The day prior to the election, ITV’s polling told them that 38 per cent of the voters said it was “quite possible” they would change their mind before voting. Other polls at over 2.5 million voters as ‘undecided’ at the same point. If we had an electoral system that allowed people to divide their vote up in some way, we may have got a very different result indeed.

We know that many votes were cast ‘tactically’ – not for a candidate but against them. We also know (and I can’t remember where I read this*) that a lot of ‘tactical’ votes were cast stupidly – people either believed in ropey statistics or just didn’t research it properly and ended up voting for the third-strongest party on the ballot in a quest to stop the bookies favourite.

We know that every MP will have slightly different levels of allegiance to their party leader. I suspect that Charles Clarke or Frank Field would be fairly relaxed about having David Cameron as a PM if the alternative were Gordon Brown. On a much larger and profounder scale, we know that many people who voted Lib-Dem may have changed their vote had they known for certain that the Lib-Dems would go into coalition with the Tories. We just don’t know how many.

And so on. The reified election results mask a much more complex set of factors in which preferences were weighted, outcomes gamed and errors were compounded.

The only thing we know for certain is that those MPs that were returned got more votes than their strongest rivals and that is the only legitimacy that the whole election campaign bestows. Strangely – and sadly – the bizarre way that the British discuss their constitutional settlement consistently serves to mask this fact.

It’s a shame, because it’s the most attractive and defensible aspect of our constitutional settlement such as it is. It makes the case for a greater focus upon individual elected representatives and candidates and for a greater measure of independence for them once they’re elected.

*Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast during the election highlighted the way that parties misrepresented previous electoral statistics to dupe tactical voters into making the wrong choice.