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). Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been [...]
Posts under ‘What makes a good representative?’
Swedenise us!
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 [...]
More on what MPs should do
There’s a good post up here on Conservative Home about what advice MPs should take seriously. I had one here a while ago about personality types – it would be good to do anything that could be done to weight these models – help the poor buggers to work out how they should be behaving [...]
MP personality types – have I missed any?
As a prelude to a bit of election-related fun research, I’m compiling a list of the different attributes that we expect to see combined under the bonnet of the perfect MP. Just for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t expect any candidate to fit firmly into any of these categories – I’m going to be [...]
The mental health of politicians
Should a shrink publish a report on a prospective minister’s mental state? Should they be breathalysed? Find out here! http://wp.me/pywkr-xa
Blogs, twitter and leadership
Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership. “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a [...]
Beta legislation: Changing the concept of ‘leadership’?da
The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’. It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, [...]
The Slugger O’Toole Awards – blogs and politics
Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘. These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the [...]
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background: Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation: “The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
