The Democratic Society

Social Media and a modern public sector

Work in a large bureaucratic organisation? You need to look at this presentation from Will Perrin, aka He Who Officially Gets it in Government.

Democracy: participation to passivity

It shows how slowly I get round to podcasts, but this debate from exactly a year ago at the RSA is still very relevant and well worth a listen. During Paul Ginsborg’s remarks, I was nodding so hard I almost got neck strain.

As opposed to taxidermists?

“Councils triumph at MJ awards” blares the headline in this weeks Municipal Journal, which is hardly surprising since only councils are allowed to enter.

Hammersmith & Fulham’s Conservative administration came out top as political team of the year (Waltham Forest were runners-up) and Ealing won best achieving council. It’s notable that there aren’t any awards for engagement, participation, or democracy promotion. Maybe next year…

LGA conference

No time for a proper post today or tomorrow because of LGA conference fun, but if you want to keep up with what’s happening, check out Twitter.

Off to Harrogate

This afternoon I’ll be heading north to Harrogate to attend the Local Government Association conference, as part of the day job. While I’m there, I’ll be keeping an eye out for local government issues and updating the Twitter feed (@demsoc) regularly.

If any readers are also at the conference and want to say hello, leave a comment or drop me a line using the details on the contact page.

Rights, said Gordon

According to the BBC and most other news sources, the Government is about to propose that cancer patients should be given a ‘right’ to a quick appointment, along with some other NHS service ‘rights’.

If you’re cynical about it, this is just a bit of spin on a policy target – if your ‘right’ is ‘breached’, the hospital has to fund treatment at an alternative facility. You won’t be going to Strasbourg with these rights.

Beyond its immediate significance, though, it’s another attempt from the Government to entrench their political philosophy, clearly done in contemplation of a Conservative government in the offing.

It’s similar to the Climate Change Act, which, you will recall, gives the Government itself a legal requirement to cut carbon emissions. Now NHS patients are being given new rights related to the quality and speed of the service they receive. By extension, you could give people the right to have a Saturday postal delivery, or the right to have a train station within 10 miles of their house.

I’m not sure that this sort of constitutional innovation is to be welcomed. Whether you agree with the goals expressed or not, entrenching high-level policy priorities in this way makes it harder for an incoming Government to implement the expressed will of the people.

It also skews lower-level decision-making. Imagine, for example, that there were a legal requirement to maintain a Saturday postal delivery. A Government elected on a tax-cutting manifesto would be much more reluctant to cut the Saturday delivery than they would to, say, scale back hospital investment. The Saturday delivery would require contentious primary legislation to abolish – the hospital budget can be cut overnight, with much less fuss. So, even if the Saturday delivery were the right thing to cut on a political or a cost/benefit basis, it would be more likely to avoid the axe.

In the British system, the point of elections is to chuck the bums out, along with their policies. If every Government tried to lock in its priorities for fear of losing the next election, we will be left with a policy map like the Holy Roman Empire – a thousand little castles and barricades, and no-one with real control of what happens.

Schools design a new Parliament

If you’re hanging around Westminster between 7 and 17 July, pop into Westminster Hall to check out what sounds like a fun exhibition. The Royal Institution of British Architects have run a competition for schools to design a new Houses of Parliament. The nine shortlisted entries will be on display in the oldest part of the Parliamentary estate.
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Reality scores from the rebound

Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest.

According to a piece on the When Saturday Comes blog, the experiment is not doing so well. Apart from a decline in membership, which is having an effect on the club’s already shaky budget, many of the democracy elements of the operation have been junked. The website members no longer pick the team, and now have ceded some power over transfers to the management, which is appointed by the MyFC website owners.

When Saturday Comes opines:

you have to wonder what the future holds for MyFC if the power afforded to members keeps being eroded. With Daish regaining some control of transfer policy, and the headline grabbing – but ridiculous – concept of fans picking the team having long been consigned to the dustbin, there is little incentive to persuade new investors to part with £35 per year, especially as the club look set for another season at the wrong end of the table.

A site commenter makes the best point of all – that an operation like MyFootballClub, started on the Internet without a particular club in mind, was never going to create a common bond strong enough to keep people participating through the bad times:

If it had been a supporters’ trust that bought the club, then perhaps this could have all been avoided. By going from internet-concept first, and THEN casting about for a team after members had been brought onboard, the erosion of support has been swift but not unforeseeable–how is a “member” in California or Australia supposed to feel any sort of bond with this side? After clicking yes/no a few times, how likely would they be to stay engaged? In their world of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, surely the same denizens couldn’t be expected to focus on a mere non-league football team in little old England for too long.

Why won’t they listen to the People?

The Have Your Say mosh pit on the BBC is not happy about the new Speaker. One says, summing up the mood:

So the clear favourite on this site, Anne Widecombe didn’t get a look in. Seems like the old boys club will continue.

Yes, why did MPs not listen to Have Your Say, the authentic considered voice of the people? That wouldn’t lead them astray.

On the efficacy of lobbying

Nate Silver has been trying to show the effect of healthcare industry lobbying on the US health care reform debate. He believes that the lobbyists’ contribution to reelection campaigns have had an effect. Brendan Nyhan disagrees, saying:

What’s so frustrating about Silver’s post, which was (disappointingly) praised by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog, is that there is an extensive literature on this subject by political scientists and economists. Over the last 30+ years, these studies* have typically found minimal effects of campaign contributions on roll call votes in Congress even when scholars use more sophisticated techniques to address the causal inference problems described above (which are widely understood at this point). Given these prior findings and the inherent problems with Silver’s analytical approach, we should be extremely cautious about putting any weight on his conclusions.