The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy (Communication, Society and Politics)

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The Internet and Democratic Citizenship Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. The Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: firstly, exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy and, finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical, proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centres of governance: local, national and transnational. Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously Professor of e-Democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and a senior Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. In recent years he has served as specialist adviser to the House of Commons Information Select Committee inquiry on ICT and public participation in Parliament, as a member of the Puttnam Commission on parliamentary communication with the public and as chair of the Electoral Reform Society’s Independent Commission on Alternative Voting Methods. His publications include Bowling Together (with John Gotze, 2001); Realising Democracy Online: A Civic Commons in Cyberspace (with Jay G. Blumler, 2001); A Tale of Two Houses: The House of Commons, the Big Brother House and the People at Home (2003) and Direct Representation: Towards a Conversational Democracy (2005). He has contributed numerous articles and chapters to academic volumes. Jay G. Blumler is Emeritus Professor of Public Communication at the University of Leeds and Emeritus Professor of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is a leading, internationally recognized figure in political communication, having published numerous books, including Television in Politics: Its Uses and Influence (with Denis McQuail, 1968); The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research (with Elihu Katz, 1974) and The Crisis of Public Communication (with Michael Gurevitch, 1995). He is a past president and Fellow of the International Communications Association. In 2006 Blumler was given a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association.

COMMUNICATION, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Editors W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington Robert M. Entman, The George Washington University Editorial Advisory Board Scott Althaus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Larry M. Bartels, Princeton University Jay G. Blumler, Emeritus, University of Leeds Daniel Dayan, Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Paris Doris A. Graber, University of Illinois at Chicago Regina Lawrence, Portland State University Paolo Mancini, Universita di Perugia Pippa Norris, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Barbara Pfetsch, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fu¨r Sozialforschung Philip Schlesinger, University of Stirling Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Politics and relations among individuals in societies across the world are being transformed by new technologies for targeting individuals and sophisticated methods for shaping personalized messages. The new technologies challenge boundaries of many kinds – between news, information, entertainment and advertising; between media, with the arrival of the World Wide Web and even between nations. Communication, Society and Politics probes the political and social impacts of these new communication systems in national, comparative and global perspective. Titles in the Series: C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy W. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman, eds., Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy Continued after the Index

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship T H E O R Y, P R A C T I C E A N D P O L I C Y

Stephen Coleman

Jay G. Blumler

University of Leeds

University of Leeds

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521817523 © Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007

ISBN-13

978-0-511-53340-2

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-81752-3

hardback

ISBN-13

978-0-521-52078-2

paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

page ix

Introduction: Anxiety and Optimism about Democracy

1

1 Democracy’s Deliberative Deficit

14

2 A Crisis of Public Communication

42

3 From Indirect to Direct Representation

68

4 E-Democracy from Above

90

5 E-Democracy from Below

117

6 Shaping E-Democracy

139

7 Realising the Democratic Potential of the Internet

166

Bibliography Index

199 217

vii

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Institute for Public Policy Research and Citizens Online for originally inviting us to write about our idea of an online civic commons; Michael Gurevitch, Jeff Chester and Lance Bennett for contributing to our thinking about this subject; numerous policy-makers, scholars and online practitioners in several different countries for engaging with us in discussion; and our editors at Cambridge University Press for their patience and assistance. The book is dedicated to Bernadette Coleman, whose encouragement, support and love have been invaluable. Any errors in the text are ours alone. SC and JGB

ix

Introduction: Anxiety and Optimism about Democracy

DIVERGENT ANXIETIES

A

pervasive anxiety characterises liberal democracy in the early twenty-first century. As one leading British politician has put it, ‘The public, and particularly young people, now have less faith than ever in parliamentary democracy. We who constitute the “political class” conduct politics in a way that turns off our voters, readers, listeners and viewers . . . Too many people believe that government is something that is done to them’ (Hain 2003). It is not that democracy as such is out of favour – on the contrary, it has never been so widely adopted as a political model – but that citizens seem to be increasingly disenchanted by and disengaged from the processes and institutions of the democratic state. There is a widespread public feeling that government is remote, insensitive and untouchable; even if one takes the trouble to speak out, organise or respond to consultations, those who hold power are unwilling or unable to listen. According to the 2007 Audit of Political Engagement, conducted by the U.K. Electoral Commission and the Hansard Society, almost 4 out of 10 people disagree with the statement that ‘When people like me get involved in politics, they really can change the way the country is run’ (EC 2007a: 35). Interestingly, no difference in this low level of political efficacy was found between respondents who were political activists and those who did not participate. As Norris has observed, there are now, globally, ‘more critical citizens, who value democracy as an ideal yet who remain dissatisfied with the performance of their political system, and particularly the core institutions of representative government’ (Norris 1999: 269). A shared unease about what has come to be regarded as a ‘crisis of disengagement’ dominates discussion of contemporary politics. Politicians 1

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

make speeches lamenting their disconnection from a public which is deemed to be, at best, otherwise engaged, and, at worst, irresponsibly apathetic. Journalists bemoan the newest generation of citizens who seem to be more enthused by voting in Big Brother than in political elections. Political scientists, who were once content to study who gets what, when and how (Lasswell 1935), are increasingly reflecting upon ‘why Americans hate politics’ (Dionne 1991), ‘the vanishing voter’ (Patterson 2002), the ‘decline of the public’ (Marquand 2004), ‘why we hate politics’ (Hay 2007), ‘the crisis of public communication’ (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995), ‘critical citizens’ (Norris 1999) and ‘disaffected democracies’ (Pharr and Putnam 2000). One might expect this crisis of political confidence to pull people together, to somehow strengthen a public sphere in which democratic innovations are tested and citizens devise new ways of making their presence felt. But upon closer inspection, anxieties about political disengagement have taken two divergent forms. For political insiders, such as politicians, anxiety takes the form of nostalgia: a longing for an idealised lost era of democracy, characterised by civic cohesion, dutiful citizens and clear political choices. When invited to articulate their disappointment about public disengagement from politics, insiders often speak about times past – part real, part imagined – when leaders were highly respected and voters paid close and serious attention to parliamentary debate, party manifestoes and press coverage. Politicians worry about what they see as an uninformed citizenry. They are eager to find ways of informing citizens so that they can play their part in making instrumentally rational and morally dutiful social choices. For politicians, reengaging the public entails a return to neglected norms, perhaps using new tools and technologies to recreate a society in which those elected to govern are trusted by the represented. Citizens’ unease with contemporary democracy tends to take a very different form. When asked to explain why they feel frustrated as democratic citizens, they refer to feelings of being unacknowledged and disrespected. Politics is seen as a relationship which is in disrepair, replete with daily failures of communication and unfulfilled promises. For an increasing number of citizens, being recipients of government, party and mass-media stories about the world is only half the story. They are interested in knowledge-sharing, which involves the upstream flow of experiential accounts, local expertise and common sense, as well 2

Introduction

as the downstream transmission of official information. Rather than seeking to restore trust in government, democratic activists are more concerned about the efficacy of citizens, whose experiences and expertise often seem to be diminished or marginalised. They do not look back to an age of deferential representation, but argue that strong democracy requires energetic and autonomous civic activity, beyond the management of the state and capable of shaping the outcomes of governance. An opening assumption of this book is that any proposed solutions to contemporary democratic ills must start by acknowledging these distinct problematisations. As Blaug has argued, the dilemmas of democracy would be better understood if we were to adopt two models for describing it, incumbent and critical: Incumbent democracy is primarily motivated to preserve and improve existing institutions by maximizing and managing orderly participation. Critical democracy seeks, instead, to resist such management and empower excluded voices in such a way as to directly challenge existing institutions. Incumbent democrats assume that effectiveness is only achieved through institutions, and that participation requires institutionalization in order to be compatible with the central representative structures of the democratic state. Critical democracy upholds a rather different assumption: that effectiveness can arise out of a collective adherence to common concerns. Here, the institutionalization of participation is seen as an attempt to tame radical energy. (Blaug 2002: 107) We share Blaug’s analysis of these two democratic models and outlooks, but take a rather less stark view of their mutual incompatibility. We would argue that for democratic participation to have a meaningful impact upon political outcomes there is a need for inclusive and accountable institutions that can provide a space for consequential interaction between citizens and their elected representatives. Indeed, a key aim of this book is to argue for an institutional innovation that could nurture critical citizenship and radical energy, while at the same time opening up representative governance to a new respect for public discourse and deliberation. Before we can make that argument, we need to be clear about what we understand citizenship to mean and why we regard the Internet as a potential space for the articulation of democratic citizenship. 3

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship BEING CITIZENS

Addressed as consumers in the marketplace, as members of audiences consuming mass-media output and as individual personalities in the sphere of intimate sociability, people have become used to having multiple social identities. The role of being a citizen is one of the more confusing of these identities. To be a citizen is to enter into a promiscuous relationship with strangers within a political community that is not of one’s own making. As citizens, we are not expected to know or understand one another, but to form political attachments that require us to abide by rules and norms of civic coexistence. Citizenship is a fluid and widely contested concept (Marshall 1950; Barbalet 1988; Turner 1990; Roche 1992; Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Miller 1998; Cruikshank 1999; Isin 2002; Sassen 2002; Heater 2004; Schudson 2006). It can be understood in at least three ways. First, there is a legal-judicial conception of citizenship which refers to one’s official membership of a political community (usually a nation-state) and its compulsory laws, regulations and customs. To be a legal-judicial citizen is to possess an appropriate passport or right of residency. According to Brubaker (1992: 21), ‘There is a conceptually clear, legally consequential, and ideologically charged distinction between citizens and foreigners. The state claims to be the state of, and for, a particular bounded citizenry’. In this sense, to be a citizen is to be within rather than without a community; to be subject to its legal duties and socially sanctioned responsibilities, such as paying taxes, obeying the highway code, registering to vote and living in peace with neighbours, as well as being in possession of legally enforceable rights. Second, there is political citizenship, closely related to the legaljudicial conception, but extending beyond its prescriptive and prohibitive terms of normativity. The political citizen is more than just an officially-recognised member of a community, but a potentially active constituent of a body politic, capable of exerting democratic influence upon fellow citizens as well as the political state. This conception of citizenship places great emphasis upon the importance of three kinds of participation: information-gathering, with a view to gaining balanced accounts of political questions from pluralistic sources; deliberation, which, in its most basic form, entails talking with other citizens about political questions in an honest and open-minded way; and active efforts to influence public policies and decisions, which range from putting up posters, voting for a candidate or party, joining a pressure 4

Introduction

group to demonstrating in the streets or breaking unjust laws. In both a normative and empirical sense, democratic legitimacy is dependent upon citizens expressing more than the thin forms of consent usually articulated through legal-judicial procedures. But political citizens do not simply spring into life; they are constituted through complex interactions between their own life experiences, traditions of collective action, structures of opportunity and available discourses of thinking and acting politically. In recent times the project of cultivating political citizens has been buttressed by schemes for civic education, deliberative democracy and local co-governance, all in their own ways intended to democratise the civic relationship. Third, there is affective citizenship which is primarily concerned to mobilise feelings of civic belonging, loyalty and solidarity. It was with a view to cultivating this kind of affective attachment that the Italian nationalist, Massimo D’Azeglio declared, soon after the national unification of Italy, that ‘We have made Italy; we now have to make Italians’. In this sense, citizenship is what Bora et al. (2001) have called ‘an ongoing communicative achievement’. That is to say, it is constituted through a variety of symbolic repertoires, ranging from the banal (flagwaving, singing national anthems, commemorating great historical episodes, the Queen’s Christmas speech) to the profound (commitment to a way of life, political values, constitutional liberties) (Billig 1995). The intangibility of affective citizenship is its strength, insofar as it draws upon energies that flow from the nerve centres of the lifeworld, but a weakness, insofar as it renders the civic outlook vulnerable to exclusivist and xenophobic perspectives that are not easily contestable in rational terms (Honig 2001; Balibar 2002; Bhabha 2004; Silverstone 2005). These are not mutually exclusive definitions of citizenship; on the contrary, all three are instantiated in most historical experiences of citizenship, with different degrees of emphasis depending upon the political model of democracy that gives rise to them. In incumbent democracy, citizenship is conceived as being primarily state-centred. That is to say, citizens are imagined and constituted in terms of their relationship to the state. In legal-judicial terms, they are required to understand their obligations as members of a state-centred community; in political terms, they are encouraged to engage with the state within certain parameters of largely-managed participation; in affective terms, they are subjected to processes of formal socialisation (in schools, churches, through the mass media) designed to promote civic pride in the state and its national narratives. In contrast to this passive and clientalist state-centric notion is 5

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

democratic citizenship which, to put it simply, assumes that the space of governance emanates from the demos rather than constituting it. That is to say, the practice of democratic citizenship by people regarding themselves as a collectivity precedes any notion of a bounded political space to which they belong. As Tassin (1992: 189) puts it, in relation to the putative citizenship of the European Union, instead of being the precondition for a public space, the European community is actually its result: it is ‘a community resting not upon an amalgamation of interests, feelings and wills, but on the contrary upon a politically constituted public space in which the plurality of political initiatives stand face to face’. Democratic citizens differ from state-centred citizens in their rejection of obligatory commitment towards existing institutions, traditions and values. Bennett (2007) contrasts actualising and dutiful citizens, with the former characterised by a diminished sense of obligation to government; a rejection of voting in favour of other more consumerist, communitarian or transnational forms of participation; and a greater sense of connections to peer networks than conventional social movements or parties. In short, democratic citizens are less willing than state-centred citizens to enter already constituted, managed political spaces; their orientation is towards autonomous civic practices (Coleman 2007). This does not mean that each generation of democratic citizens is bound to reinvent its social role, but that they are more likely to contest and reshape the three elements of citizenship that we have outlined than to accept them in an essentialist spirit. Indeed, the early twenty-first century has witnessed a flourishing of pluralistic and reflexive performances of citizenship. Legal-judicial conceptions of state-based membership have been challenged by supranational, cosmopolitan and ethnic civic identities, often operating alongside national allegiances, but sometimes in opposition to them. Political citizenship has taken innovative forms which have tended to escape from the institutional imperatives of state rule, radically juxtaposing official-administrative politics with the sphere of the political, in which mundane encounters with power are experienced and negotiated in everyday life. Affective citizenship has likewise taken a late-modern turn, remixing identities, prosaic experience and cultural norms in ways that allow ‘the unrecognised’ and the ‘practically untellable’ (Lefebre 1991) to be absorbed into the everyday practices of civic life (Miller 1998). Unlike state-centred citizenship, democratic citizenship is not parasitical upon or consistent with the spatial formation of the 6

Introduction

nation-state. As Lefort (2000) has suggested, in contrast to pre-modern and totalitarian regimes in which power is incarnated in the body of the sovereign, in contemporary democracies ‘the locus of power is an empty place’. Within this indeterminate emptiness of democratic space, a tension is played out between two political imperatives: ‘the egalitarian universal imperative embodied in the social (the will of ‘the people’) and the sovereign, institutional imperative embodied in the legal apparatus’ (Newman 2004). In other words, at some times political citizenship is defined in terms of the state’s requirements for order amongst its subjects, and at others it emerges out of the collective values, voices and actions of the people themselves. Incumbent democracy is served by the former; critical democracy by the latter. Contemporary political theorists have observed that political policymaking is increasingly conducted within an institutional void. This does not mean that ‘state-institutions . . . have suddenly vanished or are rendered meaningless. The point is rather that . . . there are important policy problems for which political action either takes place next to or across such orders, thus challenging the norms of the respective participants’ (Hajer 2003: 175). For example, it is now widely acknowledged that policies relating to health care cannot be promoted solely by governments setting funding and practice priorities at an institutional level. The health of a population is determined by a range of other factors, including ‘lifestyle’ choices, environmental conditions, stress levels and household incomes, none of which can be ‘fixed’ by state-driven, top-down policy-making. The only way to arrive at democratic health care policy is to transcend institutional silos by generating debates that cut across established policy areas and seeking to include the widest possible range of social actors. The same applies to most complex contemporary policy-making around such issues as education, care of the elderly, policing and local economies. For such democratising approaches to policy-making to take place next to and across old state boundaries, new spaces of political citizenship are required: ones in which civic energies can coalesce inclusively and productively. Thus far, few democratic societies have been successful in creating such politically vibrant spaces. The fluidity and indeterminacy of cyberspace makes it a suggestive candidate for becoming the kind of empty space or institutional void in which tensions between state-centric and democratic citizenship can be played out. To what extent should we think of the Internet as a potential space for the articulation of civic democracy? 7

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship NEW POLITICAL SPACES

The Internet, which will not qualify much longer for the title of ‘new technology’, has not tended to be thought of as a political space. Most of the hype and speculation surrounding the Internet has focused upon new opportunities for commerce, sociability and study – as well as its more negative uses for criminality, surveillance and offensive content. Governments have initiated policies intended to deliver services and information online in cheaper or more efficient ways than they could have done in the past; representative institutions, such as parliaments and local councils, all now have their web sites; politicians and candidates feel the need to establish a web presence, with a few of them even launching blogs, MySpace pages and videos on YouTube. But fundamental political questions remain to be answered. Has the emergence of the Internet changed the balance of communicative power within modern liberal democracies? Are citizens more able than they were in pre-digital times to question, comment upon, challenge and influence those who govern them? Has the Internet served democratic ends? There has been no shortage of speculative responses to these questions: The new information technologies may, for the first time in the history of industrial societies under liberal regimes, make it possible to recreate the perfect information arena, the agora of Ancient Greece, a meeting place where citizens could go to be fully informed and to participate directly, with no intermediary, in the government of the city, exercising all their political rights unconditionally and without restriction. (European Information Society Forum Report 1999) The Global Information Infrastructure [GII] will not only be a metaphor for a functioning democracy, it will in fact promote the functioning of democracy by greatly enhancing the participation of citizens in decision-making. And it will greatly promote the ability of nations to cooperate with each other. I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create. (Al Gore, speech to the International Telecommunications Union, 21 March 1994) Structurally, the Internet has inverted the few-to-many architecture of the broadcast age, in which a small number of people were able to influence and shape the perceptions and beliefs of entire nations. In the many-to-many environment of the Net, every 8

Introduction

desktop is a printing press, a broadcasting station, and place of assembly. (Rheingold 1999) Whether direct Internet democracy is good or bad is quite beside the point. It is inevitable. It is coming and we had better make our peace with it. We have to better educate ourselves so that we can make good decisions. Restricting the power of the people is no longer a viable option. The Internet made it obsolete. (Morris 1999) Sceptics regard such claims as excessive and deterministic reactions to an overhyped technology. In the name of sober realism, they predict that ‘people will mold the Internet to fit traditional politics’ (Hill and Hughes 1998: 186) and conclude that ‘far from remaking . . . politics, the development of cyberspace, and particularly of the WWW, seems more likely to reinforce the status quo’ (Margolis and Resnick 2000). Some critics go as far as to argue that, rather than invigorating it, the Internet could seriously undermine the health of democracy, by providing access to individuated information environments resulting in group polarisation (Sunstein 2001) and diminishing the rational level of the public sphere by forcing political arguments to become ‘distorted, shrill, and simplistic’ in order to be noticed amongst the vast array of competing online messages (Noam 2002). And at the most dystopian end of the spectrum there are critics who contend that the Internet is producing ‘market instability, political turmoil and civil unrest, increasing rage and violent actions amongst previously passive people, as well as “immoral” behaviour on a gigantic scale’ (Angell 2000). Rather than subscribing to either of these brands of hyperbole, we prefer to think of the Internet as an empty space of power which is both vulnerable to state-centric (and, for that matter, corporate) strategies and open to occupation by citizens who have few other spaces available for them to express themselves in constructive democratic ways.

OUR VIEW

In this book we seek to avoid the teleological trap of assuming that the Internet possesses any deterministic propensities, but that does not mean that no relationship between the Internet and democracy can be advanced. We take the position that the Internet possesses a vulnerable potential to revitalise our flagging political communication 9

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

arrangements by injecting some new and different elements into the relationship between representatives and represented and governments and governed. But we argue that such potential will be squandered without imaginative policy intervention designed to shape and nurture the democratic opportunities provided by the Internet. It is this commitment to policy intervention that saves our argument from the ritual charge in all debates of this kind of technological determinism. We reject the notion of technologies as asocial, neutral artefacts with innate capacities to affect social organisation. We are sympathetic to the social constructivist perspective which regards technologies as explicable in terms of their social origins, the various actors and interests involved in their development and the competing ontologies and epistemologies that surround and define them. Indeed, it is precisely because we take the view that information and communication technologies are constructed, shaped and given meaning by a complex range of social forces that we argue for the importance of subjecting these processes of construction, shaping and sense-making to normatively defined policy. In rooting our assumptions about the democratic potential of the Internet in theoretically-grounded policy choices, we distinguish our position from both essentialist and deterministic accounts of the Internet as an automatic leveller of communicative power and empiricist accounts which downplay political agency and assume that the Internet must become an inevitable victim to political institutionalisation. The arguments developed in this book rest upon three central assumptions, which we develop in detail within the first three chapters. First, we argue that relations between members of the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. People often expect to be heard and heeded on more occasions and matters than the ballot boxes of Polling Day can settle. But this process is sporadic, and its implications for the system of representative democracy are unclear. On the other hand, government is finding it extremely difficult to respond satisfactorily to the many new needs and problems that are continually being thrown up by the pressures of a rapidly changing society. Topdown ways of coping – through established bureaucratic routines, interdepartmental committees, commissioning opinion surveys, and so forth – are simply inadequate. Better ways of tapping people’s 10

Introduction

experiences and felt needs and of feeding them into the making of laws and policy are required. Second, we contend that an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. On some counts this is now worse than even a minimally adequate democracy deserves. But because much of this trend is rooted in media systems and structures, the ensuing problems of civic communication are inherently difficult to improve or reform from within. Third, we suggest that interactive, digital media have a potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy. That potential is vulnerable, however, mainly because an infrastructure for its proper realisation is lacking. With commerce increasingly in the driving seat of Internet development, few of its big players are out to boost citizenship. While various fragmentary and marginal exercises of online consultation, promoting informed deliberation on public policy issues, have been piloted, these have not yet been integrated into the constitutional structures and processes of liberal democracies. With suitable policies and institutional support, some of the emancipatory potential of the new media could be realised and democracy reinvigorated. The historical precedent for our position is the early history of broadcasting. Some commentators regarded radio, and later television, as being inherently civically enriching, observing that it reduced the threshold of access to useful public information. Others took the view that mass broadcasting would inevitably vulgarise civic communication, reducing it to the level of the lowest common denominator. In Britain (and Europe generally) the view was taken that a degree of public regulation and institution-building was needed if the new medium was to play a civic role at all well. Out of this instinct came the BBC. In the United States the public-service instinct was resisted, and the subsequent broadcasting ecology has been very different. The BBC as an institution, and public-service broadcasting as an ethos, were not inevitable products of the new medium of broadcasting. They were contingent-constructed policy interventions based upon theoretical assumptions about the social significance of mass broadcasting. In the early twenty-first century we are once again living through a period of definition for the communications industry and its influence on society at large. While the contemporary communication environment does not call for a replication of the institutional model of a vertically organised, monolithic, national public broadcaster, it is likely to be shaped by purposeful or default policy decisions far more than by 11

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

any autonomous tendency of the Internet to democratise everything around it. Nonetheless, potentially democratising characteristics of the Internet can be identified, with the strong proviso that these are always socially and politically vulnerable:
Unlike broadcasting, which has provoked long-running debates about how far, when, and over what programmes its audiences may be regarded as ‘active’ or ‘passive’ (cf. Katz 1996 vs. Kubey 1996), the Internet is unquestionably a medium of predominantly active users. Typically, one decides which web site to visit, and then, through a sequence of follow-up decisions, one may click on other pages or pursue other links of interest, ponder the material received and possibly even talk about it with others. Admittedly, the extent and depth of such activity should not be exaggerated or idealised. Empirical studies of web site pages report far more exposure to main than subsequent pages (Dutton, Elberse and Hale 1999). But if the Internet tends to encourage a more active disposition to communications than the mainstream media, then some of this should transfer over to people’s reception through it of news, public affairs and politics.
The Internet’s discursive role could also diverge from that of older media. Unlike broadcasting, which works within tight time limits and essentially shows its audiences other people discussing political issues, over the Internet it is possible to involve large numbers of users themselves in a more full expression and exchange of experiences and opinions on a given topic. It can be a medium for engaging more widely in, and not just presenting and following, civic dialogue.
The Internet provides relatively inexpensive public access to large stores of retrievable data that may be tapped into by users, at various levels and depths, in line with their particular informational needs. By making it easier for individuals to find and follow what concerns them personally, and by lowering the cost of obtaining information, the influence of social status on political involvement may be reduced. Citizens and groups with few resources can undertake acts of communication and monitoring that previously were the domain mainly of resource-rich organisations and individuals (Bimber 2000).
The Internet facilitates lateral, peer-to-peer and many-to-many interactive exchange, enabling ‘a greater symmetry of communicative power than [the] one-way communication’ flows of the press and broadcasting (Schultz 2000). At its best, people are able to discuss issues over a period of hours, days, weeks or months in an 12

Introduction

asynchronous fashion, allowing them time for reflective debate and the space to develop evidence and argumentation; participation can be open to all, regardless of geographical spread; online discussion is conducted in language closer to ordinary people than the elite world of broadcasting; and participants in online discussion can encounter new ideas and sources of information and new ways of thinking about issues. The relevance of these unique, but vulnerable potentialities of the Internet to the competing models of democracy that we have outlined in this introduction are matters for theoretical, empirical and policy analysis. Our aim in this book is to explore the Internet-democracy relationship from all three of these perspectives. In this, we think that our approach differs from previous studies which have sought to understand the relationship through theory, observation or prescription, without seeking an overarching conceptualisation that embraces all three. Hence the structure of this book: the first three chapters are devoted to identifying the key theoretical themes which give meaning to the contemporary notion of e-democracy; the two chapters that follow provide empirical analysis of two kinds of practical e-democracy; and the final two chapters assess policy recommendations that have been made thus far, and set out our own prescription for a benign relationship between the Internet and democracy.

13

C H A P T E R 1

Democracy’s Deliberative Deficit

The public will not support decisions unless they feel that they have been properly consulted and involved in the making of them. (Gordon Brown in an interview with Andrew Marr, BBC1, 13 May 2007) People with little or no power are made to believe that there is no point in raising their voices, as it will make no difference. That they will not be listened to by those who have power and control. This habit becomes so strong that some people almost forget that they have opinions of their own, and so they just endure the hardships that they suffer. (Cathy McCormack, quoted in the report of the U.K. Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power 2000: 5)

N

ever before in history have there been so many opportunities to access, comment upon and challenge governing authorities. But never before, at least in democratic history, has the public felt so frustrated and disappointed about its lack of ability to make any difference to the policies and decisions of government. In surveys, focus groups and interviews, citizens repeatedly complain of feeling left out, unheard and disrespected; mere spectators upon a political process that is rapidly losing their trust. Partly in response to this unease, a range of innovative exercises in participatory democracy has emerged in recent years. The U.K. Parliament’s Public Administration Committee, after an extensive inquiry into innovations in methods of public participation, concluded 14

D e m o c r a c y’ s D e l i b e r a t i v e D e f i c i t

that ‘the period since the middle 1990s has seen an explosion of interest in involving the public more frequently, more extensively, and in much more diverse ways in the conduct of decision-making within the public services’ (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee 2001a: para.75). Although there has been inevitable competition between proponents of particular participatory techniques and formats, the empirical evidence suggests that different approaches are suitable for different situations. Rather than seeking to identify one ideal setting for public deliberation – online, offline; recruited, self-selected; consensual, aggregative – there is a need for a broad and critical understanding of the potential opportunities and limitations of diverse methods. As shown in table 1, Goss (1999) has outlined a typology of ways of including the public in policy and decision-making, ranging from low levels of involvement, such as information provision and surveys, to sophisticated deliberative exercises. The most exciting and innovative participatory exercises have in common an aspiration to promote and utilise public discussion as a means of engendering the collective production of policy decisions worthy of public consent. Democratic theorists have taken to heart Dewey’s contention that for democracy to work well ‘the essential need . . . is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion’ (Dewey 1927: 86). Public talk has been accorded a central position within recent models of participatory and deliberative democracy. ARGUMENTS FOR DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION

At a most basic level of definition, democracy can be regarded as having five essential characteristics:
Regular, free and fair elections, involving competition between more than one party
The rule of law, under which all citizens are subject to a common jurisdiction
Freedom to speak, assemble and publish, and for opposition to the government of the day to organise without fear of intimidation.
Government accountability to the public and responsiveness to public concerns
The existence of a civil society sector which is free from control by either the state or the market 15

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Table 1. Typology of public participation Giving information

Consultation

Exploring/ innovating/ visioning

Judging/ deciding together

Delegating/ supporting/ decisionmaking

Sign-posting

Surveys

Consultative workshops

Deliberative polls

Neighbourhood committees

Leaflets/newsletters/ reports

Focus groups

Visioning workshops

Citizens’ juries

Town/estate plans

Community profiles

Interactive community profiles

Simulation/ open-space events

Negotiation workshops

Tenant management organisations

Feedback on surveys and consultation Annual performance reports

Public meetings

Support/advice

Panels

Video/Internet communication

Video boxes

Community issue groups Community workshops Planning for Consensus real conferences community discovery Use of theatre, arts/ media

Community development trust Partnerships/ contracts with communities Referendums/ tele-voting

Source: Goss (1999: 23).

The absence of all or any of these characteristics seriously undermines the claim of a state to be democratic. But even where such characteristics exist, one can identify degrees and levels of democratic practice, ranging from elite-dominated democracies in which citizens have only limited and occasional controls and checks on power to more inclusive democracies in which there is an emphasis upon civic republican duties of participation and the value of arriving at decisions by public deliberation. There are two ways of thinking about the public’s preferences. Some liberal democrats argue that society consists of fixed and competing interests and preferences and that it is the role of institutions of governance to provide optimal opportunities for the strategic pursuit of interest-fulfilment by individual actors and collectivities. Deliberative theorists reject this assumption in two respects. First, they argue that interests and preferences are not inherently invariant 16

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and can be transformed as a result of deliberative engagement. Second, they regard the function of democratic institutions as being to facilitate the collective resolution of apparent interest incompatibilities through a process of open, noncoercive deliberative talk. There is a lack of consensus amongst liberal political theorists about how important it is to have a deliberating public, as opposed to elected representatives who deliberate on the public’s behalf, but many would agree with the following three propositions:
In a democracy competing arguments about policy need to be debated fairly and with a good chance of the best decisions being reached.
Democratic debate should not be wholly confined to political elites, but should involve the public, both via such mediating processes as the press, television, radio, the Internet and opinion polling and by more direct participation in parties, pressure groups, public meetings, petitions and contact with representatives.
The best and most democratically legitimate policies and decisions are ones which are understood and accepted by the public, especially those affected by them – and the most likely way to achieve this end is by enabling the public to take some ownership of such policies and decisions. This is where deliberative democrats come in. They argue that open discussion of matters affecting the public, locally, nationally and globally, exposes people to other views, enables them to evaluate the best arguments and results in the kind of preference changes that characterise a truly democratic culture. Deliberative democrats claim that policy formation and decision-making can benefit from public deliberation because the public can contribute information and knowledge from their store of diverse, collective experience and expertise which might otherwise remain private and unutilised; because deliberating citizens, employing fair, equal and inclusive rules of discourse, are more likely to reach just policy conclusions than elites, experts or cliques; and because public input legitimises democratic decisions. In addition to these instrumental and utilitarian arguments for public deliberation, there are compelling reasons for concluding that deliberation has an inherently democratising effect upon the public itself: that by exercising public reason, rather than merely bargaining and voting, the public will become less atomised and more civic. Specifically, democratic theorists have been optimistic about the effects of deliberation upon public morality and rationality. 17

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Bohman’s definition of deliberation as ‘a dialogical process of exchanging reasons for the purpose of resolving problematic situations that cannot be settled without interpersonal coordination and cooperation’ (Bohman 1996: 27) usefully highlights the importance attached by deliberative theorists to the need for communicative action to be based upon an acknowledgement of social interdependence and a search for mutual understanding. The moralising potential of public deliberation moved John Stuart Mill to argue that ‘it is by political discussion . . . that one whose daily occupations concentrate his interests in a small circle round himself, learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens, and becomes consciously a member of a great community’ (1859/1975: 38). If citizens are able to measure their own preferences and arguments against other strong preferences and arguments, they are less likely to be purely selfinterested in their political judgments. For example, in considering the future of welfare services, a discussion involving both highearning taxpayers and welfare claimants is more likely to result in exposure to new ideas and morally sensitive conclusions than a discussion involving members of just one of those groups. The ‘bounded rationality’ of strategic political discourse based upon rigid and exclusive interests can be positively undermined by a more deliberative approach to conceiving and resolving social problems. The precise principles of an ideal deliberative process have been the subject of much theoretical debate. Habermas (1996) sets out four conditions that are essential for democratic deliberation to occur:
Each person must be able to express their own ideas openly and criticise others’ ideas.
The concepts of force and power associated with social status must be eliminated.
Arguments based primarily on appeal to tradition or dogma must be exposed.
Truth is to be sought by seeking a consensus. We shall have more to say later in this chapter about the exacting demands set by Habermasian and other versions of deliberative democracy. Regardless of the realistic applicability of such demands to complex, pluralist, mass societies, few would disagree that the political cultures of most democracies, including the advanced liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America, provide remarkably few channels for such principles to be implemented, at least in nonexperimental 18

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situations. The traditional homes of policy deliberation, such as parliaments, congresses and national assemblies, often appear to be conspicuously remote from the public and disconnected from the chatter of less official public discourse. As Sennett (1977) has observed, ‘were modern architects asked to design spaces that better promote democracy, they would lay down their pens; there is no modern design equivalent to the ancient assembly’. The absence of places and spaces for public talk on matters of common interest is related, both as cause and effect, to the atrophy of civic engagement. ARGUMENTS AGAINST DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION

Objections to democratic deliberation take four main forms. First, there are arguments about the impossibility of vast, physically and temporally dispersed groups of people being able to participate in anything resembling a collective conversation. If deliberation requires everyone speaking to and hearing from everyone else, are there not natural barriers to that happening? Second, there are questions about the intellectual competence of the public to engage in deliberative reflection about the diverse issues which affect a complex social order. Can ‘ordinary’ people cope with the demands of rational debate, or might it be better to leave deliberation to experts or elected representatives? Third, many political scientists would argue that such are the difficulties of arriving at rationally calculated outcomes from deliberative discussion that it is better to surrender to the mysteries of political aggregation than to imagine that citizens can talk their way to reasonable policy conclusions. Fourth, and somewhat differently from the earlier objections, there are democratic theorists who argue that the rhetoric of deliberative democracy is a thin disguise for a range of culturally hegemonic practices which tend to keep the powerful and articulate on top and everyone else in their place. It is necessary to engage with these formidable arguments if we are to go any further in considering public deliberation as a remedy for democracy’s current malaise. Ba r r i er s of Di s t a n c e , T i m e a n d S cal e

Democracy has not always been conceived in the context of mass societies comprising millions of people. Fifth-century Athenian democracy operated within a relatively small geographical area, with a population of between 20,000 and 40,000 citizens. As an archetypal democracy, Athens had some important flaws: most of the population, 19

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who were women, slaves or resident aliens, was excluded from the sovereign citizenry; most citizens never spoke in either the Council or the Assembly; and citizens had to be paid to attend Assembly meetings (Ober 1989). Even this small-scale democracy was beset by the problem that not everyone could be in one place at the same time – and that when thousands were gathered in one place, the voices of some counted more than those of others. These fundamental problems of democratic contiguity and calibration must be addressed if participatory democracy is to be more than a rhetorical aspiration. D I S T A N C E Representative institutions emerged in an epoch characterised by what Blainey (1968) has called ‘the tyranny of distance’. Travelling for many miles on horseback, often on dangerous roads, leaving behind politically fractious or fragile situations, representatives were often happy if parliamentary sessions were brief and infrequent. As Pasquet notes regarding Edward I’s reign, ‘suit of court was then considered a duty and not a right’ (1925: 4). Distance from the political centre has disadvantaged certain areas and regions, necessitating redressing constitutional arrangements based upon devolution and subsidiarity. Even where political powers are decentralised, strong pressures exist for diligent and ambitious politicians to travel to the centre in order to seek their share from federal budgets or to pursue their careers in the most auspicious limelight. T I M E Democracy is faced with two fundamental problems of time. The first is that people do not share the same experience of time. Differing time zones constrain long-distance synchronous debate. Simultaneous, ‘live’ political events are almost impossible to manage at a global level, especially for the majority of people whose limited resources confine them to a mainly localised existence. Despite the existence of satellites, global news organisations and the Internet, the capacity to overcome localised time zones and assume a disembodied relationship to power is unequally distributed. As Bauman has observed: People who move and act faster, who come nearest to the momentariness of movement, are now the people who rule. And it is the people who cannot move as quickly, and more conspicuously yet the category of people who cannot at will leave their place at all, who are ruled. Domination consists in one’s own capacity to escape, to disengage, to ‘be elsewhere’, and the right to decide the speed at which all that is done – while simultaneously stripping the people on the dominated side of their ability to arrest or constrain their moves or slow them down. (Bauman 2000: 119–20) 20

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Second, there are perennial pressures of temporal economics. People have many competitive demands upon their time and must allocate this precious resource as efficiently as they can manage. Choosing to debate public policy is not a serious option for many people, in comparison with earning a living, looking after children, pursuing hobbies, seeking entertainment and simply keeping abreast of the latest news. Political deliberation requires time to think, read and digest, ideally drawing upon information from many sources and perspectives. Simply finding time to read the Sunday supplements is more than many citizens are able to do. Ackerman and Fishkin (2004) have playfully suggested the establishment of an annual Deliberation Day, on which citizens would be effectively subsidised to take time off work to think about politics. But considering that millions of people do not even vote in a general election every four or five years, there are few grounds for optimism about the likelihood of this working. So formulating policy and making decisions becomes increasingly professionalised, centred upon expert bureaucracies and self-perpetuating political elites. Free time is not equally distributed. Apart from the politically committed, who sacrifice other gains to make time to argue their point, time to discuss politics is more available to the affluent, better educated or retired than to those who are poorer, less able to make sense of the debate, working hard to make ends meet or looking for work. Might public deliberation, therefore, further benefit the reasonably well-off, who have more leisure time at their disposal, and further disadvantage the worst-off? S C A L E Even if citizens can be present in the same place (or space) at the same time (or asynchronously), can they meaningfully deliberate, given the normative requirement for all to be able to speak and be heard and be civilised in turn-taking? In the British House of Commons, where 646 members represent approximately 70,000 constituents each, there is only enough seating for approximately half of the elected representatives. On the rare occasions when most of the MPs attend it is mainly to file through the voting lobby rather than to sit down and enter into anything resembling policy deliberation. A gathering of all or most citizens, even from a single constituency, let alone an entire nation, would be almost impossible to organise. Not only would it be difficult to find a space large enough for such an assembly, but the event would more than likely collapse under the weight of procedural problems. For example, in a gathering of tens of thousands of people – not to mention millions – would everyone be allowed to speak? Who would decide who could or could not have their say, and who could make supplementary points or 21

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raise new questions? At what point would votes be taken, and would everyone be allowed to vote, even if they were not present for all of the debate? How long would such meetings last? How would a record of the event be agreed and verified? As Page observes: If . . . a nation of 250 million citizens devoted twenty-four hours to fully equal collective discussion of some political issue, each citizen would get less than .0004 – less than four ten-thousandths – of one second to talk. If each citizen insisted, instead, upon a rather modest two minutes of speaking time, the discussion would take five hundred million minutes: that is, 347,222 days, or 950 years. Extreme boredom and impatience would result. (Page 1996: 4) It is hardly surprising that the history of mass meetings has tended to involve speeches from the platform to a receiving audience, or voting by hand without collective debate. Even pre-Bolshevik Russian soviets, in what were considered to be innovative exercises in public decisionmaking, delegated key decision-making to small committees – that before too long were dominated and manipulated by a political elite. This is consistent with Michels’s (1969) ‘iron law of oligarchy’ – that ‘organisation on a large scale reduces the responsibility of the persons elected to office to any of their electors’. Th e L imits of Public C o m p e t e n c e

Lippmann’s (1922) vivid image of the citizen as ‘a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake’ cuts to the root of the assumption that the public lacks the cognitive competence to engage with sophisticated questions of policy. Although it is in the interest of democracy to make issues more transparent and accessible – a role performed for better or worse largely by the media – the growth of globalisation has resulted in a set of policy problems that are more opaque, fragmented and expert-driven than ever. It is hardly an insult to the intelligence of average citizens to say that they would be at a loss to make sense of policy debates relating to such issues as global interest rate fluctuations, pharmaceutical regulation or the principles of international competition law. Evidence from research suggests that there are ‘large gaps in even the most elemental kinds of political information among the American electorate’. Although Americans would seem to be significantly less informed than most Europeans, and ‘German and Italians who have 22

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never attended college are more knowledgeable about world events than Americans who have’, it is still the case that most citizens in most countries know very little about political structures, institutions or policy issues that do not directly impinge upon their daily lives (Dimock and Popkin 1999: 47, 82). Indeed, many nonvoters in elections state lack of adequate knowledge as their main reason for not feeling able to cast a vote (Hansard Society 2001). Critics of deliberative democracy may well ask how citizens who do not know enough to even choose a government can be expected to deliberate about complex policy options. Consequently, democratic theorists have tended to expect elected representatives to provide leadership rather than merely follow every whim and nuance of public opinion. Mandated by the electorate to pursue a declared programme, based upon explicit values, why should representatives call upon those who elected them to deliberate upon matters of policy? In electing representatives, voters are placing their trust in their personal competence and judgment. Citizens are free to contact their representatives with appeals for support for specific interests and pollsters may try periodically to capture the public mood, but ultimately it is for representatives to decide what is in the best interest of those they represent. Burke famously refused to sacrifice his independent political judgments to the will of those he represented, arguing that ‘authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience – these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution’ (Burke 1871: 446–7). Two later political theorists reinforced the Burkean thesis. Lippmann asserted that ‘We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally’ (1922: 37). Schumpeter contended that ‘The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1976: 269). According to these highly influential thinkers, the climactic point of civic power occurs at the ballot box, before which citizens must deliberate upon the choices on offer; after that, deliberative power is transferred to the elected. From that perspective, excessive use of public 23

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polling, consultation or single-issue referendums could be regarded as an abdication of responsibility by representatives to deliberate on the public’s behalf. Th e I nevitabi lity of A g gr e g at i o n a n d Ra t i o n a l C h o ic e

Whereas Lippmannesque and Schumpeterian political theorists are sceptical about the public’s capacity to cope with political decisionmaking, social choice theorists such as Arrow and Riker go further, arguing that the very nature of opinion structuration and preference aggregation makes it futile and populist to claim that any democratic vote reflects the public’s will. Social choice theory is based upon five assumptions:
Political preferences are rigidly invariant.
Political actors (individuals and groups) employ strategic action to pursue their own preferences in competition against others.
The function of voting is to aggregate preferences so that those supported by the most people win.
All mechanisms of aggregation are prone to manipulation by actors seeking their own preferred outcomes. Different voting mechanisms will produce different outcomes, on the basis of the same spread of individual preferences, depending on how options are ordered and calculated.
Expressions of ‘the public will’ cannot emerge independently of aggregating mechanisms that are bound to distort most people’s intentions in supporting particular preferences. In short, social choice presents an intractable problem for democracy, resulting from the innate logic of voting mechanisms rather than the behavioural limitations of voters. For most citizens, the highly complex permutations of social choice logic raise the costs of being politically informed to too high a level. According to Downs, who sought to explain political behaviour in economic terms, ‘In general, it is irrational to be politically well informed because the low returns from data simply do not justify their cost in time and other scarce resources. Therefore many voters do not bother to discover their true views before voting, and most citizens are not well enough informed to influence directly the formulation of those policies that affect them’ (1957: 259). 24

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The logic of social choice (and its close relative, rational choice) poses some very gloomy questions for deliberative democrats. Why should anyone take the time to become politically informed when it is unlikely that the popular will is going to be reflected in voting outcomes? In the strategic model of politics, where the aim is to pursue one set of preferences at the expense of others, there is a motive to dissemble in order to persuade; why should advocates of deliberation expect it to be free from such dishonestly persuasive talk? Given that deliberation is rarely proposed as an alternative to voting, but rather as a way of making it more informed, what is the point of having transparency at the level of communicative interaction when there is systemic obfuscation at the level of aggregating collective choices? H e g e m o n y a n d D i f f er e n c e

The objections considered so far imply that policy deliberation should remain a matter for the political elite. There are other critics, coming from a quite different perspective, who argue against public deliberation because it is an elitist exercise, serving to replicate and reinforce hegemonic cultural values in the name of democracy. Deliberation is regarded by such critics as an essentially rationalist project which is insensitive to the differences of background, language and perspective of marginalised social groups. Sanders argues that ‘Appeals to deliberation . . . have often been fraught with connotations of rationality, reserve, cautiousness, quietude, community, selflessness and universalism; connotations which in fact probably undermine deliberation’s democratic claims’ (1996: 348). From the perspective of ‘difference’ democrats, whose thinking derives mainly from feminist and cultural pluralist critiques of the existing political order, the discourse of deliberation is controlling and constraining. As Young argues: The speech culture of white, middle-class men tends to be more controlled, without significant gesture and expression of emotion. The speech culture of women and racial minorities, on the other hand, tends to be more excited and embodied, more valuing the expression of emotion, the use of figurative language, modulation in tone of voice and wide gesture. (2000: 123–4) In order to learn from ‘the social perspectives of people positioned differently in structures of power, resource allocation or normative hegemony’ (126), Young argues for what she calls ‘communicative democracy’ which would embrace other modes of communication 25

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than rational argumentation. Young has in mind three alternative ways of enabling the public to articulate its views and feelings: rhetoric, greeting and storytelling, each of which allows room for emotional, testimonial and vernacular forms of discourse that are free from the constraints of rationality. Young, and other critics of the hegemonic practices of deliberative democracy do not dismiss the democratic function of political talk, but they cast doubt upon the demanding – sometimes constraining – conception of deliberative talk as a hallowed, hyper-rationalistic activity. Mouffe, in a radical critique of deliberative democracy, argues that it is based upon a misplaced ‘belief in the possibility of a universal rational consensus’ that cannot be achieved and is not good for democratic politics.. For Mouffe, ‘Instead of trying to design the institutions which, through supposedly ‘impartial’ procedures, would reconcile all conflicting interests and values, the task for democratic theorists and politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted’ (Mouffe 2005: 3). Mouffe probably has in mind here deliberative democrats like John Elster, who, in a somewhat utopian vein, has contended that as a result of policy deliberation ‘there would not be any need for an aggregating mechanism, since a rational discussion would tend to produce unanimous preferences’ (Elster 1997: 112). The implication that wellconducted talk can transcend conflicts of interest or value seems like a recipe for depoliticised politics. Idealised constructions of discursive process may be forceful and compelling in making normative claims for deliberation as a civilising approach to political debate, but they fail to give appropriate attention to the structural inequalities and institutional hierarchies which have traditionally constrained democratic processes and outcomes. Mouffe’s call for the pursuit of agonistic politics is helpful in rescuing deliberative theory from an apolitical indifference to difference and an unhistorical belief in consensus as a form of hegemonic closure. BRINGING DELIBERATION DOWN TO EARTH

Though critical of some of the more excessive claims and constraining demands of deliberative democracy, we are convinced by the strong arguments in favour of embedding deliberative exercises within trusted democratic institutions and processes. We favour a more deliberative democracy, without being committed to the normative and teleological 26

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case for Deliberative Democracy as a political end in itself. Our arguments in response to the objections discussed above are therefore more grounded and pragmatic than might be expected from fully committed deliberative democrats. In seeking to bring deliberation down to earth, we wish to defend four main positions. First, that hitherto intractable barriers to communicative co-presence can now be transcended with the support of new media. Second, that effective deliberation in the policy sphere needs to be carefully cultivated by developing and utilising techniques designed to foster inclusive, collaborative public communication. Third, that deliberation offers the one practicable escape route from the dilemmas of social choice theory. Fourth, that deliberation can be democratically inclusive only if its procedures and style reflect and encourage cultural diversity, and if its political norms acknowledge the intractable realities of interest, difference and conflict. Ov e r c o m i n g T i m e , S pace and S c a l e

A characteristic of modernity has been the separation of time and space through processes of mediation (Giddens 1984). Castells’ (1996) notions of ‘timeless space’ and ‘the space of flows’ helpfully describe what it means to live in a world where time is compressed and desequenced and simultaneous social practices can be organised without geographical contiguity. New information and communication technologies have facilitated the growth of relationships of mediated co-presence, leading to shrinkage of social space and the collapse of traditional constraints of distance. Virtual co-presence transcends the problem of proximity by digitally simulating the presence of physically distant actors so as to make them instantly ‘accessible, available and subject to one another’ (Goffman 1963). In the age of the Internet, it is increasingly the case that virtual social space supplants the sovereignty of place and asynchronous message storage reduces coordination problems created by temporal dissonance. This is not to say that physical togetherness, in space and time, are not preferable or even necessary for certain kinds of social interaction. But mass, political discussion is probably not one of those social interactions that require embodied, synchronous presence, for it can just as well be conducted within a virtually constructed social space. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that, in veiling social cues, the disembodied nature of online interaction benefits some social groups that have traditionally been most silent, ignored or disrespected within 27

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the public sphere (Schneider 1996; Yates 1997; Stromer-Galley 2002; Bowker and Tuffin 2002, 2003; Herring 2003). But even within the context of virtual co-presence, problems of scale still persist. How can vast numbers of people engage in collective talk without the voices of individuals being drowned out by the noise of the crowd? One solution to this problem is to invite representative groups to deliberate on issues as proxies for the public as a whole. (Fishkin’s [1997] deliberative polls, discussed later in this chapter, are organised around this principle.) Another option would be to have large numbers of small-group discussions, with summaries from each feeding into a meta-account of public deliberation. A more radical solution is offered by scholars working in the field of discourse architecture and conversation-mapping. By plotting the semantic and pragmatic associations between terms, they aim to provide meaningful graphical representations of large-scale discussions, so that the process of accessing and making collective sense of the evolving views of vast numbers of people need not involve reading every word of text produced (Sack 2002; Buckingham-Shum 2003; Viegas and Smith 2004; Verheij 2005; Renton and Macintosh 2007). The scope of the Internet to reduce spatial and temporal barriers by establishing arenas of virtual co-presence goes some way towards confuting the claims of those who dismiss the possibility of the public’s capacity to deliberate on its own and for itself. By making it easier for citizens to connect with one another, and those who represent them, time and distance are diminished as obstacles to democratic communication. Pr o d u c i n g Inf ormed Delib eration

Turning from obstacles of scale to those of public competence, how far might the Internet facilitate the necessary environmental conditions and pedagogical resources to support informed public deliberation? Intelligent public deliberation is unlikely to occur spontaneously. Just as aggregative processes, such as elections, require a range of tools and methods for managing effective structuration, successful deliberation calls for well-designed and carefully evaluated techniques of communicative collaboration. Although online deliberation faces its own specific problems, its designers can draw upon a number of well-tested examples from offline communication. The most common example of a managed deliberative situation is the jury room. Jurors are not selected because they possess deliberative skills. 28

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On the contrary, the strength of juries is their random composition and ‘common-sense’ approach to decision-making. Jury deliberation presents us with an interesting case study of how the public actually deliberates, often in relation to deeply complex issues. Since the thirteenth century, when trial by jury began to become more common than trial by ordeal, random members of the public have been thrown together to hear cases in courts. Early jurors were occasionally condemned to prison for bringing ‘wrong’ verdicts in the view of judges, but by the later Middle Ages the notion of the independent jury became a principle of justice. Even so, not all judges or legal experts have respected the competence of jurors, and there has been an ongoing debate about the extent to which lay people, with no legal training, can provide a useful contribution to public justice. For example, Oppenheimer argued that: We commonly strive to assemble twelve persons colossally ignorant of all practical matters, fill their vacuous heads with law which they cannot comprehend, obfuscate their seldom intellects with testimony which they are incompetent to analyze or unable to remember, permit partisan lawyers to bewilder them with their meaningless sophistry, then lock them up until the most obstinate of their number coerce the others into submission or drive them into open revolt. (1937: 142) Herbert Spencer referred to juries as ‘a group of twelve men of average ignorance’, while Dean Griswold (1963: 506) of the Harvard Law School asks, ‘Why should anyone think that twelve persons brought in from the street, selected in various ways, for their lack of general ability, should have any special capacity for deciding controversies between persons’? Given these reservations by experts, the surprising evidence from jury trials has been that of general agreement about verdicts between judges and juries. Extensive U.S. and U.K. studies, in which judges were asked to produce separate verdicts from juries, found that in most cases both reached the same conclusion (Kalven 1964; Kalven and Zeisel 1971; McCabe and Purves 1972). Other researchers have created simulated jury trials, in which jury deliberations can be observed, recorded and analysed with a view to assessing their deliberative features. Reviewing these, Baldwin and McConville (1979: 14) concluded that ‘the overwhelming weight of this body of evidence points strongly towards the jury being a reliable and competent fact-finding body. The simulated juries on the whole, it seems, discuss cases conscientiously, 29

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stick fairly doggedly to the evidence as presented in court, and decide individual cases according to their merits’. Other well-tested deliberative exercises are more experimental in design, but have some important lessons to offer about ways of generating useful discussion. We shall consider three such techniques: citizens’ juries, consensus conferences and deliberative polls. C I T I Z E N S ’ J U R I E S Citizens’ juries have been established in recent years by a number of local authorities, government agencies and NGOs (nongovernment organisations) as a way of enabling members of the public to think through policy issues with the benefit of balanced information, expert advice and an opportunity to question witnesses. In the United States the Jefferson Center has been running citizens’ juries on a range of policy issues since the mid-1970s. These have been intended to provide independent scrutiny of the policy process, but have not been directly connected to the process of government decision-making (Crosby 1999). In Germany, since 1970 there has been experience of organising Plannungszellen (planning cells) comprising groups of 25 randomly selected people who are released from work for up to a week to hear evidence and make recommendations on matters of planning or policy. Participants are given lectures and taken on field trips and then, together with an independent facilitator, invited to draft a set of recommendations which are passed to the relevant decision-making body (Garbe 1986). British citizens’ juries have been smaller in size than German or U.S. ones, with 12 to 16 members of the public selected to participate. Like courtroom juries, they present a test case of lay deliberation upon complex issues that are usually the province of the political elite (Smith and Wales 2000; White, Lewis and Elam 1999; Coote and Lenaghan 1997). Evidence from several citizens’ juries suggests that participants are likely to change their minds once exposed to new arguments (Stewart, Kendall and Coote 1994) and to become more civically active after having participated (Renn, Webler and Widemann 1995). But, as Smith and Wales (2000: 61) argue, the sustainability of such effects depends upon participants’ belief ‘that their deliberations will be taken seriously’. C O N S E N S U S C O N F E R E N C E S Consensus conferences are in many respects similar to citizens’ juries. They were developed by the Danish Board of Technology, which has used them to consider issues ranging from air pollution to gene therapy. In Denmark they have had a direct effect upon parliamentary decisions and have since been used in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and France. A sociodemographically representative citizens’ panel is 30

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recruited, comprising between 10 and 20 people who have had no prior involvement with the issue they are asked to consider. Panel members are given information packs on the subject of the conference, prepared by an independent advisory group, and they spend two weekends preparing for the conference by learning to work together and think through the key questions to be addressed and the witnesses they would like to question. The autonomy of the panel is crucial to this method. With the support of an independent facilitator, they set their own agenda and frame their own questions. At the conference itself, participants question their chosen witnesses and discuss their findings at length, with a view to producing an agreed-upon statement which they then present to a press conference at the conclusion of the event. The aim of this process is to reach a consensus rather than explore political disagreements. The extent to which consensus is sustained after the formal exercise is over is unclear. D E L I B E R A T I V E P O L L S Deliberative polling, as developed by Fishkin, provides a sophisticated method of encouraging informed public deliberation on issues where the public is under-informed. Deliberative polls are counterfactual events, designed to discover what the public would think about complex issues if it were informed by balanced information. Fishkin and Luskin, who are proponents of deliberative polling, argue that: Expertise helps with some questions but not others. Although experts may possibly reach some soft consensus about what policies serve what values, they can never authoritatively say what values or therefore what policies to pursue. For that, as democrats, we should prefer the public’s policy preferences, based on its values – or, better yet, given its ignorance, the policy preferences it would have if everyone had the chance to inform him or herself, acquiring something like expert knowledge of given policies’ implications for given values, and to weigh competing arguments and tradeoffs. (quoted in McCombs and Reynolds 1999: 6) Participants in deliberative polls are selected as a random, representative sample of the population and are then given the opportunity and incentive to behave like ideal citizens. The process begins with an initial in-depth face-to-face survey with each of the 500-odd participants to find out their views on a range of questions relating to a specific policy theme, such as crime, the future of the monarchy or foreign policy. They are then invited to spend a weekend deliberating upon the 31

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policy theme. Participants are encouraged to acquire new information and to question a range of expert witnesses, to share their views in small discussion groups, to listen to the views of others and to be open to changing their original positions. In such a situation, instead of being one voice in millions, participants are one in a few hundred; instead of relying on sound bites to obtain their information, they have access to nonpartisan briefing papers and can listen to and cross-examine policy experts and politicians; instead of passively reading, watching or listening to the media in isolation, they share their thoughts, visions and concerns in group deliberations. After the weekend of deliberation, the participants are polled again to see whether they have changed any of their opinions as a result of the deliberative process. Fishkin and Luskin claim that there have been both net and gross changes of opinion amongst participants in deliberative polls, indicating that exposure to information and argument results in individual and overall preference shifts (McCombs and Reynolds 1999: 25). All of the methods described above depend for their success upon the construction of appropriate environments for effective deliberation to take place. A key question for our research is whether online communication environments are particularly conducive to the kind of deliberative outcomes that are routinely missing from most current political debates. Critics of online deliberation warn that unequal access to the Internet skews online deliberation in favour of richer and better educated people (Ebo 1998), that groups of like-minded people are likely to herd together online to reinforce their beliefs and prejudices (Hill and Hughes 1998; Sunstein 2001) and that the quality of online deliberation might be limited by an absence of credible information (Barabas 2004). However, several empirical studies offer a more promising account of the potential of online discussion to overcome hitherto intractable barriers to effective public deliberation. First, evidence is emerging to suggest that by transcending geographical confines and enabling Internet users to connect with a broader range of perspectives than they would encounter through face-to-face communication, citizens online are more likely to be exposed to heterogeneous debate than is the case in the offline world (Price and Cappella 2002; Graham and Witschge 2003; Kelly, Fisher and Smith 2005; Janssen and Kies 2005; Albrecht 2006; Muhlberger and Weber 2006). Furthermore – and crucially for the case for a civic commons that we shall be outlining in the final chapter – the design of online spaces can promote forms of deliberation in which participants 32

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are exposed to a broad range of perspective in contexts likely to generate discursive civility (Edwards 2004; Wright 2006; Wright and Street 2007). Second, by eliminating the presence of social status cues, online deliberation reduces the likelihood of judgements being made on the basis of who the speaker is rather than what they are saying (McKenna and Bargh 2000; Stromer-Galley 2003; Kenny et al. 2007). Third, online deliberative interaction offers greater opportunities for knowledgesharing and long-term community-building than many forms of offline deliberation (Plant 2004; Johnson and Kaye 2004; De Cindio and Schuler 2007). Finally, although certainly a contested finding, some studies suggest that online deliberation has mobilisation and efficacy-building effects, which qualify it as being regarded as a positive stimulant to democratic participation (Johnson and Kaye 1998; Shah, Kwak and Holbert 2001; Horrigan, Garrett and Resnick 2001; Price and Cappella 2002). Overall, these various empirical findings suggest that online discussion and debate offer some hope to those seeking a more deliberative democracy. ESCAPING FROM SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY

Even if problems of communicative scale can be overcome and citizens can be relied upon to disprove the worst fears of elitists, there still remains the bleak picture of democracy presented by social choice theorists. Their claim that aggregation is inherently vulnerable to manipulation is not one that proponents of a more deliberative democracy can afford to dismiss. On the contrary, one response to this claim is to say that if all electoral arrangements are likely to defeat the best intentions of voting citizens, the very least that can be done is to precede all voting by robust periods of public deliberation. That way interests become transparent and actors are exposed to influence before, if not during, the voting process. For example, even in the case of a referendum in which the order of choices can be manipulated by astute strategists and the question of wording does not meet standards of objectivity, a lengthy period of public deliberation before votes are cast would at least stand some chance of helping voters to decide what they really want to achieve, even if the perverse permutations of preference structuration deny them their desired end. A major benefit of prevoting deliberation is that people could address the question of the distorting voting mechanism and consider openly and collectively how best to achieve a fair outcome. 33

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Democratic theorists have offered an ‘escape route’ from the problems of social choice theory by suggesting that people should reveal their preferences openly in advance of voting, thereby rendering strategic manipulation less of a threat. Dryzek and List have constructed a sophisticated theoretical argument for reducing the effects of strategic manipulation and the problem of ‘cycling’ by inducing preference structuration in the course of deliberation, thereby enabling ‘people to reflect on their preferences, in the knowledge that these preferences have to be justified to others’ and creating ‘a situation of social interaction where people talk and listen to each other, enabling each person to recognise their interrelation with a social group’ (Dryzek and List 2003: 9) The Dryzek and List thesis depends upon the capacity of deliberative environments to generate sufficient transparency, integrity and selfreflection amongst discussants to undermine the effects of aggregatory manipulation: How do we explain discussion-induced cooperation? Discussion provides participants with opportunities for multi-lateral promise-making about choices they will make. Rational choice theory would predict that in one-shot interactions such promises will be broken, but empirical evidence suggests that social norms and/or psychological dispositions in favour of keeping promises are more powerful. (Dryzek and List 2003: 11) Recent research in the area of group decision analysis offers some promising support for the Dryzek and List approach. For some time, decision analysts have been designing methods to help groups articulate and structure their preferences in ways that will enable them to reach decisions that are consistent with their values and intentions (Gregory, Fischoff and McDaniels 2005; French 2005). The aggregation of individual perspectives on the basis of deliberatively-structured sensitivity analyses has helped to generate a reflexive approach to the decision-making process and strategic outcomes, thereby avoiding the worst pitfalls of Arrow’s (1951) impossibility theorem. French (2005) has shown that web-based group decision-making support tools ‘offer the possibility of supporting much larger groups’ in structuring discussions so as to enable people to share their views about the outcomes they most desire and then order and weight voting options in accordance with these sensitivities. The aim of the European Science Foundation’s Towards Electronic Democracy project (http://www.esf. org/ted) has been to produce an online ‘toolset’ that would help lay 34

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decision-makers to facilitate ‘discussions between stakeholders to explore their perceptions and values’; identify and structure ‘key issues, providing complementary perspectives on the uncertainties and the scale of possible impacts’; and document ‘the process in a way which both explains the rationale behind the final decision and lets all stakeholders explore the decision and understand the reasoning’ (French 2005). The extent to which web-based decision-making of this kind might contribute to a closer relationship between preference expression and democratic outcomes has yet to be tested, but, in theory at least, it would seem to be the case that distributed decision-making, facilitated by preference-structuring software, could at least reduce some of the uncertainties identified by social choice theorists. An illustration of the scope for distributed public judgements being made are recommender systems, in which users’ past experience of visiting a web site or reading a posted message are aggregated with a view to guiding the future preferences of others. The Slashdot web site (http://slashdot.org), a major gathering space for technology enthusiasts, uses a recommender system based upon the ratings of a pool of accredited moderators, whose judgements are themselves subjected to evaluation by the wider Slashdot community. Lampe has found that: In general, the Slashdot moderation system seems to work. Readers employ the ratings to change how they view comments, new users receive some amount of feedback from the scores of their comments, survey respondents report high levels of satisfaction with the moderation system, and the moderators mainly agree on the disposition of a comment when making ratings and reverse ‘incorrect’ moderations. (Lampe 2006: 138) Poor argues that ‘Slashdot’s primary mechanism, moderation, supports the concept of the public sphere in that it allows comments (ideas) to be judged on their own merit’ and contends that ‘Slashdot meets the four criteria laid out for an online public sphere: (1) it is a space of discourse; (2) it opens a space for a wide range of computer enthusiasts to come together and discuss many issues, (3) including many political ones; and (4) ideas are judged by their merit’ (Poor 2005). The application of the Slashdot model of collaborative evaluation, combined with more sophisticated tools designed to support distributed group decisionmaking, offers the prospect of a more reflective approach to democratic structuration and consequently a more substantive (rather than processcentred) approach to collective decision-making. 35

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B eyond the Ra t i o n a l i s t St ra i g h t j a c k e t

Deliberative democrats sometimes seem to be promoters of deep, sombre, rationally-bounded cerebral rumination, more suited to the Senior Common Room than the workplace, community hall or public square. The depiction of deliberating citizens as possessing special qualities of tolerance, fairness and articulateness and, above all, rationality serves to place deliberation beyond the norms of everyday discourse. Deliberation becomes fetishised and artificial. But what about people who find it difficult to express what they think or who find it hard to stay calm in the face of values they regard as hostile to their interests or who simply do not want to be reasonable about every issue that affects them? Should such people be excluded from public deliberation – or educated to become better citizens so that they can join the consensus-seeking discourse without dissent? Why does deliberative democracy, in its most ideological formulations, make such little allowance for marginal, eccentric and dissentient values, perspectives and ways of speaking? Deliberative democrats have tended to conceive of deliberation taking place within specially dedicated, procedurally regulated environments, such as ‘juries’ or ‘panels’. It is as if deliberation is something people do when they stop doing anything else. In fact, most public talk about politics and civic affairs is of a much more autonomous, casual and unstructured nature than deliberative theorists demand. At the most informal level, ordinary political conversation can be both deliberative and nondeliberative in nature, often within the course of a few sentences. Within what Merelman (1998) calls ‘mundane political culture’, conversation about politics is not uncommon. There is evidence that citizens talk about politics within the private sphere of family and friends far more frequently than they would ever do so in public places (Beck 1991). Deliberation in public is widely conceived as potentially conflictual, embarrassing and even stigmatising (Eliasoph 1998; Noelle-Neumann 1993). Critics of the notion that political conversation can be deliberative, such as Schudson (1995), argue that the nonpurposive, casual and entertaining nature of conversation is qualitatively different from deliberation. But both deliberation and conversation can be regarded as intermediating networks between personal reflection and political behaviour, within which ideas, experiences, fears and desires can be rehearsed. If formal deliberation is intended to arrive at consensual truth, political conversation is more modestly and informally about making, expressing and sharing common sense. Conversations have 36

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three characteristics that differentiate them from institutionalised debate. First, they are reciprocal undertakings, in the sense that participants agree to enter into them and adhere to the protocols of a collaborative speech relationship. Second, conversation participants possess equal rights to speak and respond, in accordance with implicit codes of turn-taking. Third, conversations are informal, unpremeditated and unbounded. One rarely sets a time for a conversation to begin or end; genuine conversations tend not to be structured by agendas or expected outcomes. The value of political conversation for deliberation is its inclusive informality. Conversational logic is not always sequential or tightly framed, but it does provide opportunities for sharing information and can be influential in helping people to adjust their opinions. People often know privately and experientially more than they appear to know formally, when questioned by pollsters or called upon to speak at a local meeting. Their values and impressions are not deliberatively inferior just because they do not sound like politicians. On the contrary, informally expressed views are often deemed to be authentic and sincere precisely because they are constructed out of the messy fragments of mundane experience (Gamson 1992; Herbst 1995; Coleman 2006). The emergence of the blogosphere (see Chapter 3) marks a transition from the kind of online political discussion that is characterised by the protocols of the forum, with its rhythm of formal argument and counterargument, to more autonomous, self-expressive and experientially rooted approaches to the political. In blog posts the conventional political agenda is remixed to fit in with the ethos of citizens as self-reflecting, biographical beings whose encounters with structures and relationships of power obtain meaning through performances and narratives of everyday life. Studies of fan and reality TV web forums suggest that participants are indirectly addressing questions of social value and power, but not in a language that would be familiar to traditional scholars of political communication (Baym 2000; van Zoonen 2005). Of all the objections to the deliberative approach, Mouffe’s (2005) concern about the non-agonistic fashion in which online consensusseeking fails to address crucial conflicts that are at the heart of politics comes closest to our own anxieties about certain forms of deliberative democracy. As Mouffe suggests, too often deliberative debates are conducted in ‘the moral register’, emphasising the virtues of deliberation as a civilising process rather than assessing its scope as an instrumental 37

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strategy. With the deliberative democrats, we take the view that simply aggregating votes is too parsimonious a foundation for democracy; but, in contrast to some of these theorists, we want democratic deliberation to have a hard political edge: to be a means of contesting values, challenging hegemonic beliefs and achieving material outcomes. In the blogosphere, and other informal sites of social networking, we are witnessing an approach to deliberation that resists the pressures to arrive at settled positions and argument closures, and reflects well the messy, fragmented, experiential and yet inherently public nature of politics. A MORE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

This chapter has suggested that deliberation, in the broad sense of public talk about issues that affect communities, nations and sometimes the whole world, offers a remedy to the current ills of democracies that appear to have become distant from the lives, concerns and beliefs of the demos. There are convincing responses to the standard arguments against taking public deliberation seriously, and there are examples, experimental and otherwise, of effective and democratically invigorating public deliberation. But, unlike many theorists, we are sceptical about the claims and demands of deliberative democracy. We are happy to settle for a more deliberative democracy. What exactly does that mean? A more deliberative democracy would encourage and take seriously a range of forms of public talk, from the informal and conversational to the consultative and evidential. Democratic governments, at all levels, would operate on the basis that on most issues there is room for public discussion to feed into the process of policy formation, legislation, policy scrutiny and post-legislative review. As we shall argue more fully in the final chapter, such public deliberation is best conducted in trusted space, dedicated to the most accessible, inclusive and meaningful deliberation. A more deliberative democracy would seek to connect a wide range of consultative and participatory projects, as well as fragmentary and informal public conversations, to the everyday workings of political policy formation and decision-making. Too often the public is asked for its views about an issue – by government, individual politicians, the media or interest groups – only to discover later that the policy has already been decided and that consultation is taking place either as a formality, because there is a duty to consult, or in order to claim public 38

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support for a controversial decision. There is a danger of public energy being squandered or exploited in such tokenistic or manipulated exercises. There is evidence to show that participants in deliberative exercises often feel a greater sense of political efficacy after taking part: they feel that they are being listened to and can influence the political process. But if citizens’ deliberative input is manipulated or ignored, increased confidence in democracy will soon turn into an increased sense of inefficacy, cynicism and resentment. Evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee inquiry into new forms of public participation, based on a survey of 332 U.K. local authorities, found that whereas 20 percent considered that participatory consultation exercises strongly influenced final policy decisions and 16 percent thought that they led to better informed decisions, 20 percent considered that such exercises had very little impact on decisions, and 20 percent stated that they merely confirmed decisions that were already made (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee 2001b: 29). In her evidence to the inquiry, Dr Sue Goss, Director of Public Services Development at the Office for Public Management, declared that ‘While organisations are learning to consult, they are failing to respond effectively to consultation and this harms potential relationships between citizens and government’ (House of Commons Public Administration Committee 2001b: 188). The key to the effectiveness of public deliberation is for it to be embedded within the constitutional structure of policy formation and decision-making. Rather than offering it as a novel add-on, public deliberation should become an essential part of a working democracy. This presents risks to politicians, for there is always a chance that deliberative consultation will arrive at different answers – even different questions – from those being contemplated within the political elite. The democratic challenge here is to ensure that public deliberation should be linked to governance, but not appropriated or manipulated by politicians or officials. The conception of deliberative exercises as being about exposing non-experts to expert agendas reinforces a one-way information flow which undermines democratic efficacy. In the case of many deliberative techniques citizens are conceived as performing a different role from expert witnesses or policy professionals; specialised knowledge is pitted against the generalised, testimonial input emanating from experiential wisdom. 39

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All of this leads us to conclude that there is a need for real-world experimentation in public deliberation, utilising technologies which support effective democratic interaction, and embedded in structures and processes that can result in meaningful consequences. A more deliberative democracy would not be dogmatic about the search for model deliberative formats and procedures. There are many ways to talk things over. Pluralistic techniques are likely to be best suited to a diverse population debating a wide range of issues. In a more deliberative democracy one might hope to see public talk about political and civic issues characterised by the following basic principles:
Access to balanced information – Deliberative exercises are primarily concerned to discover what citizens think about issues once they have become reasonably informed about them. The provision of information to deliberating citizens needs to be comprehensive, balanced and accessible. It need not be the case that all participating citizens read or study information provided to the same extent, but efforts should be made to provide for all a basis for acting as informed deliberators.
An open agenda – In deliberative exercises, whilst governmental and other promoters are likely to set out the broad parameters of the anticipated discussion, the agenda must be open to revision or expansion by the deliberating citizens. So, in the debate about the siting of a new airport, a deliberative agenda could move on to a discussion of the benefits of air travel as opposed to alternative methods, or a broader debate about the usual criteria for planning decisions.
Time to consider issues expansively – Deliberative exercises must be temporally expansive, allowing citizens adequate time to think through an issue and then work out where they stand on it.
Freedom from manipulation or coercion – Deliberative exercises must involve a high degree of protection of the independence and free thought of participating citizens. The analogy is with juries in courts of law, where the freedom of jurors from any influence but that of the factual evidence is paramount.
A rule-based framework for discussion – Democratic deliberation is not to be confused with an anarchic free-for-all. People feel safer and discuss more freely when they are aware of the transparent rules of the debate.
Participation by an inclusive sample of citizens – Efforts must be made to recruit participants who are representative of those affected by or concerned about the issue being considered. 40

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Scope for free interaction between participants – Deliberative exercises require two extra-directional flows: citizens to government (so that participating citizens can in turn ask questions of those asking them to deliberate) and citizen to citizen (so that participants can exchange views with one another).
Recognition of differences between participants, but rejection of status-based prejudice – Effort must be made to ensure that prejudices based upon status do not diminish the value of any contributions. What we are envisaging is the transition from a counting democracy, where citizens are valued only as aggregated voters, to an accounting democracy in which, before and after voting, people’s accounts of who they are, how they live and what they want are accorded fundamental political value.

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B

eing an active citizen is complex and time-consuming. First, it involves being sufficiently informed to know what’s going on in the world, what matters personally and what matters globally, how government works and how language is used both to illuminate and obfuscate political realities, where to access reliable information and how to compare sources so that rival perspectives can be transformed into useful knowledge. Second, active citizens need to arrive at judgements about who and what can be trusted. Can one party or politician be trusted more than another? Are elected representatives and governments able to do what they promise at election time? How far can friends, neighbours and strangers be depended upon to engage in the kind of collective action that might bring about desired changes? Can the existing constitutional system be trusted to serve the interests of all people, or should active citizens be thinking about working around the system, creating their own rules of engagement? Third, active citizens need to make their voices heard and their presence felt. This involves using whatever skills and resources are available to develop networks of collective self-organisation, contribute to the political discourse and make a tangible impact upon the ways in which political power is exercised. Most people find these challenges overwhelming. They know little about formal politics (Lupia and McCubbins 1998), rarely trust politicians or political processes (Norris 1999) and feel that they have little or no voice in policy formation and decision-making (Vergez and Caddy 2001). It is little wonder that most people do not even vote in local elections, let alone engage in active campaigns to bring about changes that might make life better for them. The media play a crucial role here, by enabling citizens to encounter and make sense of events, relationships and cultures of which they have 42

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no direct experience. As such, the media constitute a public arena in which members of the public come together as more than passing strangers. As media theorist, Michael Schudson, has argued: When the media offer the public an item of news, they confer upon it public legitimacy. They bring it into a common public forum where it can be discussed by a general audience. They not only distribute the report of an event or announcement to a large group, they amplify it. An event or speech or document in one location becomes within a day, or within hours, or instantaneously, available to millions of people all over a region or country or the world. This has enormous effects. (Schudson 1995: 19) The ability of mainstream media to serve citizenship and democracy properly has latterly become an increasingly contested topic of debate in the twenty-first century. Of course, such concern is not entirely new. Since the political communication process interrelates competing interests and values, its workings and outcomes are perennially controversial. But in recent times the debate has been sharpened by two developments. One has been the ‘growing intrusiveness of media in politics’ (Seymour-Ure 1987). As Bennett and Entman (2001: 1) put it, ‘Mediated political communication has become central to politics and public life in contemporary democracies’. Schulz (1997) epitomises this trend in his model of a ‘media-constructed public sphere’, in which the ‘mass media are regarded as the precondition of a public sphere’ – not only indispensable to but also constitutive of it. And, of course, as mediated communication becomes more pivotal in politics, questions and issues about its civic strengths and limitations proliferate. Recent transformations of the political communication process have been a second spur to debate. Almost everything to do with political communication seems to be in flux these days: social formations and lifestyles, strategies of persuasion, politician-journalist relations, media technology, organisation and finance. Critical in the last sphere has been the shift from a system in which limited-channel, nationwide television was the dominant medium of political communication to a more abundant and fragmented system, providing not only more channels for political messages but also more opportunities for audiences to ignore (or only cursorily scan) those messages in favour of more sheerly enjoyable fare (Blumler 1999). The ability of political messages to offer value to citizens becomes more important as a result, 43

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and attention is naturally directed at the ‘important normative issues that emerge within this transformed communication landscape’ (Bennett and Entman 2001). Underlying both of these developments and perceptions is the undoubted fact that the mass media have ‘become the main cultural institution and principal means of public expression in contemporary society’. Consequently, they ‘are perceived to occupy a key position in the public life of most societies’ (McQuail 2003: 4, 5). It is natural therefore to hold them responsible for whatever seems constructive or defective about the communicative relationships between citizens and politics. Some have argued (including ourselves) that recent trends have ensnared mainstream media in a ‘crisis of public communication’. This allegation is sometimes depicted simplistically – as if maintaining that a combination of journalistic shortcomings was directly responsible for negative effects upon citizens’ knowledge of, perceptions of and willingness to take part in politics. It is important to specify at the outset therefore five features of a more mature version of this position. First, it is more of a normative than an empirical thesis. Its prime focus is the adequacy or otherwise of present-day political communications for the performance by people of their roles as citizens in a well-functioning democracy. Certain effects on their stores of information and political attitudes may be implied, but they are secondary to the main thrust of the critique. Second, it is not a narrowly one-sided thesis. It acknowledges that in communication terms our democracies do have their better moments, better impulses, better dialogues and better organised sectors. Its proposition is not that everything has gone to the civic dogs but that overall the political communication process tends to strain against rather than with the grain of citizenship. This matters at a time when many political problems have become more complex and difficult and when public understanding may affect the ability of governments to tackle them effectively. Third, it does not stem from some romanticisation of former times. Of course, the makeup of ‘political communication man’ has always included elements of partisan deviousness, journalistic sensationalism and electoral indifference. In the past, however, it could be assumed that the role of publicity in politics was not only to reflect but also to counteract such shortcomings. Today, it is 44

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alleged, the shortcomings are built into the very structure of the publicity process. Fourth, it is not confined to the cutting edge of political messages and their reception by citizens. It is rather a systemic analysis. It is about a large-scale process (or set of processes), which has been affecting relationships among key communicators and their would-be audiences, structuring in turn the incentives to which all respond and the constraints on their behaviours and perceptions. In Blumler and Kavanagh’s (1999: 211) formulation: ‘Today the major influences on political communication seem even more volatile than before. They include new styles of politics, developments in media technology and organisation, and shifts in social structure, all changing in interlocked ways and impacting on people’s lifestyles’. Fifth, it is not a deterministic thesis. In the words of Semetko et al. (1991: 184–5): ‘A “downhill all the way” scenario is certainly plausible, but given the interactive nature of the forces that animate political communication systems, so too is a more cyclical scenario in which reactions against the worst trends and excesses might eventually build up and help to reverse the swing of the pendulum’. Indeed, signs of such a reaction were prompted among a number of British political communicators by the shock of an unprecedentedly low turnout of voters at the U.K. General Election of 2001. Since then, the BBC has shaken up its political news service, aiming to gear it more closely to audience interests and mentalities; and the government has overhauled its communications apparatus, aiming to restore credibility to its discredited workings and output. These measures may be interpreted, however, as clear institutional acknowledgements of the crisis of public communication in which they are involved. How did it originate? The ‘crisis of public communication’ may be regarded as emanating from three sets of forces: developments in the societal environment; responses to those developments among political institutions, including consequential reactions by media institutions; and developments in the media sphere per se. These are dealt with in the following three sections in turn, after which we consider the characteristic kinds of political communication content that these trends have produced. T H E S O C I O - P O L I T I C A L E N V I R O N M E N T All declarations of a building ‘crisis of public communication’ insist that its ultimate origins are exogenous to the making, sending and receiving of political messages. The seeds of political communication trouble are planted deep in a 45

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confluence of social forces which have transformed the environments of leading political and media institutions. As Blumler and Coleman (2001) have put it, the problems of civic communication ‘stem not so much from the deficiencies of particular individuals or groups but from the interplay of political institutions, media institutions, and audiences, within a continually evolving technological and sociopolitical environment’. The most influential social trends may be termed individualisation, modernisation and secularisation. I N D I V I D U A L I S A T I O N Since the end of World War II, all advanced democracies seem to have experienced an increasing elevation of personal aspirations for better lives, the onset of consumerism and higher expectations of standards of service in all areas of provision, including politics. This has entailed a relative but seemingly irreversible dissolution of traditional social ties. Institutions that previously organised meaning, identity and authoritative information for many people, that structured their political preferences and simplified the process of democratic power-seeking – notably political parties, the nuclear family, mainstream religion, the workplace, and neighbourhood and social class groupings – all have waned in salience and influence. In their approaches to politics, citizens have become more like consumers (instrumental, oriented to immediate gratifications and potentially fickle) than believers. Politicians must therefore work harder to gain and retain their interest and support. M O D E R N I S A T I O N In place of the relative coherence and stability of institutionally fashioned social organisation, a more complex and fragmented society has developed, full of interest groups and contending value orientations. People have been acquiring ‘an ever more separate set of personal identities, as evidenced by their ethnic affiliations, their religious allegiances, their views of personal morality, their ideas about what is valuable in life, their tastes in art, music, and so forth’ (Miller 1998). In these conditions, moral consensus has declined, while the bases of social conflict, including identity politics, have multiplied and become more difficult to resolve. This has complicated the tasks of political aggregation, leadership and consensus building. The political communication scene has become more turbulent and less manageably containable than before. Both politicians and journalists face increased competition for access to publics and audiences – the former from a wider range of interest groups clamouring for publicity; the latter from many new makers of news, sources of commentary and investigative purveyors of scandal in talk shows, tabloids and Internet web sites. 46

A Crisis of Public Communication S E C U L A R I S A T I O N Public attitudes towards authority holders, leaders and experts have shifted in many walks of life. Relations of elites to masses have been transformed by the evaporation of deference. ‘Messages from on high’ no longer enjoy an automatic or even a ready acceptance, and scepticism has virtually become the norm. The floodgates have consequently been opened to currents of populism in politics and the media, validating the testimony of personal experience, the assertion of personal needs and views and the registration of majority attitudes in opinion polls. T H E P O L I T I C A L R E S P O N S E Political transformations have emanated inexorably from these societal transformations. Relationships of political parties to their constituents have been radically altered. Allegiances to and membership of political parties have declined, as has the voting loyalty of those retaining party identification. Demographic correlations of party preferences are no longer so predictive, and political socialisation is less effective. Internally, parties have been ‘de-energised’ (Seyd and Whiteley 1995) with fewer members taking part in their activities. In the electorate at large, voting is less an act of solidarity and more an expression of present personal opinion. As Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999) put it, the emancipation of major parts of the populace from traditional political institutions breeds more ‘self-mobilised citizens’ (a term coined by Dalton), to whom ‘the ubiquitous availability of information via mass media is an important resource . . . for developing their political outlook individually and independently of political ideology’ (Dalton 1996: 253). The role of the media has consequently become more crucial for politicians as well as for individual citizens when following their doings. Politicians and those seeking to influence public opinion believed they had no place to turn to other than to the media. The lines of access they afford, their ways of framing issues, their ways of constructing public opinion preferences and demands, their occasional support for certain policies, their (sometimes trenchant) criticisms of the decisions and conduct of politicians – all have become significant if variably influential cards in the political game. Nowadays the authority of leaders derives from their ability to appeal to public opinion through the news media.

The Profession ali sation of P o l i t i c a l A d v o c a c y

Arguably the most formative development in the political communication process of present-day democracies has been the professionalisation of political advocacy. In an early essay, the second author treated the news media but not political parties as examples of professionalised 47

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organisations (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). It is as if since that time politicians have been impelled to absorb, match and ape news media professionalism. The conditions described above, then, have encouraged politicians and parties to think about and to handle communication along certain lines (Swanson and Mancini 1996). Of course, their approaches have not been universally identical. Traditional characteristics of societies’ political systems, media systems and political cultures have served as mediating and differentiating influences. Nevertheless, a response to modern imperatives, combining in its fullest form seven specifiable features, has been favoured: 1. Strategic comprehensiveness. The response of politicians and parties to current conditions has not been merely tactical – a matter of every now and then staging a publicity coup or scoring a good news point. It has been based rather on a more comprehensive approach to the tasks of communication, persuasion and news management. This ‘holistic’ feature of the process is illustrated by Gould’s (2002) characterisation of New Labour’s approach to the 1997 U.K. election as one of ‘total campaigning – the campaign as an integrated machine – rooted in message, able to defend itself against attack with extraordinary speed, connecting with voters with ever-increasing sophistication’. Bennett and Manheim (2001: 282) refer to this as ‘strategic communication’, defined as the ‘scientific engineering and targeting of messages that subordinate the ideals of deliberation and transparency to the achievement of narrow political goals’. Kernell (1997: 325) states that the concept of what he calls ‘routinely going public’ (his emphasis) must ‘be appreciated as a strategic adaptation to the information age’. According to McQuail (2003: 122), ‘Information management, in and out of elections, . . . is now a salient feature of public communication involving much propaganda, manipulation of news agendas, and the extensive deployment of spin doctors’. Blumler and Gurevitch (1995: 207) describe what they term the ‘thoroughgoing professionalisation of political advocacy’ as ‘the near-universal response of political parties (and others) to the dissolution of previously more firm anchorages of political attitudes, the increasing centrality of television, and the proliferating demands of multiple news outlets for instant comment and appearances’. 2. A conceptual core. When daily news becomes the chief pipeline to politics for most citizens, politicians and their advisors tend to see 48

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themselves as caught up in ‘a competitive struggle to influence and control popular perceptions of key political events and issues through the major mass media’ (Blumler 1990: 103). What matters, according to this ‘theory’, are the ‘perceptions’ that people form on contested issues. Since political reality and its central issues can often be ‘perceived’ in opposed ways; since political news supplies much of the material on which such perceptions are based, politicians must therefore strive to ensure that their version of reality prevails in the news over that of their rivals. 3. A high priority for communication functions and activities. More resources are poured into their organisation and performance. More staff (some quite high in status) are dedicated to them. Getting communications right is thought essential, not only for winning power, but also for wielding it effectively while in office. As David Gergen advised U.S. President Reagan early in his first term, ‘to govern successfully, the government has to set the agenda; it cannot allow the press to set the agenda for it’ (Hertsgaard 1988). Or as Philip Gould (2002), advisor to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, put it more recently, ‘integrated and professional campaigning . . . is an essential part of good governance’. It follows that communication considerations are no longer secondary to policy thinking; they must be integrated into it. As an advisor to Tony Blair was quoted by Butler and Kavanagh (1997: 61), ‘In the mass media age, policy is there to win elections’. 4. Professionalisation. Political news is too important to be blundered into, toyed with, or entered into impulsively. Waging publicity competition through the media, massaging journalists’ news values, putting the best possible spin on significant stories, fashioning political advertising, designing tracking polls and interpreting their results – all require the skills of experts who are single-mindedly dedicated to the goal of victory in such competition. Consequently, a new role, that of the specialist political consultant, has been injected into modern politics all round the democratic world – albeit in varying degrees and with different positions of authority (see surveys by Plasser and Plasser 2002; see also the 11-country analysis in Swanson and Mancini 1996). 5. Proactivity. Merely reacting to the initiatives of opponents and journalists will not suffice. Needed instead is a continual provision of events and statements that stand a chance of leading and shaping the news media. An equally continual massaging of influential 49

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journalists may also be required – flattering, bullying and spoonfeeding them as appropriate, to influence running orders and the interpretation of stories. 6. Orchestration of communication activities and messages. Strict internal discipline is imposed – both to ensure that all party sources stay ‘on message’, doing nothing to distract reporters from the adopted ‘line of the day’; and to ensure that the press are offered no signs of dramatic splits to headline. Lines of command and rules of procedure are instituted across all internal sources and departments to ensure that those in charge are aware of publicity initiatives in advance and can decide who should appear where and when. 7. Exhaustive thoroughness. Professionalism is equated with leaving no stone unturned, no detail omitted, no statement unplanned, no journalist unbriefed, no opportunity unexplored and no pitfall unanticipated. Since there are no holidays or days off in the political publicity game, a ‘permanent campaign’ is instituted and waged. Finally, one general implication of this approach may be mentioned. That is its adherence to Machiavellian perspectives of Realpolitik. If political news is a source of power, one must realise that one is involved in a power struggle to shape it to one’s advantage. Information comes to be regarded as a weapon in that power struggle, and sentimental motions like a free marketplace of ideas, the social responsibilities of the press and the role of the informed citizen in democracy are discarded as illusory. The ethics of the modern publicity game also become uncertain as a result. What distinguishes acceptable attempts by politicians to puff up a favourable publicity wind from manipulation that is beyond the pale? The line may be difficult to draw. In Britain, New Labour has been accused of unethical manoeuvres from time to time – for example, by releasing an item of ‘bad news’ on September 11, 2001, knowing that it would be buried and ignored by the saturation attention paid to the attack on New York City’s Twin Towers on that day. Th e J o u r n a l i s t i c Re a c t i o n

News management based on the above precepts may be interpreted as a systematic effort to narrow journalists’ options of political coverage. They suggest that the party publicity ideal is to shape the news environment so that journalists are driven to focus only on such and such an issue or theme, on this message about it, and on that 50

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spokesperson on it. For their part, however, journalists do not relish having their news choices severely narrowed by those whose activities they are supposed to cover. Although they may sometimes repeat what has been served up to them on a plate, fashioned to satisfy their news values, they recognise and jib at the fact that they are being ‘used’ to pass on what the news makers have dreamed up. In Zaller’s (2001: 247) words, ‘Professional reporters loathe running politicians’ press releases . . . and . . . therefore [rewrite] the script’. Indeed, Zaller (2001) provides a plausible ‘Theory of Media Politics’ to explain this side of the dynamic. In part it is a matter of mutually operative systemic constraints: ‘if candidates are constrained to approach communication strategically, journalists are not constrained to like it, and most do not’; ‘the harder . . . campaigns try to control what journalists report . . . the harder journalists try to report something else instead’ (247, 248). Zaller terms this a ‘rule of product substitution’, whereby ‘the more strenuously politicians challenge journalists for control of a news jurisdiction, the more journalists will seek to develop substitute information that the mass audience is willing to accept as news and that gives expression to journalistic voice’ (255). In the heyday of attempted news management, several influences pushed journalists in that direction. Most powerful were their professional values. As Zaller (1999: 249–50) explains: Like other professional groups – lawyers, doctors, architects and university professors, journalists value autonomy both as an end in itself and as a means to creating the kind of product they wish to create. The kind of product they wish to create is one that requires as much personal skill and expertise as possible. This is not only inherently satisfying. It paves the way to promotion, better pay and higher status. The best regarded political journalists are those who can put the most arresting stamp of their own on stories, find the most vivid words in which to tell them, or conduct the most robust and challenging interviews. Two related consequences have followed from this reaction. First, political reporting over time has become more interpretive. Drawing on an analysis of political coverage by the U.S. television networks across several postwar decades, Hallin (1992: 9–10) notes that: In the 1960s and 1970s, the journalist’s role as a communicator was relatively passive . . . Today’s television journalist displays a 51

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sharply different attitude toward the words of candidates and other newsmakers. Today those words, rather than simply being reproduced and transmitted to the audience, are treated as raw material to be taken apart, combined with other sounds and images, and reintegrated into a new narrative. Indeed, increasingly interpretive commentary by journalists appears to be one of the few long-term trends reshaping election campaign coverage that has been consistently documented by empirical researchers in a number of Western democracies (Wilke and Reinemann 2001). Thus, what politicians have to say is subordinated to the stories that journalists decide to tell. A content analysis of television in the 2001 U.K. election showed, for example, that Andrew Marr, the BBC’s Political Editor, was ‘seen or heard in the news more than any politician, possibly more than all the party leaders combined’ (Harrison 2001: 143). Second, much political story-making by journalists tends to be pejorative. Again this may be regarded in part as a reaction to politicians’ news strategies. As Zaller (2001: 255) explains: ‘Media negativity toward candidates is . . . determined in significant part by the candidate’s strategy of news management. When aggressive news management limits journalistic opportunities to express voice, journalists create their own outlets in the form of investigations, critical analyses, and, to the extent they think the public will tolerate it, blunt expressions of sarcasm’. It may be that in a period of heightened publicity manipulation, journalists are more prepared to believe the worst about politicians; that at a time of a heightened sense of being involved in a struggle for control with them, they may take greater relish in exposing their iniquities; and that at a time of widespread public disenchantment with politicians, they may feel more free to hit out at them. A n A dv e rs a ri al Re l a t i o n s h i p

The modern publicity process has thus intensified conflict between politicians and journalists. Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) have termed this ‘a chronic state of partial war’. Since the politician-journalist relationship is part adversarial, part collaborative, the state of war is partial. Nevertheless, the adversarial climate today seems fiercer and more abiding than in the past – hence the ‘chronic state of war’ tag. Like a smouldering volcano, such a relationship periodically erupts into high-profile rows, punctuated by lots of mutual recrimination. An example is the conflict between No. 10 Downing Street and the 52

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BBC over a reporter’s claim that the Prime Minister and his Director of Communications had ‘sexed up’ an intelligence service’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before its release to the public in September 2002. Readiness to believe this charge probably stemmed from the government’s reputed obsession with presentation. But the government firmly denied the accusation and sought a retraction from the BBC, its Director of Communications even accusing the Corporation of lying. In response, despite doubts about some features of the reporter’s story, the BBC Board of Governors decided to support him, seeing this as the only way to demonstrate its political independence. According to the Chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors, in testimony to the Hutton enquiry, more important than the strengths and defects of its journalist’s story was the imperative that the BBC ‘must not buckle to government pressure’. The Me d i a S ys t e m : I ntensifi ed C o m p e t i t i o n

Meanwhile, the media system in which journalists work has been changing in ways that affect political reporting. As media abundance advances, politics intended to inform, reveal or persuade must vie for the attention of editors, reporters and audiences in a far more competitive environment. Partly this is because there are so many more outlets through which people can follow politics, none of which can dominate as before. Partly it is because politics must compete with the increased appearance in many of those outlets of entertainment, sports and other more beguiling fare. Partly it follows from the exposure of many journalists’ media employers to a market logic, which subjects politics like everything else to the leveling impact of a profit-and-loss calculus. Thus, even the BBC has stated that its news, current affairs and political programs have entered ‘a period of hyper-competition’, in which ‘a “pick and choose” news culture prevails’. The logic of this situation entails four consequences for political communication through the mainstream media. First, political communication loses its formerly sheltered position inside many media organisations, comes under pressure to demonstrate its compatibility with those organisations’ goals and is often obliged to compromise with other influences inside those organisations. According to Underwood (2001: 100), ‘the intertwining of news and marketing goals is everywhere’ in the United States. Definition of the news is ‘recast’ to ‘what is relevant to the audience. Newspapers’ traditional beat structure whereby reporters focused on coverage of 53

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politics, government, the courts and police has been replaced by ‘thematic coverage that is built around self-help, family and financial issues viewed as personally meaningful to readers’. Serious minded journalism is ‘being overwhelmed by the media marketer’s image of the public as busy, distracted, fulfilment-seeking consumers who must be pleased at all costs, even if it means abandoning the higher traditions of the profession’ (101). Some research suggests that broadcast news and current affairs in Europe have not been overwhelmed by trivialisation and sensationalism in the wake of multichannel competition (Brants 1998). Nevertheless, the role of the public service idea in shaping BBC coverage of the 2001 election campaign in Britain seemed to observers of its news operations ‘less comprehensively dominant, less single-mindedly didactic; somewhat less confidently pursued [than in the past]; and having at times to be bargained for against other interests’ (Blumler and Gurevitch 2002b: 219). Consequently, ‘the task of those fighting its corner has become more difficult. Public service is being pursued in an environment of both external and internal conditions that are less amenable to its realisation than ever before . . . [By] 2001 countervailing influences seemed to be piling up on more fronts – in a firm template of journalistic assumptions and workways, in an indifferent audience, in the entertainment priorities of BBC-l (described . . . by a senior executive as “fighting for its life” in the competition with ITV), and in the persistence of long-standing campaign rituals’ (229–30). Second, sacerdotal approaches to politics tend to be regarded as not viable for reception by mass audiences. Typically, politics must fight for its place in reporting and scheduling on the basis of its news value and likely audience appeal. As a reporter justified the BBC’s more newsy coverage of the 2001 campaign, ‘No more can we say, watch this because it’s good for you’ (Blumler and Gurevitch 2002b: 225). Some signs of this include drastic reductions of campaign coverage by the U.S. networks, similar reductions in verbatim reporting of parliamentary proceedings by Britain’s broadsheet press, the near demise of long-form documentaries in many national broadcasting systems, and reduced use by the BBC of correspondents with special areas of policy expertise to cover the 2001 General Election, partly ‘because the longer films they prepared in the previous election were no longer required’ (Blumler and Gurevitch 2002b: 227). Third, given that much of the increased competition stems from entertainment, ‘infotainment’ approaches to politics are favoured. This 54

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is reflected not only in the explosion of subgenres designed as hybrids – breakfast shows, news magazines, talk shows and so forth, but also in the further mixing of information with drama, excitement, colour and human interest in the topics, formats and styles of many other programmes. This is partly a response to the diminished standing of political, media and other elites in popular eyes. In such conditions, paternalistic discourse is no longer an option. Communicators who wish to inform and empower their audiences must therefore adapt more closely than in the past to what ordinary people find interesting, relevant and accessible. It is also important, however, whether such communicators do wish to inform and empower or just want to grab eyeballs and sop up ratings. Increased competition is likely to encourage the latter response. For example, whereas in responding to the perceived indifference of the audience towards the 2001 campaign, some BBC reporters sought ways of making serious politics interesting and accessible, others were primarily concerned to catch and hold (or not to lose) viewers’ attention (Blumler and Gurevitch 2002b). This is not to imply that only programmes formally labelled as ‘informational’ should be regarded as legitimate outlets for civic communication. There are nevertheless several reasons to temper enthusiasm for ‘infotainment’. For one thing, it tends to stage politics as spectacle and to suffer from glitziness and shallowness. Its dissolution of the boundary between political and nonpolitical realms may encourage people even more than before to perceive and evaluate their leaders as celebrities rather than as civic problem-solvers. For another, its agenda tends to be slanted towards the more immediately riveting issues with strong sociopersonal elements and away from anything more structurally complex. In addition, the appeal of ‘infotainment’ may be tuned more towards audiences’ affective impulses than their cognitive ones. Of course, affect has a proper part to play in determining the ends that people wish to achieve in politics. But those ends will only be socially defensible and viably attainable if they are also shaped by a cognitive awareness of surrounding interests and circumstances (B1umler 1999; Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). Fourth, the combination of increased competition and an audience known to be sceptical about politicians’ credentials reinforces journalists’ tendencies to focus much of their coverage on their mistakes, alleged misdemeanours and policy failures. Such treatment has the double advantage of being arresting and sensational and of chiming with audience perceptions. According to Jones (2002: 1), in a competitive 55

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media system, reporters are ‘judged increasingly on their ability to deliver exclusive stories’, which more often than not will be exposes. And according to Toynbee (2003: 25), the intense circulation war in which the British press is engaged has nurtured an extreme anti-politician mentality – especially among tabloid newspaper journalists. As she describes it: ‘Get the politicians, catch the government lying, denigrate, mock, kill. Never mind the substance of a policy – that’s boring and time-consuming. The fun is to go after the next minister who might be knocked off his or her perch’. C haract eristic C o n t e n t

The developments of organisation and interrelationships outlined above do appear to have been transforming the news systems of many democracies, though in varying degrees and respects. On balance, certain ways of presenting politics have been encouraged and have increased. 1 . T R U N C A T E D P O L I T I C A L A D V O C A C Y Studies across time in the United States, Britain and Germany show that politicians’ statements are being reported less frequently than in the past and that the average length of direct quotations is shortening. According to Deacon, Golding and Billig (2001: 668), for example, ‘sound-bite politics is growing in Britain’. Quotes from television news broadcasts fell on ITV from an average length of 22.3 seconds in the 1992 election to 17.6 seconds in 2001 and on BBC1 from 26.5 to 20.3 seconds. According to Lichter (2001), the average politician’s sound bite fell from its already short length of 9.8 seconds in the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign to 7.8 seconds in 2000. This is not just a matter of compressed utterances by politicians. The principal talkers about politics in the news are now journalists themselves. In the 2000 presidential campaign in the United States, three-quarters of the speaking time was allocated to journalists (Lichter 2001). For Britain, Deacon, Golding and Billig (2001: 672) also report that ‘the average speaking time of the media’s own journalists was nearly twice as great as the average speaking time of politicians during the 2001 campaign’. Even when politicians have a voice it is not necessarily on their own terms. Very often their words are chosen by reporters and editors to illustrate the points which they wish to make about the state of the political debate at the time. Kendall (1993: 135) vividly describes what is involved from her study of U.S. network coverage of 1992 primary election candidates: 56

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Speech episodes were used . . . chiefly as a form of proof. They were always in a dependent role; that is, the anchors and reporters made claims about the presidential campaign and backed them up with instances of the candidates speaking. The anchors and reporters were the omniscient narrators . . . The candidate’s words were treated as of decidedly secondary interest. 2 . HEAVY PRESENTATION OF POLITICS AS A ‘GAME’ The scholarly expert on this feature is Thomas Patterson (1993), who found that the ratio of election news stories in the New York Times dominated by a ‘game’ schema (about political strategies, successes and setbacks) to those centred on ‘policy’ (about policy and leadership issues and problems) shifted dramatically from 1960 – when it was 45:52 – to 1992 – when it had become an overwhelming 80:15. Although British political news has historically been more substantive than American reporting, and although it has been less thoroughly tracked by such measures, research evidence shows that recent elections have witnessed a sharp increase in stories about campaign organisation, strategy and tactics, advertising, polling and activity on the stumps (Goddard, Scammell and Semetko 1998; Blumler and Gurevitch 2002a; Harrison 2001). Other research suggests that the game frame is replete with further consequences, few of them reassuring. As Lawrence (2000: 94) puts it, it presents a ‘one-dimensional view of politics’, squeezing the news hole for policy substance. According to Patterson (1993: 59), drawing on survey evidence, this does not mesh with voters’ main concerns, for whom ‘policy problems, leadership debates, policy debates and the like are the key dimensions of presidential politics’. Yet at least two studies have shown that reporting of the political game encourages audience members to assume spectator roles, ‘responding more to the status of the race than to what candidates represented’ (Patterson 1980; Graber 1988). Jamieson (1992: 166) succinctly explains the connection: ‘In the strategy schema, candidates are seen as performers, reporters as theatrical critics, the audience as spectators’. Content analyses have also shown that politicians’ quotes in gameframed stories provide less evidence in support of their statements than in policy-framed ones, that experts quoted in game-framed stories comment more often on the state of play than on the issues and, perversely, that the game frame is more prevalent at times when an issue is being contested than when it has been settled. As Lawrence (2000) elaborates this last finding: ‘news organizations are most likely to approach the world with the superficial and cynical game schema at 57

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precisely those times when public opinion is most likely to be focused, mobilized and tuned into politics during elections and highly charged legislative debates’. In the case of welfare reform (the focus of her analysis in 1996), much of the information of use to the public came too late to help the public participate meaningfully in that debate. 3 . BIAS TOWARDS ‘MEDIATISATION’ A media-constructed public sphere is full of references to media-related actors and processes (Blumler 1998). Not only do political broadcasters become celebrities, better known than most politicians, party publicity managers also become leading political personalities in their own right, often attracting sharp controversy and often depicted as moving (even sinister) forces behind the scenes. Policy initiatives are rarely reported without accompanying comments on how they were prepared for presentation, how pressed on the media and with what forms of ‘spin’. In Scammell’s (2000: 381) words, they are continually ‘deconstructed’ for their ‘base strategic significance’. Striking details of this tendency appear in an analysis of the political coverage by eight newspapers of Britain’s national press during six months preceding and including the 1997 election campaign. The study found 444 articles about ‘spin doctoring’ by the major parties, amounting to an average of 17 such pieces per week (Esser, Reinemann and Fan 2000: 213). Many of these were overtly critical: ‘the expression [spin doctor] often implied lack of political substance, sometimes even lying. It is obvious from reading the news reports that journalists were using the term to indicate that a “spin doctor” did not offer them hard facts, but a more slanted version of events’. Such a communications road can be bumpy for governments with ambitious policy projects in train. Their efforts, targets, spending plans and proclaimed achievements are continually portrayed as publicity stunts. McNair (2000: 137) declares that in Britain, for example: ‘The demonisation of spin . . . flourished after the election of Tony Blair as Labour Leader in 1994, and became the dominant formula applied by journalists to the coverage of Labour in power’. Seyd (2001: 609) concludes that ‘The [Labour] party’s pre-1997 campaign professionalism had been an electoral bonus but the government’s attempts to control the news agenda made it renowned more for its “spin” than for its policy performance, and this became something of an electoral handicap’. 4 . P E R S O N A L I S A T I O N Political personalization is advanced because it is easier to project than the hard stuff of issues and policies. A leader-seeking media system promotes a leader-elevating political system. According to 58

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an 11-nation survey of recent developments in electioneering, The centrepiece of parties’ approach to campaigning ‘typically consists of focusing attention on the personalities of party leaders, for appealing personalities are currency of high denomination in media logic’ (Swanson and Mancini 1996: 251). 5 . I N C R E A S E D N E G A T I V I T Y This is fuelled by both political and media impulses. On the political side, there is an increased temptation to resort to negative campaigning, which is believed to be more memorable and easier to present in crisp terms than a positive case. Indeed, a majority of the points made in both Conservative and Labour party press releases of the 1997 campaign were coded by Butler and Kavanagh (1997) as negative. But on the media side journalistic commentary on political developments, statements and personalities has been increasingly negative (see Patterson 1993 for the definitive U.S. analysis). Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles (2001: 162) perceptively note that journalists are increasingly casting themselves as ‘authenticating agents or rather as unauthenticating agents in the political publicity process’. This encourages journalists to focus on ‘issues that politicians cannot keep under control, ones which reporters can run and break down doors with and apply conventional news values to’ (Blumler 1998). In Britain’s 1997 election, the Conservatives seemed to suffer from this preference. A campaign based on their relatively successful economic record was ‘distracted by greater media interest first in the issue of sleaze’ and later in the Party’s splits over European questions (Gavin and Sanders 1997). After that election, as noted above, it was Labour’s turn to be the target of journalistic negativity with frequent emphasis on its news-spinning machine. 6 . S O M E L O S S O F S P O N T A N E I T Y Although such a quality would be difficult to operationalise and measure, a media-constructed public sphere, which is run by two sets of large, well-oiled, preprogrammed and highly professional machines (those of the parties and the newsrooms), may lose some of the essential ingredients of attractive and meaningful communication – like spontaneity, a sense of adventure that could lead to discovery and a sense of wrestling with reality instead of always trading smoothly in appearances and perceptions. Such interlocked professionalism may also become wedded to routines that may appear to voters repetitious and unappetising. Seasoned observers suggest that this may explain the failure of recent British General Election campaigns to connect with voters (Butler and 59

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Kavanagh 2002): ‘The public was perhaps becoming bored with the ritual of modern campaigns. The morning press conferences, the setpiece media interviews with prominent politicians, the party leaders’ bus trips to encounters with voters (largely staged for the benefit of cameras), instant rebuttals and the speeches before invited and largely sympathetic audiences may now be past their sell-by date’. C ri sis o f Publi c C o m m u n i c a t i o n Re v i s i t e d

The trends outlined above contain the seeds of a crisis of communication for citizenship. What is meant by this? What are the components of such a crisis? In 1995 Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) identified six, most of which still hold true today. First, they said, the very move of the media to the centre of the political process (including what was termed ‘mediatisation’ above) entails a degree of de-politicisation. This is because in Western democracies the press (especially television) base their claims to legitimacy and credibility with the public on their nonpolitical status and on their disavowals of explicitly political, particularly partisan, motives. Such a stance underlies in turn their preoccupation with personalities and the flow of events rather than with policies. It also suggests that the claims of citizenship as such are not central to news media operations but are subordinate to their primary purposes of holding audience attention, earning revenue and profit, and satisfying news values. Second, the present system disseminates an oversupply of oxygen for cynicism through the visibility of manipulative publicity efforts and the increased flow of negative messages. A related product is a highly pejorative, oversimplified and, in many cases, probably unfair stereotype of the standard politician as someone who cares only for power and personal advancement, is not bothered about the problems that matter to ordinary people and is constitutionally incapable of talking straight. Audience disillusionment with political leaders and their utterances is a natural outcome of such a bombardment. Credit is not given to government even when it deserves it. Difficulties of making sense of what appears in the media inevitably arise when people are disposed to disbelieve what is presented from the very outset. Third, less of the political communication diet serves the citizen role due to the predominant presentation of politics as a game and the diminished space and time devoted to policy substance resulting from provision of ever shorter sound bites. This is not to claim that a brief message is always shallow or unenlightening but that, other things 60

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being equal, it often oversimplifies the issues and blocks meaningful argumentation. In any case the sound bite providers are rarely moved by a concern to offer illuminating ideas in captivating capsules. Much of the snappiness of modern political communication arises from the influence of advertising on political persuasion, from that part of the journalistic culture which regards political talk as inherently boring, and from the assumption that people have incredibly short attention spans. Fourth, because voters’ needs to understand and make sense of civic problems are increasingly confounded and frustrated, they are virtually excluded from any say or significant stake in public communication. The absorption of politicians and journalists in their own complex and fraught patterns of collusive conflict results in what Rosen (1993) terms a ‘public sphere commandeered by insiders’. A classical example of this was the months-long absorption of Britain’s political and media elites with the details of the government’s preparation in September 2002 of an intelligence dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and a piece of investigative journalism about them by a BBC reporter. Fifth, developments in the relationship of the media system to the political system have catapulted the press into a position of surrogate opposition. Since it is the duty of an opposition to oppose, reporting is yet more imbued with the qualities of challenge, vigilance, criticism and exposure at the expense of giving credit where it may be due, fairly recognising the difficulties involved in shouldering political responsibility and a rounded political coverage overall. And as media framing of politics has become increasingly negative, leaders, bereft of strong parties, have lacked a sounding board to counter the press’ discordant orchestration. All this has injected an extra element of conflict and mutual recrimination into the relationship of media personnel with politicians. Finally, an irony of the present situation is that, although democracies face many urgent problems requiring a considered canvassing of difficult choices, and although frequent attention to such problems in our expanded communication system ensures broad public awareness of them, formats of constructive discourse about them are in rare supply in the established news media. With the possible exception of top-level candidate debates in the United States, conventional civic communication seems to be dominated by point-scoring, tallies of rivals’ advances and slipbacks in the game of political snakes and ladders, childish sound bites, interview gamesmanship and a plethora of scarcely believable attempts to establish plausibility. Not a pretty picture – nor an involving one! 61

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A n A l te rna ti ve Pe rs p e c t i v e

The notion of a ‘crisis of public communication’ is not universally accepted. Norris (2000: 4), in particular, denies mass media involvement in such a crisis and proclaims instead their association with a so-called ‘virtuous circle of political communication’. Empirically her outlook derives from analyses of data from both European and American surveys, showing that those individuals who are more exposed to news on television and in the press are also more knowledgeable and less cynical about politics and are more likely to be politically active – and that after controls for education, age and income (which also go with political engagement) have been applied. According to Norris, the most plausible interpretation of such evidence is that already active citizens read and watch more news and are reinforced in their positive dispositions as a result, ratcheting up those dispositions in a virtuous circle. This is to address the thesis of a crisis of public communication at only one point. It reduces that notion to a theory of media effects, connecting journalistic shortcomings with public disenchantment. As should be clear from what has already been said above, this translates what is a normative thesis about systemically rooted trends into a unidimensional theory of media effects. Nevertheless, it is clear from Norris’s data that, among samples of electorates as a whole, exposure to the news media does not go quantitatively with increased political cynicism and apathy. There are, however, several flaws in Norris’s approach in general and specifically in the idea of a virtuous circle of political communication. First, with one minor exception, the surveys on which Norris relies were snapshots of samples at one moment in time; none traced developments over time in panels of respondents interviewed on two or more occasions. Strictly speaking such an approach cannot speak to effects; it can produce correlations, not evidence of causation; it cannot demonstrate a dynamic process, such as is implied by a ‘virtuous circle’. It is possible therefore that the associations she detected were due to a tendency for more knowledgeable and active citizens to be more interested in following politics in the media. Again strictly speaking, a reinforcement effect among them has not been demonstrated. In fact, one of the few pieces in the literature that followed a sample before and after media exposure showed that Americans who had read newspapers with more front-page stories critical of political institutions became more cynical about American politics afterwards (Erbring, Goldenberg and Miller 1980). Miller and colleagues focused 62

A Crisis of Public Communication

on the members of a national sample who had been interviewed first in 1972 and again in 1974 and who had on both occasions given their responses to five statements comprising a trust in government scale. In 1974 they also determined which newspapers respondents were reading and then content analysed political articles appearing on the front pages of those papers. The aim of this analysis was to measure the amount of institutional criticism appearing in the stories. Institutional criticism was operationalised by coding the content of each political article to indicate if the actions, positions, policies or actors in the story were criticised, praised or discussed in neutral terms. Finally, developments in voters’ levels of trust in government over the 1972–4 period were charted against the amount of institutional criticism found in their papers. When readers of papers with above-average amounts of institutional criticism were compared with readers of papers with below-average amounts, a sample-wide tide of increasing mistrust proved significantly greater among the former – and especially among less educated Americans. An implication of the study is that when subjected to careful content analysis, media reporting may well help to influence attitudes in ways that can have repercussions on political legitimacy. Second, none of Norris’s surveys adopted a strategy of trying to identify subgroups of the electorate who might be more vulnerable to negative media effects. Whole samples were not broken down by potentially significant divisors. If, for example, more actively inclined citizens follow the news media more frequently, what happens to the less active sector of the public? They may form unfavourable impressions of politics through exposure to political news and as a result tune out more often. Or, to consider a different possibility, many electors are probably ambivalent about politics and the value of following it in the media. And those who are most ambivalent might be most susceptible to negative portrayals of politics and politicians in political communications. Here quantitative measures of influence might be supplemented by qualitative ones – aiming to tap the impressions people form when following political news, the judgments they make about political institutions, actors and processes featured in the news and how they rate the communications they receive for utility, interest and credibility when following political affairs. Third, Norris’s optimism is based on an uncritical celebration of the onset of media abundance through the multiplication of channels and the arrival of new media, all of which she equates with a diversification 63

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of information sources. As she puts it, the more abundant environment ‘offers a wide range of political information broadly defined in different formats and different levels so citizens can select the type of information most useful to them’. But this is to ignore two downsides to diversification. One concerns its impact on the previously dominant sources of people’s access to news about politics. These are not replaced by media abundance; they remain the most important sources of people’s impressions of politics; but their ability to perform their civic roles is weakened by their exposure to the competitive pressures that have been discussed above. Another concomitant of diversification is fragmentation. As Bimber (2003: 229) argues, the more abundant information environment lowers the threshold for groups seeking support for their causes to receive publicity and to be noticed. As he puts it, ‘more mobile, ad hoc organizations . . . appear better able than ever before to have a voice in politics’. On the one hand, this enhances political equality, but on the other hand, ‘universal “sense-making” and the building of shared conceptions is that much harder as the public sphere becomes more diverse and fluid as a result of technological change’ (245). In our words (Blumler and Coleman 2001: 12–13): Admittedly, there may be more chances in such a system for more voices to be heard, more problems to be brought to people’s attention, and more chances for people to find what they want to hear, see or know about. But it may also be more difficult to put all this together at the centre. Such communication flows could be conducive more to a public sphere of cacophony than to one of coherence. Finally, Norris’s thesis ignores and lacks an answer to a recently emergent and now widely recognised problem of political communication. Conditions differ today in one significant respect from those that obtained in the mid-1990s when the notion of a ‘crisis of public communication’ was coined. There is a broad awareness in elite circles of the existence of a crisis of public trust and of communication practices that have reinforced and deepened it. We live, it is often said, in an age of cynicism. Consequently, a frequent theme of present-day commentary is the need to find ways of reconnecting the institutions of politics and the media with a thoroughly sceptical and disillusioned citizenry. An example is the reaction of Britain’s Electoral Commission 64

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to the very low turnout of voters after the 2001 election campaign. Since, according to evidence from opinion polls it had commissioned, few voters found the campaign interesting, since most of the impressions of the campaign they volunteered were negative and since even the bulk of those people who were ‘very interested’ in politics before the election did not find the campaign itself interesting, the Commission held that declining turnout was ‘not a function of declining interest in politics or elections but rather a failure of the campaign to connect with the electorate’ (Electoral Commission 2001). Regarded in this light, the crisis of public communication could be said to be reflected today in the difficulties communicators face in managing to restore that connection. Various issues of feasibility arise. Once lost, trust is difficult to regain. The deeper conditions that gave rise to the crisis of public communication cannot be wished away. How much confidence can one have that the intercommunicator relationships and trends of characteristic content, discussed above, can be reversed sufficiently to enable mainstream political communication to serve citizens more adequately? Arguably, the disjunctures and problems of the now widely acknowledged crisis of democratic participation, rooted as they are in multidimensional transformations of elite-mass relationships over the postwar period, are too profound to be overcome through the mainstream media. In any case, how strong are the means at the disposal of mainstream communicators for overcoming mass indifference and hostility? In recent election campaigns the efforts of BBC newscasters to make their campaign reporting more interesting and accessible to viewers failed in the end to overcome their unfavourable impressions of the campaign. As Blumler and Gurevitch (2002b) concluded, ‘such wellintentioned, even essential approaches could be regarded as little more than tinkering on the surface of a deeply rooted antipathy among many voters towards the uncongenial way in which political communicators have addressed them for so long in the past’. Lo o k i n g A h ea d

It would be fair to conclude from much of the foregoing that a mediated public sphere, dominated by mainstream newspapers and broadcasting, gives only fleeting and haphazard succour to citizenship. But there are signs of change in the new media landscape. The top-down model of news production that dominated the ‘industrial’ age is unlikely to survive in the digital age, now that it is possible for anyone with access to the Internet and other digital technologies to publish their own 65

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accounts or remix others’. As in the case of the music industry, which lost its cultural and commercial grip in the face of online file-sharing, the threat to the news media comes from online social networks which empower ‘ordinary people’ to produce, distribute and remix news without passing through the mass-media filter. Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has declared that ‘Journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television’. Both the producers and receivers of news are going to have to adapt. According to a 2005 Carnegie survey, the Internet is the most frequently cited source of news for 18–34-year-old Americans. Fortyfour percent report using online news portals at least once a day, compared with 37 percent who watch local TV news and 16 percent who watch national network news on a daily basis. In the 2005 U.K. election 71 percent of 18–25-year-old British Internet users visited the BBC election web site, and only 20 percent said that they did not visit any election-related web sites. Clearly there is a generational migration towards online news sources, a trend born out by latest Ofcom* research among 16–24-year-olds. Online news-seekers are currently gravitating towards sites run by newspapers and broadcasters with established reputations. Of the 12 most popular news web sites in the United States, eight (CNN, Gannett Newspapers, New York Times, Knight Ridder, Tribune Newspapers, USA Today, Washington Post and ABC News and Hearst Newspapers) were established news publishers, and the other four were run by Internet service providers or search engines. In the United Kingdom, the BBC and The Guardian have been spectacularly successful in adapting to online formats, although all old media organisations face an inevitable tension between intellectual property rights (owning their stories) and the open-source ethos of content-sharing. But established media organisations are under growing pressure from open-source news sites which have abandoned top-down editorial control for a more participatory style of journalism. The Indymedia network was established as a response to the failure of traditional media to cover the anti-globalisation protests on the streets of Seattle in 1999. A web-based global network of reporters and photographers was set up, designed as ‘an interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a *

Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for communications industries in the United Kingdom.

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world based on freedom, cooperation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy’ (Indymedia UK Mission Statement, http://www.indymedia. org.uk/en/static/mission.html). There are now 160 Independent Media Centers on six continents, making it the largest alternative media service in the world. According to one of its leading activists, ‘Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available.. . . Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions‘ (http://purplebark.net/maffew/cat/openpub.html). Another major success, Ohmynews, emerged out of the fierce South Korean electoral contest of 2002. It is a grass-roots news service, comprising over 30,000 citizen-reporters who submit about 200 articles each day. The editorial objective of Ohmynews is to create ‘a two-way journalism’ in which ‘the readers are no longer passive. They can be reporters anytime they want’ (Ho 2004). Key to the success of both of these new news services has been a democratic notion of accountability, based upon the participatory production of news, with minimal and transparent editorial control. This democratic trend conflicts with the claims of professional journalism to possess exclusive expertise and adhere to rigorous ethical standards. Open-source news providers, such as citizen-reporters and bloggers, argue that they are simply going back to the days when journalists were people who published accessible journals and news correspondents were people who wrote letters reporting on what was going on around them. Although these developments seem promising so far, the Internet’s civic potential has been greater than its use. At bottom, that potential is vulnerable mainly because an infrastructure for its proper realization is lacking. With commerce increasingly in the driving seat of Internet development, few of its big players are out to boost citizenship. It is true that various exercises of online consultation, promoting informed deliberation on public policy issues, have been piloted. But lacking constitutional status and effective links to mainstream politics, their contributions have been fragmentary and marginal. Yet with suitable policies and institutional support, some of the emancipatory potential of the new media could be realised. This line of argument is developed in Chapter 7.

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C H A P T E R 3

From Indirect to Direct Representation

I

n the first two chapters we have identified fundamental weaknesses in contemporary democracy: the lack of a political culture in which citizens can deliberate effectively and the presence of mass media which undermines public trust in politics per se. These two profoundly disturbing tendencies contribute to a third aspect of democratic dysfunction: a pervasive sense of disconnection between most elected representatives (politicians) and most represented citizens. As one former Leader of the U.K. House of Commons has astutely observed: The public today is worryingly inclined to see politics as something, which belongs to a political class, rather than a process which is rooted in decisions by the public themselves. The most common complaint of the public is that politicians as a class do not listen to what the public want, which is curious as there has never been a time when the major political parties have spent more effort on trying to find out what the public thinks. (Cook 2002) In theory, political representatives are supposed to speak for the people they represent. ‘Speaking for’ becomes necessary when citizens are physically, culturally or cognitively removed from the locus of public decision-making and their interests, preferences and values have to be expressed via an aggregating intermediary. As the democratic theorist Hanna Pitkin (1967: 209) puts it, in what still remains the most cogent analysis of the functions of political representation: representing . . . means acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them. The representative must act independently; his action must involve discretion and judgment; he must be the one who acts. The represented must also be (conceived as) capable of independent action and judgment, not merely being 68

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taken care of. And, despite the resulting potential for conflict between representative and represented about what is to be done, the conflict must not normally take place. The representative must act in such a way that there is no conflict, or if it occurs an explanation is called for. He must not be found persistently at odds with the wishes of the represented without good reason in terms of their interest, without a good explanation of why their wishes are not in accord with their interest. Although not bound simply to reflect, mimic or personify the will of the represented, neither, according to Pitkin, should democratic representatives be detached from or indifferent to citizens’ interests, preferences or values. Representation entails an ongoing connection between politicians and citizens, albeit one that is often tenuous, tense and difficult to sustain. However, the practice of representative democracy is rather at odds with theory. In most contemporary democracies, whether old or new, parliamentary or presidential, the representative relationship is in chronic disrepair. There is a pervasive sense that politicians and the people they represent inhabit different worlds, speak mutually incomprehensible languages and fail to respect one another. To be sure, the disconnected citizen is not unique to late modern democracy. Recall Lippmann’s ‘deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake’, a pathetic figure whose bewilderment helped to define expectations of citizens’ political behaviour in the twentieth century (Bachrach 1967; Lippmann 1922: 10). Lippmann’s ‘deaf spectator’ was characterised (perhaps caricatured) as lacking the cognitive skills to connect. Nearly a century later the problem seems to be different: citizens are awake (in the sense of being educated) and quite able to hear what is going on (insofar as they are exposed to a daily array of mediated political messages and images), but the show on offer is not to their taste. Figure 3.1 depicts the contrasting characteristics of connected and disconnected representation. Cl ose ne s s

Connection suggests boldness in the face of the seeming intractability of distance, not only linking the near to the far and the present to the past, but the informed to the uninformed and the strong to the weak. To be connected in a vast, complex society of inequalities, linguistic diversity and group polarisation is an ethical transcendence of differential 69

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship Closeness

Distance

Mutuality

Detachment

Coherence

Exclusivity

Empathy

Aloofness

Figure 3.1. Diagram of political connection and disconnection.

communicative opportunities. Connected representatives are those who are not regarded as ‘distant’, either in the geographical sense of being nonlocal or unreachable, but also in the sense of being approachable and capable of communicating at many levels. Mu t u a l i t y

The notion of connectedness implies mutuality: if I am connected to you, then you must be in some sense connected to me. To be connected means to be in touch, either physically or via mediation. Connection is more than merely reaching out; being connected involves being reached as well as reaching, being touched as well as touching others; it is a relationship both dialectical and dialogical. Representatives who collaborate with those they represent, by sharing information, consulting regularly and being highly accessible and ‘in touch’, are less likely to be regarded as disconnected than detached representatives who are perceived as secretive, self-serving, autonomous operators. C oherenc e

Connection conjoins and coheres, linking hitherto separated entities. The connected representative gives a single voice to many separate lives. Connectedness invokes the aspiration towards common understanding 70

From Indirect to Direct Representation

in a world of sovereign artificers. Connected representatives are good at articulating diverse experiences and narratives and aggregating competing interests and preferences. In contrast, politicians who are seen to pursue narrow ideological courses and to be obedient to partisan interests and structures are likely to be regarded as disconnected from those they represent. Em p a t h y

Finally, and least tangibly, to connect is to empathise, in the sense of imagining oneself in the position of an other (Goodin 2003). As Bowlby (1969: 442) argues, ‘Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves . . . from these intimate attachments a person draws his strength and enjoyment of life and, through what he contributes, he gives strength and enjoyment to others’. Intersubjective connectedness entails not a sense of not being someone else, but of knowing what it means to be someone else. In an increasingly post-deferential culture, citizens will disengage from people and institutions as they experience the solitary pain of not being recognised, heard or valued. FEELING REPRESENTED

For citizens, being politically represented is a matter of intermittent concern. Apart from a small minority of highly active, often ideologically committed, citizens, most people have reason to connect to politicians and political institutions only at exceptional moments of personal crisis or public excitement. Whereas the work of representing is a permanent one for elected politicians, the sense of being represented is only ever an occasional realisation for citizens. In order to examine the extent to which U.K. citizens feel themselves to be connected to political institutions and other social actors, an online survey of a representative sample of 2,273 U.K. citizens was commissioned from the online polling organisation yougov. The value of using an online survey is that secondary questions could be asked of respondents, seeking qualitative explanations for their initial responses. The initial survey, comprising seven questions, was conducted between 11 and 13 September 2003. Seventy-two percent of the sample reported feeling ‘disconnected’ from Parliament, with nearly half (46%) feeling ‘very disconnected’. Over half of 35–44-year-olds (52%) and nearly half of 45–64-year-olds 71

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felt ‘very disconnected’ from Parliament. Perhaps surprisingly, fewer 18–34-year-olds felt very disconnected from Parliament than in the older cohorts. There were no significant differences between responses to this question from men and women or between higher and lower social classes. When asked how connected they felt to their local MP, levels of disconnection were slightly lower. In these responses, disconnection decreased with age, suggesting that as people grow older they are more likely to establish some sort of communication with their MP. Respondents were asked how ‘in touch’ they are with their local MP, local councillor, doctor, clergyman and next-door neighbour. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 0 indicating total disconnection and 10 indicating intimate connection, over half (54%) rated their level of connection to their next-door neighbour at a point of 7 or above. Perceptions of connection to local GPs were not far behind, with 52 percent reaching 7-plus. Only 1 in 10 felt connected to a clergyman at 7-plus, slightly behind councillors (11%), but ahead of MPs, at 7 percent. Looking at the bottom end of the scale, taking zero to three to indicate a perception of significant disconnection, next-door neighbours were so evaluated by 18 percent of the sample, GPs by almost 1 in 4 (24%), councillors by 77 percent and MPs by 79 percent. Clergymen were so rated by 81 percent of the sample, with 62 percent expressing 0 connection (compared with 50 percent who rated their connection with their MP at 0). When asked about the kinds of contact they had with their MP in the past year, nearly half (48%) claimed that they had read a letter or leaflet from their MP. A quarter claimed to have seen their MP on television, 20 percent to have written to their MP, 16 percent to have visited their MP’s web site, 12 percent to have met their MP face to face and 11 percent to have listened to their MP making a speech. Almost 4 out of 10 respondents (39%) claimed to have had no contact of any kind with their MP. There was a significant correspondence between having had contact with and feeling connected to MPs. People who had met their MP in person were more than five times more likely to feel connected to them than those who had not; those who had visited their MP’s web site were nearly three times as likely to feel connected. Ninety-four percent of respondents who had no contact with their MP in the past year felt disconnected, compared with 61 percent of the overall sample. 72

From Indirect to Direct Representation

In a 1999 survey by the U.S. Council for Excellence in Government (CEG), almost two-thirds (64%) of Americans agreed with the statement ‘I feel distant and disconnected from government’. The CEG research found that citizens who felt connected were more likely to have contacted their elected representative. In our United Kingdom Survey there was a similar correlation between communication with MPs and perceptions of connection. On average, those who felt disconnected from Parliament were 18 percent more likely than those who felt connected to have had no contact at all with their MPs. Those who felt disconnected from their MPs were 37 percent more likely not to have had any contact with them at all. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

People who feel connected to MPs People who feel disconnected to MPs Non Voters

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Figure 3.2. Graph showing relationship between contact with MP and voting.

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

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Figure 3.3. Feelings of political connection amongst those who had and had not been in contact with Parliament. 73

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

44 39

6 Connected

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Disconnected

Figure 3.4. Feelings of political connection amongst those who had and had not been in contact with their MP.

A key finding was that the vast majority (80%) of people who felt disconnected from Parliament reported that they had not voted in the previous general election. Ninety-eight percent of those who felt very connected, and 89 percent of those who felt slightly connected reported voting, whereas over half (52%) of the very disconnected had not voted. Nonvoters were far less likely to have had contact with their MPs than voters. ARTICULATING DISCONNECTION

How can these widely-held negative perceptions of the citizen– representative relationship be explained? The qualitative method used to obtain a more detailed picture of what citizens mean by political disconnection was to recontact survey respondents, inviting them to complete two sentences: ‘I don’t feel connected to my political representative because . . .’ and ‘A connected political representative should . . .’ . Of the 2,273 respondents to the initial survey contacted by e-mail, 1,783 responded to the invitation and posted a total of 23,642 words to complete the first sentence and 25,821 to complete the second sentence. In their comments respondents identified eight types of disconnected representative:





The The The The

unknown representative invisible representative distant representative alien representative 74

From Indirect to Direct Representation







The The The The

partisan representative untrustworthy representative arrogant representative irrelevant representative.

A significant minority (about one in five respondents) did not know who their MP was. Considering that 39 percent of respondents had had no contact with their MP (mediated or otherwise) in the previous year, it is not surprising that about half of that number could not identify their MP, with comments such as: I don’t know who they are and they make no attempt to rectify this. I don’t even know who he/she is! We have only lived here four months, but we have not had any newsletters or correspondence from any political representative. Some respondents complained about their MP’s lack of visible presence: ‘He isn’t very “visible”, hardly hear anything about him’. The importance of being ‘seen’ was clearly about more than formal representation. To be seen is a first step to being trusted. Respondents seemed to perceive unseen representatives as being ephemeral, faceless, ghostly figures: Even though he only lives up the road I have never ever seen him. I don’t even know who is representing me politically and I don’t know anyone who does. They don’t seem to want to be known. He or she does not have a ‘face’ in the constituency. After the election and its promises, nothing’s changed. I voted but have actually forgotten his name as I haven’t seen nor heard of him since. Respondents were uneasy about the distance of their representative from them. Even in an age of time-space compression, local rootedness and attachment are highly valued as grounds for representing. Paradoxically, although distance between citizens and the loci of central power is a key reason for the necessity of political representation, representatives are expected to transcend the symbolic manifestations of distance in their work of representing. Respondents expected representatives to be near, in the sense of reachable and touchable: He never walks around our town, we have to go somewhere once every month for a surgery of about two hours. 75

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They are not seen very often round here. They don’t seem to like mixing with the public. They have no local presence, and make no obvious effort to communicate with their constituents. A London politician, not a local politician. A repeated observation from respondents was that their MPs came from a different world, an alien planet. The prevalence of this metaphor was striking, perhaps reflecting a perception of representatives as ‘outsiders’ with life histories that made them incapable of registering everyday meanings: They live in a totally different world to the man on the street. They are disconnected from the real world. He lives in a different world from me. He is too remote and not on the same wave length as the people generally. They haven’t a clue about the real world. They say they do, but I feel it is just lip service. I don’t think they are on the same planet. They have no idea about normal life. Respondents commonly complained about their representatives being politicians, more attached to their parties than those they represent. In the minds of many respondents, there seemed to be a split between the work of representing and the rituals of high politics. Respondents wanted to be consulted and heard rather than simply regarded as voting fodder: He is a party loyalist, a careerist who towes the party line irrespective of whether it is appropriate to his constituency. He just appears to be a publicity machine – not a politician. He does not refer to me for my opinion on any question. Mainly he follows the party line. Some respondents expressed serious distrust about their MPs, but these were a relatively small minority. In general, respondents distrusted the process of representation rather than the character of representatives. But there were strongly-expressed exceptions: I regard my MP as a self-serving opportunist who is interested in power for power’s sake and will do and say anything to secure his position. 76

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I can’t trust any politician/party to treat me like an adult, and tell me the truth. There is so much secrecy and behind the scenes tradeoffs. There is no relationship between his policies and my expectations. I do not trust politicians in general, even those who entered politics for the best of motives. In a post-deferential culture, representatives are required to respect people whose experiences and backgrounds they do not understand. As Sennett has powerfully argued, equality entails respect based on the autonomy of the respected rather than the comprehension of the respecter (Sennett 2003). This places elected representatives in the odd position of having to demonstrate respect for vast numbers of unknown recipients. A widespread complaint from respondents was that their MPs did not care about who they really were and how or what they thought: I have been seduced with the belief/idea that what I think and feel will have an influence over decision-making when it doesn’t. My views have been canvassed so many times yet no regard is taken of them at all. She seems more at home in the Today programme studio than the constituency. She has a huge majority and I suspect she takes us for granted. They treat us as if we were invisible and do what they want, not what the people they represent want. The MP for here looks down his nose at us lower mortals. Finally, a significant minority of respondents considered their MP to have little or no relevance to their lives. Unlike the respondents who did not know who their MP was, these knew their MP in the way that a childless couple might know the local school or a vegetarian might know the local butcher shop. They were unconvinced that they had any need to be represented politically: They don’t play a part in my life. I have never had any reason to ask the assistance or advice from my MP or councillor. What should one make of these pervasive perceptions of political disconnection? The most striking feature is the overwhelming extent to which they refer to process rather than outcome. In open survey questions, respondents were free to give whatever reasons came into their minds for feeling disconnected, but hardly any chose to criticise 77

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their representatives for not serving the right interests, pursuing correct policies or delivering better outcomes. Connection was conceived almost entirely in terms of the health of the representative-constituent relationship. References to mechanisms of connection, such as elections, accountability or constitutional arrangements, were few, with the exception of some proposals for representatives to initiate local referendums and online consultations. Public frustration appears to be less about constitutionality or policy than affective perceptions of attachment, affinity and respect. When asked how their representatives could become more connected, respondents wanted them to be more accessible, to spend more time listening to constituents, to be more independent from parties and to be more like the people they represented. FROM INDIRECT TO DIRECT REPRESENTATION

After nearly a century of political representation based upon the principle of universal franchise, what is the public saying about how it feels to be represented by others? The overwhelming negativity of the survey and qualitative data considered here, as well as the extensive data from other studies of public attitudes to politics and politicians, could be read as suggesting that the public has had enough of representation and now wants to make most or all political decisions for itself. There is certainly strong evidence that the public wants more say in politics and trusts its own judgments more than those of politicians (Bowler, Donovan and Karp 2003). But there is little to indicate that citizens want to dispense entirely with representative democracy and initiate a direct democracy, at least in its crudest sense of transcending all representative institutions and passing unmediated power over decision-making to all voters. Indeed, when asked directly whether institutions such as parliaments should cede power to a plebiscitary electorate, few are in favour of this (Coleman 2007b). Bowler, Donovan and Karp offer intriguing evidence to show that many citizens do not distinguish between direct or representative democracy. According to this thesis, the determining variable is one’s attitude to democracy as such and distrust of representative democracy affects distrust for direct democracy. Those who have faith in the public’s democratic capacity in representative democracy are more likely to support greater direct democracy than those who do not. A helpful feature of Bowler, Donovan and Karp’s analysis is their rejection of the 78

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direct-representative dichotomy and their conceptualisation of a spectrum of more or less direct or indirect democracy (Bowler, Donovan and Karp 2003). A second response to the data presented here is offered by Inglehart’s post-materialism thesis, according to which there has been a shift in emphasis in recent times ‘from maximising economic gains to maximising subjective well-being’. Post-materialist citizens are regarded as moving away from trust in secular or religious authorities, especially so in the case of the young and better-educated (Inglehart 1977). It would certainly seem from the qualitative data that citizens care more about the quality of political relationships than could be explained by a simple materialist analysis of ‘who gets what’. But, contrary to the Inglehart thesis, there is no significant evidence from this survey that better-off, more educated people feel any more or less disconnected from their political representatives – and indeed the youngest cohort of respondents report feeling slightly more connected. A third response would be to interpret the public’s mood of disconnection as a demand for a more direct form of representation. Indirect representation is characterised by an apparently inevitable fracture between the representing centre and the represented outer layers. The indirectness of political representation is not inevitable, but is contingently rooted in some of the most enduring features of modernity: the intractability of distance, the bounded nature of place, the professionalisation of mediation and the spectacular nature of authority. In a world of increasing inter-connectedness, these justifications for indirect representation appear less credible. With the emergence of reconfigured patterns of interaction across space and time, resulting particularly from computer-mediated communication, traditionally centralised and indirect social processes are under increasing pressure to adapt. Shopping, banking, learning, travel and health care are being reshaped by new forms of mediation, so it seems unlikely that political representation can remain undisturbed. At the functional level of governance, the Internet has been at the heart of major programmes to make information more transparent and to rationalise service delivery. At the level of political representation, parliaments have slowly started to engage with digital media at a number of levels, but neither representative institutions nor individual representatives have so far done much more than replicate offline communication practices (Coleman and Spiller 2004; Gibson, Ward and Nixon 2003). 79

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The prospect of using the inherent interactivity of the Internet to enhance democracy has been raised by a number of scholars (Coleman 2007c). Early cyber-democrats predicted that representative institutions would be radically transformed, or would even become obsolete, in the face of the public’s capacity to state views and vote on any issue (Becker and Slaton 2000; Etzioni 1992; Morris 2001; Toffler 1981). These visions of a return to the Greek agora or the New England town meeting reflected a combination of overdeterministic reliance upon the apparently democratising features of digital technologies and a naı¨ve belief in the dispensability of representation in a world where the total presence of those who will be affected by decisions is rarely, if ever, possible. But, just as techno-populist fantasies have been a distraction, the assumption that indirect representation is inevitable has served to constrain imaginative efforts to more closely link the act of representing to the needs and desires of the represented. Somewhere in between these two conceptions of democracy lies a third position, which we refer to in this book as direct representation. By direct representation we have in mind a democratic system which rejects paternalistic modes of governing associated with the postwar welfare state and adopts techniques and technologies that go beyond formal consultation on preestablished policy agendas by mobilising, listening to, learning from, mapping and responding to diverse articulations of public experience and expertise. Direct representation entails an ongoing rather than episodic political conversation, inhabiting trusted spaces of everyday communication rather than being confined to official zones of electoral manipulation. Direct representation offers many of the same benefits as direct democracy, but fewer of the burdens. In short, it offers citizens the prospect of representative closeness, mutuality, coherence and empathy, without expecting them to become full-time participating citizens. A key factor in making direct representation a realistic possibility has been the emergence of interactive, digital media. As depicted in Figure 3.5, four conceptual and strategic shifts combine to create the potential for a reconfiguration of representative democracy. Vulnerable though such potential is, it opens up the possibility of overcoming the two most glaring defects of contemporary political culture: the absence of effective mechanisms for public deliberation and the presence of mass media, which seem to be persistently at odds with democratic civic values. In the concluding sections of this chapter we outline the 80

From Indirect to Direct Representation online surgeries – videoconferencing Closeness…. …

Co-presence

virtual communities – email lists Mutuality … …

Network

online consultations Coherence… …

Dialogue

blogging – multimedia ‘reality’ TV Empathy … …

Self-disclosure

Figure 3.5. ICT and democratic connection.

features of each of these areas of potential reconfiguration and the extent to which they might provide the foundations for a more direct representative democracy. Fr o m Di sta n c e to C o -Pr e s en c e

Digital technologies have facilitated the growth of relationships of mediated co-presence, leading to shrinkage of social space and the collapse of traditional constraints of distance. Virtual co-presence transcends the problem of proximity by digitally simulating the presence of physically distant actors so as to make them instantly accessible and subject to one another. The shrinkage of political distance has two principal effects: representatives become more visible to remote constituents, and citizens find it easier to engage in virtual contact with politicians. The ability to manage their own visibility and control public impressions is a skill long cherished by politicians. It allows them to be seen in different ways by different people, and not seen at all in moments of uncertainty and ‘backstage’ rehearsal. As Thompson has observed, the ubiquity of digital media makes it much harder to maintain such control: 81

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Whether they like it or not, political leaders today are more visible to more people and more closely scrutinized than they ever were in the past; and at the same time, they are more exposed to the risk that their actions and utterances, and the actions and utterances of others, may be disclosed in ways that conflict with the images they wish to project. Hence the visibility created by the media can become the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility. However much political leaders may seek to manage their visibility, they cannot completely control it. Mediated visibility can slip out of their grasp and can, on occasion, work against them. (Thompson 2005: 42) Apart from well-publicised occasions, when politicians have been exposed by blogs, phone cameras or leaked e-mails as duplicitous or inauthentic (the U.S. Senator Trent Lott’s off-the-cuff support for racial segregation; the U.K. Ministerial adviser Jo Moore’s suggestion that 9/11 presented a good opportunity for the government to make announcements that would be buried amidst other news), elected representatives are faced with a permanent sense that they are on stage, observed not only by the 24/7 professional media, but by a citizenry equipped with the latest surveillant technologies as well. Politicians’ web sites become vulnerable to hackers; they can be talked about by bloggers; an e-mail reply to a single constituent can be copied and distributed to thousands within seconds. At the same time, citizens regard mediated co-presence as grounds for rejecting forms of thin political communication with which they once had to be satisfied. When addressing a political representative involved having to make physical contact – a visit to a weekly surgery or a letter addressed to a physical office – the management of the relationship was largely controlled by politicians, via appointment systems and mail protocols. As representatives can be addressed at any time and in any place via mobile phone, text message or e-mail, citizens experience greater communicative equality. So far, most analyses of this new situation have emphasised the discomfort of politicians in the face of communication overload. The U.S. Congress has gone as far as to support a research project intended to address the curse of overload by unsolicited communications. The Congress Online report (2001a) ‘E-mail Overload in Congress: Managing a Communication Crisis’ states ‘With individual House offices now receiving as many as 8,000 e-mail messages per month and Senate offices receiving as many as 55,000, the burdens on staff are viewed as unmanageable’. Members of 82

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Congress, like elected legislators elsewhere, are in search of effective mail-filtering techniques and protocols designed to protect them from unwanted communicators. From the citizens’ perspective, the problem is one of nonresponse rather than overload. Another Congress Online study (2001b), entitled ‘Constituents and Your Web Site: What Citizens Want to See on Congressional Web Sites’, reports on a series of focus groups in which citizens were asked what they want from online communication with their representatives: ‘Participants . . . wanted assurances that, once expressed, their views would be both acknowledged and taken into account. Just as importantly, however, they expressed their appreciation for Members who showed the courtesy to tell them when they did not agree with them’. Whereas politicians are instrumental in seeking to manage their connection with constituents, citizens tend to be more affectively motivated, expressing concern about the quality rather than the volume of their relationships with their representatives. In the United Kingdom, the Hansard Society has run some experimental online surgeries designed to explore how these peculiarly private consultations about public affairs work in a context of virtual co-presence. The most obvious benefit is the collapse of distance. The MP can be in London and the constituent in Yorkshire, but, for the duration of the interaction, they are in the same virtual place. This not only frees time for the representative, who does not have to lose precious hours moving from one location to another, but allows constituents to engage from the relative security and familiarity of their own home or workplace, the most typical spaces of political opinion formation and exchange (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Wyatt, Katz and Kim 2000; StromerGalley 2002). Virtual co-presence diminishes nonverbal cues, especially significant when constituents, often in the role of a victim or supplicant, encounter articulate, confident politicians. Online interactions are archived, so that both parties to a meeting can recall what was said or promised. As with most forms of online communication, virtual or cyber-surgeries should not be thought of as a substitution for the richness of face-to-face interaction, but as an additional option, which for some at least might prove more convenient or satisfying. Fr o m Pl ace to Ne t w o r k s

As people’s lives become more dispersed across networks of interest, preference and passion, the possibility of representing them within centralised, hierarchical institutions becomes less credible. The 83

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proliferation of social networks, through which weak ties connect citizens to numerous others, weakens the logic of narrow representation, whether based upon bounded territory or partisan ideology. Policy networks have long played a central role in the political process, largely by linking hitherto disconnected sections of the political elite (Marsh 1998; Rhodes 1998; Thatcher 1998; Jordan 1990). Heclo (1979) wrote in the 1970s about the need of governments managing complex policy issues to connect with networks of experts and activists which come to perform ‘subgovernmental’ roles. A consequence of networked governance has been the decline of ‘governing by a central actor’ and increased ‘interdependence between . . . socialpolitical-administrative actors’. As access to online communication and information abundance spreads beyond elites, the threshold of access to the arena of collective action is lowered, and potential mobilisers of public opinion find it easier to disseminate their messages (Bimber 2002; Bach and Stark 2004) In their review of ways in which civil society organisations influence policy processes, Pollard and Court (2005) note that ‘the Internet has enabled groups such as One World and IPS [Inter Press service] to become global hubs for the civil society media, publishing stories on a wide range of development issues and creating opportunities for both large and small groups to publish informative reports, commentaries and opinion pieces’. An early example of an online network lobbying, with a relative degree of success, against powerful transnational policy-makers was the campaign in the late 1990s against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). When the MAI negotiations collapsed in 1998, the French government noted that ‘the development of the Internet is shaking up the world of negotiations’ (Deibert 2000: 257). According to Deibert, the Internet performed three functions in the anti-MAI campaign: it helped to coordinate strategic information between the 600 groups from 70 different countries involved in the campaign; it publicised anti-MAI views to people who would not otherwise have known about them; and it placed pressure on politicians. Deibert’s analysis of the campaign suggests that the Internet’s role was qualitative, transforming a range of nationally based groups into something like a global movement: having been created around the MAI, the network shows definite signs of being sustained into the future. Some of the prominent World-Wide Web sites have now situated their campaign against 84

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the MAI into a wider campaign against ‘corporate rule’ or ‘neoliberalism’ generally, alongside new issue areas . . . This network shifts its focus comfortably between the local, the national and the global, from issues in one national jurisdiction to another, and from issue-area to issue-area. (Deibert 2000: 264–5) Successors to the anti-MAI campaign have been the much more sophisticated digitally-sustained anti-globalisation movement and the Indymedia alternative journalism network, widely regarded as the most vibrant spaces of radical activism in contemporary politics. Civil society networks do not operate only at a transnational level. For example, in the small European state of Latvia an alliance of NGOs have joined together within a single online portal where all of their research papers are deposited and policy debates conducted in public. The Politika portal (http://www.politika.lv), which was launched in July 2001 with the explicit objective of promoting more open policymaking, currently attracts approximately 13,000 unique users per month who produce 150,000 page views. Mainstream media have come to acknowledge Politika as a neutral and reliable source of policy thinking, and both print and broadcast journalists encouraged Politika to monitor the content and ethics of the Latvian media. The key to Politika’s sustainability has been its capacity to operate as a decentred network, combining organisational resources to produce a powerful collective voice. Fr o m Tr a n s m i ss i o n t o D ialogue

The rise of digital interactivity has blurred the boundaries between the production and consumption of mediated content. Though used in a variety of inconsistent ways, ranging from human-computer interaction to one-click credit-card donations to politicians’ web sites to many-to-many peer-based discussion, media interactivity opens up the possibility for a more dialogical style of public communication; one in which message senders and receivers frequently exchange roles and are compelled to collaborate on the framing of common agendas. The ubiquitous spread of phone-in programmes, online discussion boards and e-mail discussion lists is suggestive of a more accessible, socioculturally inclusive, democratised media landscape. Broadcasters have come to realise that simply transmitting news and elite opinions alienates audiences with a growing appetite for talking back. Politicians too are eager to demonstrate their ability and willingness to use digital 85

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technologies not only to propagandise, but to be seen to engage in dialogue with the people they represent as well. There is evidence to suggest that there is a generational migration to online political spaces. According to a 2007 Eurobarometer poll, 24 percent of Europeans aged between 15 and 30 said that they had presented their views in an online discussion forum during the past 12 months, compared with only 8 percent who had been involved in trade union activity and 5 percent who had actively supported a political party. (Interestingly, young people within the new, post-communist European democracies were 3 percent more likely to have participated in political discussion online than were those from the older democracies.) It is unlikely that the younger generation is going to stop discussing politics online once they reach middle and old age; if anything, we can expect this trend to increase as the cohort grows older. Governments in various countries and at various levels have entered the online arena with a view to being seen to engage in dialogue with citizens and to obtaining a more nuanced sense of public opinion than can be gleaned from crude polling. A recent study from the U.K. Department of Justice, examining 12 case studies of governmentmanaged online engagement, concluded that they brought ‘people and communities into the policy process who had not previously participated’ (Department of Justice 2007: 112). But, as we shall discuss further in the next chapter, participants themselves were less than enthused by the willingness of government representatives to contribute their part to the dialogue. Indeed, the technical capacity to facilitate citizen-to-representative dialogue makes failures of responsive communication even more conspicuous than they had been in the pre-digital era. F ro m S pectacle to S elf -Di sc l o s u r e

As relatively inexpensive and increasingly convergent media technologies have become accessible, and the rigid division between producer and audience evaporates, opportunities for self-representation become more realistic (Bruns 2006). Many citizens are no longer content with the role of just being passive spectators. Audiences and publics seem to be converging, leading some commentators to speak of a new, hybrid category combining these once distinct roles (Manin 1996; Livingstone 2005). The rise of the political blogosphere exemplifies the way in which technologies are being used to open up a more subjective space for 86

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citizens’ self-expression. Blogs, which are publicly accessible, regularly updated personal journals (or logs), provide an ongoing account of the beliefs, discoveries and personalities of their authors. Blog software allows bloggers to archive their past entries so that they are searchable and to link any entry to related material, both in other blogs or elsewhere on the web. So blogs become a form of networked expression, an ongoing experiment in the social production of reflection and knowledge. Blogs are fast becoming sophisticated listening posts of modern democracy. To blog is to declare your presence, to disclose to the world that you exist and what it’s like to be you, to affirm that your thoughts are at least as worth hearing as anyone else’s and to emerge from the spectating audience as a player and maker of meanings. Although a number of politicians have established their own blogs (Coleman and Moss 2008; Wright 2008), the main political value of blogging is not to be found in politicians presenting themselves to an audience of potential voters, but in the dense networks of intellectual and symbolic intercourse involving millions of private-public bloggers. The blogosphere is characterised by three democratising characteristics. First, it provides a bridge between the private, subjective sphere of selfexpression and the socially fragile civic sphere in which publics can form and act. As democracy becomes more sensitive to affective dimensions, attention is paid to a revalued recognition of subjective and intersubjective articulations. As several commentators have observed, it is often within the safety of private or familiar environments that people feel most able to speak as citizens (Eliasoph 1998; Gamson 1992). By allowing people to both interact with others and remain as private individuals, blogs provide an important escape route from the ‘if you don’t come to the meeting, you can’t have anything to say’ mentality. Second, blogs allow people – indeed, expect them – to express incomplete thoughts. This terrain of intellectual evolution, vulnerability and search for confirmation or refutation from wider sources is in marked contrast to the crude certainties that dominate so much of political discourse. As Mortensen and Walker (2002) have explained: We post to our blogs as ideas come to us. Daily, hourly, weekly. The frequency varies, but it is a writing that happens in bits and pieces, not in the long hours of thought that suit the cliche´d image of the secluded scholar in the ivory tower. In this sense blogs are suited to the short attention span of our time that worries so many traditionalists. Blogs are interstitial for the writer as for the reader. 87

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Third, blogs lower the threshold of entry to the global debate for traditionally unheard or marginalised voices, particularly from poorer parts of the world which are too often represented by others, without being given a chance to present their own accounts. Blogs such as the South Korean OhMyNews (http://www.ohmynews.com) and Blog Africa (http://blogafrica.com) are refreshing additions to a global debate in which contributors have tended to be better at speaking for than listening to the world’s least privileged. In Iran blogging has become the sphere of opposition debate. Hossein Derakhshan, whose Editor: Myself (http://hoder.com/weblog) blog is one of the most widely respected sources of Iranian political commentary, has observed that blogs have served different functions for different groups of Iranian Internet users:
They have provided first-hand reports from several events such as student protests
They have helped young people find new dates or know more about potential dates, in the lack of legitimate dating services
They have helped parents to get to know more about their children’s values and norms
They have provided Iranian emigrants outside of Iran with firsthand information about the new and unofficial Iran (new values, new lifestyles, new slang, etc.)
Some of well-known bloggers have been hired by newspaper publishers to write for them, something they had never had a chance to do
They have attracted several top officials and politicians as regular readers; in some cases they have commented on some posts in some blogs
They have popularised the concept and use of the utf-8 standard as the ultimate standard for putting Persian texts on the Net
They have hugely increased the total volume of searchable Persian content on the Internet, both directly by their own content, and indirectly by popularizing the idea of full utf-8-friendly Persian web sites
They have shifted the attention of many young users from chat rooms towards reading and writing blogs
They have encouraged a number of groups of bloggers to gather and publish e-zines (such as Cappuccino, a weekly e-zine with more than 50,000 visitors per month) based on their experiences as bloggers (http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/006659.html, last accessed 10 March 2007). 88

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It is as channels of honest self-presentation that blogs make their greatest contribution to democracy. If Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off ‘That’s the way it is’ was the dictum of the world of media-represented factual certainties, ‘That’s the way I am’ is the dictum of a self-expressive culture where truth emerges in fragmented, subjective, incomplete and contestable ways. DEVELOPING THEORY – INTERROGATING PRACTICE

Our arguments so far have proceeded on the basis of normative theory, supported by empirical findings. We have stated that contemporary liberal democracies are blighted by communicative disconnections which have resulted in widespread public disengagement from politics as usually practiced. In theory, interactive, digital information and communication technologies would seem to offer promising ways of creating forms of political discourse consistent with democratic norms. Digital interactivity could facilitate political communication characterised by greater transparency and public co-presence, networked collective action, dialogical debate and individual self-representation, but whether it does so will need to be explored empirically. In the next two chapters we turn to such empirical investigation, examining case studies of specific attempts to use digital technologies to create a more direct form of representative democracy.

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C H A P T E R 4

E-Democracy from Above

C

ommunicating with the public used to be a straightforward operation for governments, parliaments and local authorities. The communicative relationship was largely one-way, with the dissemination of minutes, official records, reports and memoranda being placed regularly within the public domain, usually to be read by a small audience of interested experts. For most citizens, communication with state bodies has tended to be conducted via post or telephone and has involved specific problems relating to their personal circumstances. At election time, publicity campaigns intensified this relationship of monological transmission, leaving citizens with little room to do anything in response except cheer, boo and vote. During the last decade these old communicative arrangements have come under pressure to change. As citizens begin to experience two-way relationships with other institutions – shops, travel agencies, banks, broadcasters, colleges and universities – there is an increasing expectation that those elected to represent and govern them will be both accessible and interactively accountable online. Most government departments and parliaments now have web sites, as do individual MPs and other elected representatives. But these tend to be little more than electronic brochures: accessible via the Internet, but not conforming to the interactive ethos of online communication. A number of innovative online projects have been initiated. One of the most radical, in terms of shifting the balance of power from the state to citizens, is the Estonian government’s TOM web site (TOM stands for ‘Today I Decide’). This allows Estonians to propose new laws which, if supported by a relatively small number of signatories, have to be considered and reported upon by the Estonian government. In the United Kingdom e-petitioning has been initiated, and there are proposals from both main parties to make it 90

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compulsory for popular petition proposals to be debated in parliament. Several governments, parliaments and councils have established online consultation mechanisms to support them with policy-making. In 2001 the European Union established the Interactive Policy-Making Unit with a view to obtaining continuous access to the opinions and experience of EU citizens. In the United States the main focus has been upon e-rulemaking, which allows the public to search regulatory documents and submit comments electronically on proposed new rulings by government agencies. In many countries both national and local governments have run online consultations, designed to involve citizens, communities, businesses and pressure groups in policy-making and legislative processes (Gustafsson 2002; Jankowski and van Os 2002; Renton and Macintosh 2007; Coleman 2006; Delakorda 2007). The common feature of all these initiatives is that they were initiated, funded and managed by state bodies. We refer to these as examples of top-down e-participation, in contrast to other online projects that have come into being from beyond the state, which we refer to as e-participation from below. In this chapter we explore empirically two examples of top-down e-participation, and in Chapter 5 we present three empirical studies of e-participation from below. As we shall see, there is a thin line between these two categories, which should perhaps be conceived as a spectrum rather than being mutually exclusive. Our aim in both this and the next chapter is to understand how these initiatives have come about, what those who initiated them hoped to achieve and how far, if at all, they provide citizens with new democratic opportunities. At the end of this and the next chapter we draw attention to the limitations of the category that we have been exploring. In the final two chapters of the book we turn to questions of policy, arguing that the best aspects of both of these models should be incorporated in an effective strategy for e-democracy. CASE 1 – ONLINE PARLIAMENTARY CONSULTATIONS

A series of experiments in using the Internet to facilitate public input to the U.K. Parliament were launched in 1998. Since that time over 20 online consultations have been run by or on behalf of Parliament. Instead of simply creating a web forum and inviting the public to have its say, rather like an online phone-in programme, these consultations were designed to recruit participants with experience or expertise in relation to specific policy issues. For example, consultation forums 91

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have been established to discuss policies on subjects as diverse as domestic violence, family tax credits, stem cell research, constitutional reform, hate crimes in Northern Ireland and the treatment of diabetes. The objectives of these online consultations were to do the following:
Gather informed evidence from the public to help parliamentarians understand policy issues
Recruit citizens whose evidence might be unheard or neglected in the usual course of parliamentary evidence-taking
Enable participants to interact and learn from one another over an extended period of asynchronous discussion
Enable participants to raise aspects of policies under discussion that might not otherwise have been considered
Enable legislators to participate in the online discussion, raising questions and responding to citizens’ comments, as time permits
Derive a fair, independent summary of views raised which can constitute official evidence to Parliament. We focus here upon two of these online parliamentary consultations: the Womenspeak consultation on domestic violence and the consultation on the draft Communications Bill. Both were set up, moderated and summarised by the Hansard Society, an independent, nonpartisan body that has been active in encouraging the British Parliament to use digital technologies in innovative ways. Womenspeak was commissioned by the All-Party Domestic Violence Group and was conducted over a one-month period in March 2000. The consultation on the draft Communications Bill occurred in May 2002, when a Joint Committee of MPs and peers was established to consider and report on this important piece of draft legislation. (Pre-legislative scrutiny is a post-1997 innovation introduced by the Modernisation Select Committee with a view to enabling parliamentarians to examine draft legislation before the ink is dry on the final Bill.) The Joint Committee introduced two important innovations into its proceedings:
The public was able to see and hear all of its evidence sessions which were webcast live on Parliament’s own site, http://www.parliamentlive.tv, and broadcast on BBC Parliament the following weekend.
In order to gather a wider range of views on the draft Bill, the Committee commissioned an online forum, under the auspices of the Hansard Society and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, to accompany its formal evidence-taking. 92

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The two consultations examined here contrasted in their purposes: the first was designed to enable women survivors of domestic violence to submit experiential testimony to a group of parliamentarians interested in developing policy; the second allowed the public to submit and discuss evidence for consideration by a committee of MPs and peers as part of the process of pre-legislative scrutiny. Demographic profiles of participants in both consultations were produced by examining user registration forms. All messages in both consultations were analysed by a team of trained coders. A post-consultation survey was sent to participants in both consultations, and face-toface interviews were conducted with participating MPs and peers. In c l u s i v e C o n s u l t a t i o n o r ‘T he Us u a l Su s p e c t s’?

Identifying survivors of domestic violence and persuading them to participate in an online parliamentary consultation is far from simple. Participants for this consultation were recruited by the Hansard Society in partnership with Women’s Aid, which has confidential access to a national network of local refuges, as well as women’s groups and disability groups. In October and November 1999, five months before the consultation began, it was announced via flyers in Women’s Aid newsletters. Other recruitment was conducted at a number of regional meetings across the United Kingdom. Most of the registration for the consultation was conducted face-to-face or by post. The Womenspeak consultation faced two initial problems: accessibility and security. Many women who were enthusiastic about participating had no access to or familiarity with the Internet. Fifty-two percent of the registered participants had no knowledge of using the Internet before they took part. Most of the participants were able to go online using computers in refuges (secure shelters provided for women who are at risk from domestic violence). This had several advantages: the personal and often distressing stories they had to tell could be recounted in friendly and familiar surroundings; there were trained workers to help them if they needed personal support during or after posting their messages; IT help was close at hand – 60 percent of the women reported needing help in getting to the consultation web site, and most of the time that was provided by refuge workers. A second problem concerned security. Had the participants been invited to attend Parliament to tell their stories and express their views, few would have gone. Parliament is an intimidating place, and most women would not want their names recorded as witnesses. Many of 93

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the women thinking of participating in this consultation expressed concerns about the confidentiality of the online medium. This was particularly the case when they were sharing homes and/or computers with their abusers. In the consultation participants were given pseudonyms, assured that their real names (which were registered for purposes of authentication) would remain private and that the content of the online discussion would only be made available to other participants and the Hansard Society. According to the post-consultation survey, 85 percent of the participants felt that the web site was a safe and secure place. The Womenspeak forum recorded an average of 1,574 hits per day, with 78 users visiting the forum each weekday and 111 on weekends. Seventy-three percent of the participants visited the site at least six times; 18 percent visited at least 10 times. The average visitor session lasted 16 minutes and 31 seconds; 199 women registered and participated online, submitting 960 messages between them. Participants came from throughout England and Wales, with a demographically typical spread of ages and ethnic backgrounds. Six percent were registered disabled. Recruitment of participants for the draft Communications Bill consultation was much easier. The clerks of the Joint Committee provided the Hansard Society with a list of potential participants, including organisations from which the committee would like to have heard evidence had there been more time. In addition, other participants were recruited who were unknown to parliamentarians and could bring diverse as well as alternative perspectives to the consultation. The Communications Bill consultation web site recorded 1,949 hits per day, the average duration of which was 17 minutes and 12 seconds. An average of 85 people visited the site each weekday and 55 at weekends. Registration for this consultation was 373 people, but only 136 posted messages to the forum. In all 222 messages were posted. Unlike the domestic violence consultation, where the emphasis was upon sharing experiences, discussion and mutual support, in this consultation there was a more traditional focus upon influencing policy. Most of those who registered were either more interested in what others had to say or else felt that they would not be able to influence policy, so did not submit their own comments. Typical comments from registered non-posters in the post-consultation survey were ‘I preferred to watch the debate develop and take note of the points raised’ and ‘I did not submit a personal message mainly because I did not feel I knew enough about the topic, and time reasons’. 94

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How politically engaged were these consultees prior to their involvement in this exercise? In the post-consultation surveys, participants were asked whether they had ever contacted an MP and whether they were members of a political party. A majority (58%) of Womenspeak participants had never been in contact with an MP, whereas for the Communications Bill consultation the number was just over one-third (38%). Ninety-six percent of Womenspeak participants and 78 percent of the participants in the Communications Bill consultation were not members of political parties, the usual point of entry for citizens to the policy process. Was it the case that participants in these consultations, while registering as individuals, were in fact representing interest groups? According to the post-consultation survey, 94 percent of the Womenspeak participants and 82 percent of the Communications Bill participants had no organisational affiliation related to the subject of the consultations. The majority of participants in both consultations lived outside of London: 77.5 percent for Womenspeak and 63 percent for the Communications Bill consultation. In the case of Womenspeak, which included many low-income participants and single mothers, the opportunity to take part in a parliamentary inquiry without travelling to London was a significant benefit. Although one might have expected Communications Bill consultees to be more able to visit Parliament in person, according to the post-consultation survey only 17 percent of registered participants ever attended Parliament to see the committee in session. (Twenty-seven percent watched at least one webcast of the committee in session, and 66 percent visited the committee’s web site.) This suggests that interactions which would not otherwise have taken place were facilitated by the creation of a space for online consultation. Cr e a t i n g an d C onnectin g Onli ne N et wor k s

There was a significant contrast in the extent of interaction between participants in the two consultations: in the Womenspeak forum over four-fifths (82%) of all messages were replies to previous messages; in the Communications Bill forum fewer than one in 10 (8%) messages were replies to previous messages. This reflects the sociable, networking character of the former consultation, as opposed to the more advocative nature of the latter forum. Many participants found the experience of interacting online with other survivors of domestic violence to be empowering in itself, regardless of their access to parliamentarians. As the one-month 95

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consultation went on, Womenspeak participants increasingly used the forum to create an online community of mutual support, as well as engaging in a formal consultative exercise. Comments posted in the forum towards the end of the consultation indicated the extent to which a virtual community had been built: It was brilliant; I felt really close to the participants during the consultation as if I were part of a giant support network. Through this site I have built up so much strength by reading all your stories and I wish the best to every one out there and a big thank you to all that have worked tirelessly to get this site working every day. Let’s hope this isn’t the last. Thank you to everyone involved in this discussion. Thank you to all of you who have become friends to me. I never imagined feeling this sad at the end of this. I will miss you all and hope it is not too long until we are in touch again. Take care and stay safe. A majority of women (60%) reported in the post-consultation survey that participating in the forum helped them deal with their own experiences of domestic violence. As a result of networking online, some participants made contacts with one another in the offline world. In the post-consultation survey, 24 percent of participants reported making new contacts, and 92 percent reported learning something new as a result of reading other participants’ messages. Several of the participants were eager to continue the virtual network beyond the life of the parliamentary consultation and subsequently set up their own web site in which survivors’ stories and views could be exchanged. In the case of the Communications Bill consultation, there were fewer signs of community-building, related to the markedly lower level of online interaction between contributors to this forum. Nonetheless, in the post-consultation survey most (72%) participants (including majorities of both message posters and nonposters) claimed to have learned something new from reading messages from other participants. I n t e r a c t i o n w i t h Politi c al R ep r es e n t a t i v es

In the Womenspeak consultation forum 31 messages (3.2% of all) were contributed by six MPs. In the Communications Bill consultation forum eight messages (3.6% of all messages) were contributed by four MPs and peers. Despite the emphasis upon peer-to-peer communication in the Womenspeak forum, three-quarters of the participants 96

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reported that a major reason for taking part was the opportunity to interact with MPs. In the post-consultation survey, however, 68 percent of Womenspeak participants stated that they did not consider that the MPs who took part were interested in what they had to say, and almost four out of 10 (39%) were not satisfied with the contributions from MPs. Nonetheless, perhaps surprisingly, 94 percent of participants considered that the online consultation was a worthwhile exercise, and 93 percent said that they would like to take part in future exercises of this kind. This suggests that participants measured success in terms of group networking more than political interaction. In the case of the Communications Bill consultation, a majority (53%) of participants were satisfied with the degree of involvement in the forum by MPs and peers on the committee considering the draft bill. One in four participants considered that the committee was interested in what they had to say; fewer than 3 percent disagreed, and the majority were unsure. But 72 percent considered the online consultation to have been worthwhile, 91 percent were in favour of there being more online parliamentary consultations and 87 percent said that they would definitely be prepared to participate in future online consultations – with the other 13 percent saying that they would possibly do so. These are mixed messages. Clearly, there was some concern amongst both groups of consultees about the extent of parliamentarians’ interest in what they had to say. If an objective of online consultations is to increase public trust in politicians as good listeners, the exercises reported here do not provide grounds for optimism. The parliamentarians who participated in the Womenspeak consultation expressed enthusiasm about its method of collecting evidence: ‘If you meet with a group in the constituency for 5–10 minutes you don’t always have sufficient time to listen to all the problems. This was a unique experience because you were able to listen to a dialogue for an extensive period of time’ (Linda Gilroy MP). But the length of the process proved difficult to integrate into already crowded schedules: I knew I had to do it because I had been asked to. But I had other commitments which I had to make time for as well. And my brief is actually Health . . . I guess it was worthwhile, but it was hard to find time to do it. It coincided with other commitments. (Caroline Spelman MP) 97

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With the Internet format, people are used to immediate responses, but it does take time to change legislation. In that sense it isn’t an equal participation; a lot of women had this as their number one priority, whereas MPs work on a huge amount of other issues. And with the time you have it is not realistic to expect MPs to read all the contributions. (Julia Drown MP) Members of the committee examining the draft Communications Bill, from all parties, were enthusiastic about the exercise: The online consultation worked exceptionally well, and proved its worth as a vital tool in the democratic process. I am sure future committees will find it as invaluable as we did. The responses were of a very high quality, and gave us a real sense of public opinion across a wide range of issues. We should promote future fora as aggressively as possible to maximise participation. (Lord Puttnam, Chair of the Committee) It helped us change the questions we were asking the witnesses and made us focus on areas we would not necessarily have thought of. It tended either to reinforce something that we already knew or it changed questions that we would not otherwise have asked. (Brian White MP) It opens it up to a wider range of people to feed in ideas and opinions into the Parliamentary process. The fact that we were able to get ideas and opinions from the regions, particularly input on the importance of regional broadcasting, meant that the exercise was not restricted to Whitehall and Westminster. It allowed us to get on the road, electronically. The alternative would have been to hold a series of public meetings around the country. In my view, it was an advantage to the credibility of the committee and its work. One benefit of this consultation is reinforcing policies that are already well known and throwing up the concerns that may not previously have arisen. The argument against it is that you have to have the facility to participate in an online forum. (Lord McNally) We thought it worked very well – it clearly was popular, we had very substantial response, we had very good information and we incorporated some of the points that came out from the online forum in our recommendations. (Lord Crickhowell) 98

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Evi dent ial Q uality

Traditionally, parliamentary inquiries select witnesses who are acknowledged experts, question them formally and minute their evidence, which is then used to determine and support recommendations. Online parliamentary consultations should fulfil the same purpose: the accumulation of high-quality evidence. Critics of online deliberation argue that that most policy issues are too complex and time-consuming for the public to give serious consideration to them. Much of the literature about online political discussion has been pessimistic about the quality of online discourse. Hill and Hughes, who conducted research on political chat rooms, concluded that ‘Chat rooms are a difficult format for thoughtful discussion. The short line space and the fast pace require people to make snap comments, not thoughtful ones’ (Hill and Hughes 1998: 130). Davis found, on the basis of his study of political Usenet groups, that ‘In Usenet political discussions, people talk past one another, when they are not verbally attacking each other. The emphasis is not problem solving, but discussion dominance. Such behaviour does not resemble deliberation and it does not encourage participation, particularly by the less politically interested’ (Davis 1999: 177). Wilhelm concluded from his research that ‘The sorts of virtual political forum that were analyzed do not provide viable sounding boards for signaling and thematising issues to be processed by the political system’ (Wilhelm 2000: 102). These are strangely noncontextualised accounts of online discussion. Chat rooms and political party discussion lists during election campaigns are hardly appropriate places to expect to find the discursive characteristics of democratic deliberation. The environment and structure of communication has a significant effect upon its content; synchronous chat rooms and peer-generated Usenet groups are no more indicative of the scope for online public deliberation than loud, prejudiced and banal political arguments in crowded pubs are indicative of the breadth of offline political discussion. Assessing the quality of public deliberation is particularly problematic, involving sensitive normative standards. Nonetheless, attempts have been made to design methodologies for measuring the quality of stated opinions (Price and Neijens 1997; Wyatt et al. 2000; Capella, Price and Nir 2002; Muhlberger 2000). Three rudimentary characteristics of deliberative quality were analysed in this study: the extent to which messages were supported by external information, the frequency of message posting and the level of interaction between 99

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messages and previous messages. Normatively, one might expect a deliberative discourse to include widespread use of external information sources; nondomination by a minority of frequent posters, to the exclusion of other, less articulate or sociable prospective participants; and high levels of interaction between agenda-setting messages and responses. In submitting messages, participants could draw upon information from a number of external sources, including books, reports, newspaper articles and web sites, or upon self-referential information derived from personal experience. The use of external sources is commonly associated with the rational validation of evidence. In the Womenspeak consultation, one in three messages (32%) cited external sources of information. The fact that two-thirds of the messages did not go beyond personal testimony or opinion reflects the highly subjective nature of the experience of domestic violence. In the case of the Communications Bill consultation, nearly half of all messages (48%) referred to an external source, but fewer than one in 10 (7%) drew upon personal, anecdotal experience. Insofar as deliberative quality is dependent upon argument repertoires that extend beyond subjective experience, feelings or opinion, the majority of messages submitted to both consultations fell short of this standard, although a significant proportion of messages to both consultations were informed by external sources. In the Womenspeak consultation most participants (52%) submitted only one message; 90 percent submitted fewer than 10 messages; but 21 percent of all messages were submitted by just two participants, and a third were submitted by just 11 percent of the participants. Frequent posters were much more likely to be agenda-setters than onetime posters: 18 percent of messages to the consultation were classified as ‘seeds’ (they started a new discussion thread); of these, most were submitted by the minority of participants who were frequent posters. In the Communications Bill consultation 82 percent of participants submitted only one message. There were very few frequent posters (4%), and these contributed less than one in 10 messages. Rafaeli defines interactivity as ‘the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of earlier messages’ (Rafaeli 1988). Eighty-two percent of messages to Womenspeak responded in some way to a previous message in the forum. The extent of dialogue and information exchange in this forum was striking. In the Communications Bill 100

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consultation only 14 percent of messages were responses to preceding messages. Participants in this forum were less interested in discussing others’ ideas than stating their own. The largest numbers of responses in the forum were to messages submitted by MPs. In this respect, there was a striking contrast in the degree of interaction between discussants in the two consultations under consideration. So m e Co n c l u s i o n s

The principal conclusion to be drawn from these case studies is that not all online parliamentary consultations are alike. Womenspeak was a relatively informal consultation designed to collect experiential evidence. The Communications Bill consultation was more closely connected to the legislative process and adopted a multimedia strategy for making this process more accessible to interested citizens. It would be a mistake to expect all online parliamentary consultations to perform the same functions or deliver the same results. These online consultations created a more inclusive environment for public deliberation. Most participants in both of them were not ‘the usual suspects’: party members, lobbyists or people who lived in or around the Westminster village. The voices heard in these consultation forums would probably not otherwise have been heard by parliamentarians. But online participation had to be actively promoted. In particular, the success of the Womenspeak consultation depended upon extensive outreach work, not least to overcome problems of digital exclusion. Despite the top-down character of these online consultations, they did serve to generate and connect networks of interest or practice. In both consultations a majority of participants claimed to have learned from other contributors. But, whereas participants in the Communications Bill consultation considered that the committee had been interested in what they had to say and that members of the committee had participated in a satisfactory way, Womenspeak participants tended to be unconvinced at the end of the consultation that MPs had been interested in what they had to say. Although it would be unwise to conclude from these case studies that parliamentary online consultations raise the quality of public deliberation, neither can the conclusion be drawn that online discourse is somehow doomed to ranting and prejudice. Although these findings are based upon elementary indicators of discursive quality, significant proportions of messages to both consultations 101

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referred to external information; frequent posters did not dominate the discussion to the exclusion of others; and, in the case of the Womenspeak consultation, there was a high level of interactivity. These were, by almost any democratic standards, civilised and productive debates. CASE 2 – THE COMMUNITY CAMPAIGN CREATOR†

Our second case study was also initiated and funded by government: Bristol City Council, with a grant from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minster’s e-Innovations Fund. Unlike the parliamentary consultations, which sought to use the Internet to build vertical connections between elected representatives and citizens, this project aimed to give local people access to technologies with a view to encouraging an empowered notion of citizenship whereby, as well as occasionally voting, citizens are able to become effective ‘community campaigners’. Campaign Creator focused on engaging the civically unengaged and politically excluded, rather than serving already active citizens or community groups. As such, it constituted an attempt to redress asymmetries of access to political resources at the local level by democratising the ability that people have to raise their own agendas. The Project Initiation Document acknowledged that ‘there is an uneven playing field, as established community groups are likely to have greater access to resources and are therefore likely to be able to communicate their issues and concerns more effectively’. A member of the project team explained that: the role of a local authority is to be a community leader; it’s not simply to be a service provider. . . There is a role in helping those people who haven’t had much opportunity to make their voice heard, to bring their concerns forward. . . . It is easy for certain types of people from particular areas to impact the agenda because they’ve got access to resources; they know how things work, [they have] got personal contacts. So I think it’s our responsibility within the authority to bring forward those voices that perhaps aren’t heard quite so much. (Member of the Project Team) †

This case study is based upon an evaluation report commissioned by Bristol Council, produced by Stephen Coleman and Giles Moss.

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Campaign Creator comprised four key resources:
The Community Campaign Manager – A hosted web application and online campaign management tool. The application was designed to allow first-time campaigners to develop their own web sites e-newsletters, online surveys and e-petitions. It also allows campaigners to create offline campaigning materials, such as leaflets and posters, thus combining the online and offline aspects of campaigning.
The Community Campaign Guide – A booklet, available in print and online formats, providing written guidance for those who are new to campaigning. It covers all ‘the information you need to launch, organise and publicise a community campaign’. It comprises case studies and interviews drawn from successful campaigns and an introduction to how the formal democratic process works.
The Community Campaign web site – A central hub for the project that provides a gateway to the Community Campaign Manager and access to the Community Campaign Guide. It also includes discussion forums for campaigners to contribute thoughts and share advice with one another.
Community Campaign Coaching – In order to develop links with citizens who might want to engage politically, but lack skills, resources or confidence, the Campaign Creator project funded the Scarman Trust, a charitable organisation that specialises in the field of citizen empowerment, to run an innovative ‘campaign coaching’ course. Four part-time, paid campaign coaches worked regularly with people in some of the most deprived areas of Bristol, helping them to think through issues of local concern and consider how to organise together in order to take effective action to address these issues. In our interviews with them, the project managers were eager to define community campaigning as being distinct from ‘political’ or ‘marketing’ campaigns, as well as from ‘national’ or ‘international’ campaigns. According to them, community campaigning refers to campaigns that concern an issue, idea, proposal, policy or action relevant to a local geographical area or a community of interest. This definition formed part of the terms and conditions for use of the web site: A ‘community campaign’ in the context of this project is recognised to be separate from: (1) A ‘political campaign’ (which is primarily concerned with securing stated party political objectives or has the aim of securing political office); (2) A ‘marketing campaign’ (whose 103

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primary objective is increasing take up of a specific product or service) and; (3) A ‘national’ or ‘international’ campaign (whose initial intent is to operate over the widest geographical area). (http:// www.campaigncreator.org/about/terms_conditions.html) The citizenship skills that Community Campaign Creator aimed to encourage were of a very specific kind. In our interviews we endeavoured to discover how this conception of active citizenship was understood and promoted by those involved in the project. First, the project initiators were eager to promote what they called ‘constructive citizenship’. The meaning of this term is aptly captured in the slogans used to publicise the Campaign Creator project: ‘Don’t just Complain, Campaign!’ or ‘You Can Do It!’ Community campaigning was seen as a means by which citizens could assume responsibility and take a more active role in their locality. Community campaigners were seen as those citizens willing to assume a responsible role in deciding upon and bringing about change for themselves. In this process, it was argued, they gain confidence as the local authority provides them with the support for doing what they could not have done through their own efforts alone. The Leader of Bristol City Council described the need for such an approach as follows: ‘Quite a lot of people are quite good at shouting and saying, you know, “the Council should be doing this, that and the other”. What we’re short of is people saying, “this is what needs to be done and I’m prepared to take a lead on it, if you’ll support me”’ (Council Leader, Bristol City Council). Second, they attached considerable importance to understanding the political system and learning how to negotiate within it. As participatory democrats have long argued, the experience of participation is educative. The community campaign booklet urged would-be campaigners to think through the issues of concern to them and assemble relevant evidence that will convince the right people. In short, the project aimed to align grass-roots and systemic logics. A key aspect of this learning process was seen as being gaining a more sophisticated understanding of how the political system operates and knowing whom to contact in order to get things done. Political education and learning about ‘the rules of the game’ were thought to be clear benefits of campaigning: I think what they’ll learn is what we called in the guide ‘the rules of the game’ and the process for how a decision is made . . . Most people think that the way to get a thing done is to write a letter to your MP and the idea that actually a meeting with the kind of 104

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environment agency is the way to have something happen is a million miles away from someone’s personal perception of how political decisions are made. So I think that’s would I hope was the outcome of this process, was that people actually then knew that there was an environment agency, you know, knew that those things happened. And it’s like a more sophisticated way of engaging. (Member of the Project Advisory Group) Third, they sought to cultivate respect for difference, consensusbuilding and keeping expression within legal parameters. Several interviewees were keen to distinguish between positive ‘community’ campaigning and negative ‘political’ campaigning. This was described to us as one of the guiding themes directing the design and publicity of this project: ‘We wanted to encourage positive campaigning. So rather than using it in a negative way, perhaps you might to “save My Park” or “Do up the cemetery” or something rather than, you know, we didn’t want it to be used for negative political campaigning . . . we wanted it to be community issues, positive work’ (Bristol City Council, Corporate Communications). Some campaigners expressed concern that local authorities might cherry-pick certain types of campaigns to support and promote, attempting to impose a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate campaigning. One local activist, for instance, expressed the general concern that the notion of community campaigning seemed too cosily conceived: I’m a bit dubious that every activist group is included in the sort of sphere of what local authorities think of as groups they should be working with . . . And the question is, when you want to engage with those groups, if that’s what we’re saying, are you ever going to exclude groups like that, as some people argue. Or, if we are going to engage with them, how are we going to engage with them, when they hold views that most people find repulsive . . . I think I would feel naturally sympathetic to the sort of general Guardian, . . . approach that has come across, because, okay, that’s me as well. And I feel entirely sympathetic towards it. But I think there are some critical questions that we all need to ask ourselves. (Local Community Activist) The project team favoured a light moderation policy, with the responsibility for maintaining democratic order ‘passed down’ to the campaigners themselves: 105

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Our moderation role is about making sure that things fit in with our fair use policy. So we make a judgment about whether we feel something is racist or is illegal or is inciting some form of violence or, you know, things that would be unacceptable to us . . . But we don’t then moderate what goes on beneath that so it’s up to the generators of the content, the campaign owners, and they’re the ones who are sort of moderating, they’re the ones who are engaging with other people on their campaign. So I think the moderation role is actually passed down a step, in some ways. You know, we’re like super-users checking everything is, within broad principles, acceptable, but beyond that, I imagine there could be people who run their own campaigns at a local level who really don’t like some stuff that people say to them and may not agree with their campaign, you know, may have very valid criticisms or objections to the sorts of campaigns that they put forward. That’s not really our issue to sort out. It’s their issue, as the campaigner, to sort out. So I think it becomes complex, it becomes us delegating some of that responsibility to other people who have taken on that campaign and the role. (Member of the Project Team) A campaign coach described how the campaign coaching process taught a would-be campaigner that they needed to be less ‘antagonistic’ and ‘militant’ if they were to be taken seriously by others and achieve their desired result: [I]t did help him [the campaigner] realise that he can’t be so antagonistic towards people! . . . Well, because when we were talking about it, I mean, looking at what other people were doing in the media and on the newspapers and we were saying, if you actually want to achieve a result, you have to maybe not be so militant in the beginning to actually get a foot under the table. (Community Campaign Coach) Fourth, occasional and intermittent activity was valued, as opposed to the necessity for long-term political commitment. The focus of Campaign Creator was on short-term, local campaigns rather than the creation of enduring community groups or social movements. Community campaigning was thus seen as a means of participating without becoming a permanently active member of the community. It was something that could be done part-time and intermittently, without morphing into a full-time political activist: 106

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There’s a certain image that community groups have that not everyone in the community wants to partake in. And so I’d be particularly happy if this tool was able to allow people to have a campaign to raise their issues, to find like-minded people in their issues without having to join a community group, without having to become a permanently active member of the community. (Member of the Project Advisory Group) In most cases, these will be about single issues, campaign groups and more sort of consumer view of one’s relationship with policy making which says ‘look, these are the things I’m interested in, these are my views and this is where I’m going to put those views to get them heard rather than join a political party and go to the pub on a wet Wednesday and, you know, talk about it as well’. (Member of the Project Advisory Group) E-Pa r t i c i p a t i o n a s C i v i c Ed u c a t i o n ?

The most innovative element of this project was the campaign coaching process, intended to support local people to raise their own agendas and run their own campaigns. Community Campaign Coaching was organised and coordinated by the Scarman Trust, in partnership with Bristol City Council. Community campaign coaching was conceived as being not about taking decisions for individuals, but giving people the political capacity to make and effect their own decisions: Well, I feel more of a guide than a coach; you guide people to where they can go for information, where they can go for funding if they need it, how they can set up public meetings, how they can find out if something they thought is a good idea or not, is a feasible idea. That’s the way I see it, as a guide. (Community Campaign Coach) The whole thing about coaching is that, you know, it’s getting people to do things, to make their own decisions, rather than being a kind of mentor where you say, well, I’m an expert and I’ll, you know, kind of be here for you. (Representative from Scarman Trust) The idea of training citizens to become active campaigners is a novel one. While there have been a number of interventions by local and national government intended to engender social capital, a term often associated with Putnam’s (2000) conceptualisation of networks of 107

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social trust, cooperation and norms that bind communities together, political capacity-building refers specifically to the generation of skills and resources which empower people to raise political agendas and realise objectives. Political capacity depends upon and circulates through crosscutting governance networks that traverse the boundaries of market, civil society and the formal political arena. Training citizens to develop such capacity entails more than simply helping them to find their way to the Town Hall or use online ‘tools’ which might connect them more easily to sources of power. Pedagogies of active citizenship, if they are genuinely intended to nurture the political capacities of the excluded and disadvantaged, must serve, firstly, to unveil structures and mechanisms of power that are inherent to apparently neutral governance, and, secondly, provide citizens with practical resources for challenging such power, or at least making it more accountable. The Scarman Trust began by running a course for part-time community workers on how to train local citizens to use the Internet to run their own campaigns. The coaching was principally directed towards those who would not necessarily have access to a computer at home, those who lacked the requisite computer experience and know-how to use the Community Campaign Manager unaided, first-time campaigners and citizens who had traditionally been excluded from the political process for various reasons. The Scarman Trust regarded coaching as an attempt to ‘create space where people can find their own solution to their problems and issues’. The coaching process began late in the pilot period and so ran for only approximately four months. Po l i t i c a l Ou t c o m e s ?

Some elected representatives expressed concern about the political risks that a project of this kind might present: The political risks are that you raise expectations that you can’t deliver on and that you make people disillusioned and cynical about what you’re doing. So I think I need to be careful that we don’t do that. We recognise the contribution that everybody’s made, whether or not we can wave a magic wand and deliver whatever it is that they want. (Councillor, Liberal Democrats) I think you’re constantly building up an expectation that you can do things that you can’t necessarily do, and I think that causes problems because it, you know, if you’re filled with expectations and then you have no way to meet them, that leads to a lot of 108

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dissatisfaction. So I’d like to know how we’re supposed to deal with that. You know, how do you make it so that you’re more able to respond? And at the moment, there is no mechanism. (Councillor, Labour) Well, I can see that some people might say that, ‘why is the Council funding things so that people can have a go at them?’. (Councillor, Labour) I think it’s going to be very difficult if you expect local government to actually fund groups or individuals to fight the system. (Councillor, Labour) The risks are what most people focus on. Any time I’ve spoken about this publicly, I can predict the questions straight away; it’s always about the risk, the risk of people starting campaigns which are offensive. (Member of the Project Team) Local activists perceived similar risks: that the independence of civil society would be compromised by the council promoting grass-roots campaigns, several of which were directed at the local authority itself: The fundamental of community campaigning is about relationships and trust and power relationships and, if your tools are actually controlled by someone else, who may or may not be your friend, may be your enemy. If I were a community activist and the council offered me a campaigning platform on which to run, I wouldn’t use it because I wouldn’t trust them not to dump me if I started being awkward . . . I think there’s real danger of people being co-opted, subverted and undermined by government. (Member of the Project Advisory Group) Perhaps in response to perceptions of the council as a threat to the independence of civil society, the Project Team downplayed the visible presence of the council, as some of those involved in the project observed: ‘I think it was divorced from local government; it wasn’t branded by Bristol City Council, it wasn’t presented as a Bristol City Council project. It was very much almost as an independent thing, so a lot of people may not even have realised it was promoted by the local government, Bristol City Council’ (Bristol City Council, Corporate Design). One of the major achievements of the Campaign Creator project was to focus candidly upon the relationship between the 109

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council and grass-roots campaigners with a view to understanding the scope for synergistic collaboration – even co-governance – between elected representatives and active citizens. As a member of the Project Team explained: We wanted to make sure that we demonstrated at least a neutrality, which was difficult at first because we were seen as being council representatives. But the more we developed and built this relationship with other organisations, I think the easier it got for us because we’d been holding hands with these community groups for some time now, you know, 10 months with Friends of the Earth. And it’s difficult for people to criticise you for being biased if you are aligning yourself with these other groups. (Member of the Project Team) Although we were not invited to evaluate the project beyond its inception and early use, we were able to observe some examples of the ways in which it was used by a small number of Bristol citizens. For example, campaigns were launched to deal with the effects of vandalism in a local park, change the hours of work of noisy property developers and oppose fare rises on a monopoly bus service. The striking feature of all of these campaigns was their integration of online resources and offline activities: these were not virtual campaigns, but forms of e-supported real-world collective action. Asked whether they had confidence in the underlying premise of Community Campaign Creator that local authorities and community activists could work in partnership to address social problems, there was a mixed response from the local citizens we interviewed as part of the project evaluation: To a certain extent, both have got themselves into a rut. The politicians because it’s an institutionalised one, and that’s the way they’ve been brought up: ‘I’ve been elected this way, I don’t see why I should change’. And the activists, because – well I’m an activist, I don’t talk to anybody else like that, you just take what I say and do it. But you can’t do that, you’ve got to actually appreciate what the other side wants to do and what it wants to achieve and work with it. (Bristol citizen) They want to carry on as they are doing and they regard amateurs from the community as a bit of a nuisance. (Bristol citizen) 110

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One thing that comes out for me is that there seems to be a conflict between the idea that more communication is more effective communication and the needs of groups, individuals and councillors to be able to understand what each other wants . . . I see there is a potential conflict between a dialogue that involves a massive amount of views, information and data and communication that gets to the nub of what a particular community issue is, and having that put over and recognised in a way, which allows it, which allows a decision to be made. (Bristol citizen) As with the online parliamentary consultations, the credibility of Community Campaign Creator rested upon political rather than technical efficacy. Few doubted that the technologies being used could enhance the possibility of increased political dialogue or even co-governance, but for this to happen seemingly intractable structures and cultures of elite power must first be rendered amenable to public influence. THE LIMITATIONS OF E-DEMOCRACY FROM ABOVE

There are two quite different ways of reading these examples of e-democracy. The most sanguine interpretation is to see experiments such as the U.K. Parliament’s online consultations and Bristol City Council’s Community Campaign Creator as moves in the direction of technologically-enabled direct representation of the kind outlined in the previous chapter. Whether motivated by the pragmatic need to secure state legitimacy or a genuine desire to share complex decisionmaking with citizens, there seems to be a growing rhetoric from governments of diverse persuasions and at various levels in favour of mutually-respecting partnership between citizens and their representatives. This approach was forcefully advocated in a 2001 OECD report entitled Citizens as Partners, which stated that: democratic governments are under pressure to adopt a new approach to policy-making – one which places greater emphasis on citizen involvement both upstream and downstream to decision-making. It requires governments to provide ample opportunity for information, consultation and participation by citizens in developing policy options prior to decision-making and to give reasons for their policy choices once a decision has been taken. (Vergez and Caddy 2001: 71) 111

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On the other hand, there are more sceptical interpretations of government-driven e-democracy as being little more than tokenistic exercises in being seen to engage with the public. As the political journalist, Jackie Ashley, has suggested, ‘It is a general rule in politics that when someone says they want “an open debate” they don’t mean a word of it. They mean they want to delay some difficult choice or kick a report into the long grass, or they want everyone to agree with them. They certainly do not intend to see their own ideas deeply probed’ (Ashley 2006: 31). Underlying such scepticism are concerns about the nature of interactive relationships that are initiated and managed by government. Since the mid-1990s the Netherlands has had significant experience of interactive policy-making schemes, and in several of the evaluations ‘persons and parties involved have expressed unequivocal disappointment with the process’. Citizens have found that ‘solutions they have put forward are insufficiently reflected in the policies’; elected councillors have expressed anxiety about their authority being ‘undermined’ and local government officers ‘are critical of the quality of the ideas and solutions. Examining these evaluations, Mayer et al. conclude that ‘On some occasions, these experiments seem to have reinforced rather than to have reduced the mutual mistrust between citizens and administrators’ (Mayer, Edelenbos and Monikhof 2005: 181). One aspect of the mistrust has emanated from elected representatives’ fear that any form of direct communication with citizens might undermine their political authority. Klijn and Koppenjan point to a paradox between politicians as rhetorical advocates of interactive policy-making projects and their undermining behaviour which serves to jeopardize such projects: ‘Politicians are sometimes absent for extended periods from processes they themselves initiated, or they claim in advance the right to deviate from emerging proposals by referring to the primacy of politics. Participants in interactive decision-making processes often appear disappointed with what politicians do with the outcomes of the interactive process (Klijn and Koppenjan 2000: 367). As we have seen in the case of the parliamentary online consultations, participants were not confident that politicians were really interested in what they had to say. Rather than increasing their political efficacy, such experiences risk undermining it. Central to politicians’ anxiety and participants’ disappointment is an uncertainty about the crucial question of power. Is it the purpose of these consultative and 112

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deliberative exercises to make power relationships and structures vulnerable to wider democratic influence? In the course of an evaluation of the U.K. Government’s ‘national programme for local e-democracy’, led by the first author, a number of elected councillors, council officials and project managers were interviewed. (The project is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.) In the course of these interviews they were asked whether they thought that the online consultations and community forums they were promoting would in any way give greater power to citizens. This question was asked in the knowledge that the notion of power is surrounded by deep sensitivities that often result in people adopting evasive and circumlocutory strategies of political avoidance. Eliasoph (1998: 16) has observed how American community activists discuss politics ‘in hushed tones’ , as if daunted even by verbal proximity to the mysteries of organised power. The explicit mention of power in our interviews gave rise to such sensitivities because it problematised relationships which government actors prefer to think of as natural. Political theorists have long recognised that the concept of power is ‘ineradicably value-dependent’ and ‘essentially contested’ (Lukes 1974: 26). Connolly argues that ‘Those who exercise power over others typically seek to deny it or hide it. This desire encourages them to argue for quite narrow definitions of the concept and to exercise forms of power that are not easily detectable’ (Connolly 1974: 97). When asked directly whether the projects they were involved in would lead to a rebalancing of local power, interviewees became tense and did their best to deflect the question. For example, one councillor responded by saying that: I’m not sure that power is necessarily the right dimension on which to discuss that. Power would suggest being able to take decisions. What matters for me is that the decisions we take . . . are good decisions, sustainable decisions and ones that people will accept and understand . . . It’s important that they [citizens] have not the formal power of decision making – because that’s for the elected representatives – but the power of lobbying and putting their view, representing their views and so on . . . Of course if the councillor doesn’t listen then they are putting themselves at risk . . . But in the end, as elected representatives, we ultimately make the decisions and take the consequences of those decisions, but it’s very important that we have that input. 113

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Another councillor preferred to interpret the question as being about accountability rather than power: I’m not sure if power is the right word. It could enable them [politicians] to explain the reasoning behind some of the decision-making, particularly the unpopular decision-making. We’re not all that good at getting back to people and saying ‘yes, we know that this is not popular however these are the reasons why we did take the decision’. A member of one of the local project steering groups was eager to diminish the sense in which the term power was being used in anything resembling a conventional political sense: ‘To the word political power I would take the big P out of it and put a very small p in front of it’. Most council officials simply refused to discuss the question of power, saying that this was a matter for politicians to consider, but one of them articulated what seemed to be a generally accepted equivocation: I think the idea . . . is to improve power, to increase the opportunities for local residents to influence decision making. I know that there is a lot of discussion at national government level at the moment about giving power, allowing local people not just to influence but to basically take over service delivery . . . I wouldn’t go that far, but at least it should give local people a chance to influence decision making. The suggestion here – and from other case studies of interactive consultation exercises – is that citizens are invited to participate not as co-decision-makers, but as potential influencers of those who do have the power to make decisions. In many cases that will meet the expectations of e-democracy participants, but only if there is indeed evidence of a relationship between their input to online consultations and the output of policy decisions. In many cases, such a relationship is far from evident. In 2006 the U.K. Department of Justice commissioned the Hansard Society to conduct an evaluation of a series of ‘digital dialogues’ involving 12 different interactive exchanges between government departments or agencies and citizens. The evaluation noted that ‘users wanted to be listened to and, on the basis of being invited to participate, expected to have some form of influence on the policy process. The extent of this influence and the link between this exercise and the 114

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policy decisions was unclear, and this made users sceptical about participation’ (Department of Justice 2007: 108). The evaluation study reached the disheartening conclusion that ‘Whilst the opportunity to interact directly with policy makers and deliberate amongst peers was welcomed, there remains wariness about how genuine these government efforts are and what degree of influence the public can have on the decision-making process. This has directly influenced levels of takeup and participation’ (Department of Justice 2007: 144). Evidence of this kind supports Ashley’s scepticism as to the authenticity of government-driven efforts to promote public debates. While e-democracy exercises are managed by institutions which have a direct interest in the outcome of public discussions, are largely ignored by elected politicians and are mistrusted by participating citizens who do not perceive there to be a credible link between their input and policy output, their democratic potential is bound to be unrealised. Pateman (1970) has written about the dangers of ‘pseudoparticipation’, and Heller (2003) refers to forms of participation that are intended to ‘make people feel as if they are involved’. Tokenistic democratic gestures could be worse than nothing at all, for they sap civic energies and eat away at political efficacy. At its worst, pseudo-participation entails attempts by elites to domesticate and defuse participatory energies which, were they to develop autonomously, could become a threat to their power. For example, by controlling the structure and agenda of online debates (Rogers 2004), adopting moderation policies which constrain modes and areas of speech (Wright 2006; Wright and Street 2005; Edwards 2004) and limiting peer-to-peer contact between discussion participants (Coleman 2007a), online encounters which had the potential to strengthen the communicative and political positions of citizens are appropriated by the logic of governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991; Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Barry 2001). Foucauldian critics argue that the proclaimed ‘will to empower’ the public (Cruikshank 1999) should be neither taken on its face value nor dismissed as trickery, but regarded as a means of exercising power ‘through people “working” on their own conduct, fashioning themselves in ways that reflect their acceptance of a particular norm which, perhaps unwittingly, makes them subject to its control’ (Allen 2003: 76). Considered from this perspective, e-democracy from above can be read as a strategy for disciplining civic energy within the constraining techno-political sphere of managed cyberspace. 115

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Both empirically and theoretically, there are grounds for expecting e-democracy to operate most successfully in autonomy from the state. Empirically, as Bennett (2003a: 148) has suggested, there is a danger that in following the well-resourced and grandly publicised e-democracy projects run by governments, we will be looking in the wrong place, for ‘Much of the attention to the Internet and politics has been directed to where the least significant change is likely to occur: in the realm of conventional politics. Established organizations and institutions such as unions, political parties, governments, and election campaigns are likely to adapt new communication technologies to their existing missions and agendas’. In terms of democratic theory, efforts by online activists to distance themselves from governmental structures and norms can be understood in terms of Hajer’s (2003) notion of working ‘next to or across from’ the institutional orders of the state. Rather than accepting the limitations of state-centric citizenship, they are enthused by the possibilities of democratic citizenship. It is to these endeavours that we turn in the next chapter.

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eyond the realm of official politics, in which public discussion has tended to be institutionally shaped and managed, there is a vast sphere of autonomous interaction, taking place within and between publics and counter-publics. In this public sphere people encounter one another intentionally as well as accidentally, purposefully as well as promiscuously, rationally as well as affectively. Such encounters are increasingly taking place online, and, although the Internet might not qualify as a public sphere in the Habermasian sense, it does provide particular opportunities for citizens to interact beyond, around and across institutionally-controlled communication channels. By reducing the costs of finding, contacting and maintaining communication links with others, the Internet has made it much easier for dispersed groups of people to form associations, share knowledge and mobilise for political action. Lowered barriers to collective action have benefited a range of citizen-activists, including protesters against corrupt and dictatorial regimes (Cleaver 1998; Chase and Mulvenon 2002; Teitelbaum 2002; Graham and Khosravi 2002; Zittrain and Edelman 2003; Semetko and Krasnoboka 2003; Wheeler 2005; Kalathil and Boas 2006; Soon and Kluver 2007), traditionally marginalised, excluded or stigmatised communities (Goggin and Newell 2003; Skelton and Valentine 2003; O’Riordan 2005), transnational social movements (Diani 2000; Bohman 2004; Tarrow 2005), electoral underdogs (Gold 2002; Gibson, Ward and Nixon 2003; Wolf 2004; Trippi 2004) and alternative media producers (Meikle 2002; Downing 2003; Platon and Deuze 2003; Couldry and Curran 2003; Kahn and Kellner 2004; Haas 2005; Pickard 2006; Bruns 2006). Though diverse in their political objectives, these networks share a number of characteristics which define them as exercises in e-democracy from below. 117

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First, the fluidity of online civic and political networks militates against structures of central leadership based upon firm ideological positions. Holding together a network calls for a negotiated approach not only to day-to-day tactics, but to the very basis of group identity, strategy and normative commitments. This negotiation is more likely to occur within an acephalous environment characterised by collective policy formation and open links to other networks. The Internet, as a network of networks in which the sum of linkages is greater than any nodal point of activity, is reflected in the organisational and ideological adaptability of online civic and political networks. As Bennett has noted, ‘the distributed (multi-hub or polycentric) structure of the Internet somehow causes contemporary activists to organize in remarkably non-hierarchical, broadly distributed and flexible networks’ (Bennett 2003b: 148). A consequence of this transideological flexibility has been the growth of overarching political campaigns on themes such as ‘global justice’, ‘the environment’ and ‘peace’ which coordinate ecumenically the actions of hitherto disassociated social and political groups. Coordination is a fundamental requirement of successful collective action, traditionally managed through mechanisms of formalised central leadership. A perennial frustration for social movement leaders is the need to find and recruit members and supporters who are willing to participate in organised collective action about issues that matter to them. In the past this has proved to be a time-consuming and costly activity, often resulting in the limited growth and influence of particular movements. Within the online environment, coordination problems can be diminished by enabling dispersed participants to contribute to collective knowledge, trust and group stability without any one of them having to assume a leadership role. Rheingold’s ‘smart mobs’ are examples of acephalous networked coordination (Rheingold 2006). Other examples of distributed coordination would include the use of wikis to devise and discuss policy and strategy, recommender systems to prioritise information of particular value to a group and the circulation of viral messages (de Moor and Weigand 2006: Heng and de Moor 2003; Ito 2003; Dellarocas 2003; Resnick 2004; Mayfield 2005; Rheingold 2006). Second, in contrast to the online replication of traditional campaign strategies typical of e-democracy from above, online civic and political networks tend to draw upon a diverse repertoire of practices, sometimes acting as if they were ad hoc protest groups, at other times serving 118

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to boost conventional political campaigns (as in MoveOn’s support for Howard Dean in the 2004 U.S. presidential election) and on other occasions drawing upon convergences between local and global solidarities with a view to generating transnational protest. Chadwick (2007) has discussed the hybridised character of these digital network repertoires, suggesting that their amorphousness has been a source of strength and innovation to groups such as MoveOn, which at one period in its history existed to oppose the impeachment of the U.S. president, at another to support a candidate in the Democratic primary campaign and more recently to oppose the U.S.-led war in Iraq. A common thread in these shifting and flexible repertoires of collective action is dependence upon specific affordances of the Internet. For example, e-petitions and mass e-mail campaigns have served to mobilise support, publicise causes and influence power in ways that build upon customary uses of the Internet. In a more radical fashion, some cyberactivists have turned to culture jamming and hacktivism as a means of acting upon rather than simply within the Internet as a political space. In all of these cases, strategic innovation is made possible by moves that could not so easily have been made in an offline environment. The term culture jamming, coined by the experimental band Negativland, refers to attempts to refashion or remix digital content with a view to subverting and reconfiguring hegemonic meanings. Lasn (1999: xvi), one of the founders of Adbusters, describes culture jamming as ‘a social demarketing campaign’. According to Stolle and Micheletti (2005: 10): Culture jammers aim to show what they see as the hidden politics of consumer goods by targeting particular corporations and products . . . Without considerable costs, colorful, playful and poignant visual displays of politicized logos can be flashed across computer screens, downloaded for printouts, and forwarded to others. The messages are often creative and funny. They aim at consciousness-raising and innovative political mobilization. One of the most high-profile culture-jamming projects, the Yes Men, pose as politicians or global institutions, rebranding them in ways that they would not choose for themselves. For example, in 1999 they set up a spoof web site for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, depicting him in unflattering ways. Bush responded by taking legal action against them, which gave far more publicity to the site than it would otherwise have received. Later in the same year they set up a web 119

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site claiming to represent the World Trade Organisation. Again legal action was threatened; again, this led to heightened media attention. In 2002 the Yes Men set up the DowEthics.com web site to draw attention to what they regarded as the corporation’s culpability in relation to the Bhopal chemical leak in India in 1984. The Yes Men describe these tactics as ‘identity correction’, whereby the claims and self-images of the powerful are subjected to digital remixing with a view to showing them in their ‘true’ light. On other occasions culture jamming has been used in election campaigns to expose, satirise and wrongfoot politicians. (Liffman, Coleman and Ward 2007; Cammaerts 2007) Hacktivism refers to initiatives designed to disrupt official versions of online information by, for example, slowing or closing down ‘targeted sites on the Internet through many people simultaneously requesting so much data from a site that it cannot cope’ (Jordan 2007: 75). During the protests against the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, the organisation’s web site was targeted and brought to a halt more than once. Other hacktivist campaigns have involved the distribution of software intended to break through national or institutional firewalls. Hacktivists describe these interventions as attempts to reappropriate the Internet as a common space: a form of direct action towards communicative liberation. There is clearly a broad spectrum of grass-roots e-democracy initiatives, ranging from those aiming to strengthen local ties to others seeking to transcend dominant social structures. Most e-democracy from below operates within the law, drawing upon the spontaneity and inventiveness of citizens’ knowledge, and the multiple linkages and organisational stretching afforded by a global communications network. Three contrasting examples of e-democracy from below are examined empirically in this chapter. The first only just qualifies for this category, as it is a project initiated by the BBC, which is far from being a grass-roots organisation. But the project does aim to promote democratic civic connections, and because, unlike in the case of the Community Campaign Creator discussed in the previous chapter, this project is not managed or funded by government, it makes sense to consider it here. The second case study is of netmums, a grass-roots online network that seems to work well precisely because of its distance from government. And third, we consider the e-campaign conducted by the Stop the War Coalition, set up to oppose the military consequences of 9/11, which is not only removed from government power and resources, but openly hostile to current government policy. 120

E-Democracy from Below CASE 1 – BBC ICAN: AN EXPERIMENT IN MEDIATED E-DEMOCRACY

The BBC, as the U.K.’s principal public-service broadcaster, sees its role as being to foster informed citizenship. Its recent manifesto of principles, Building Public Value, declares an intention to ‘offer a place where a plurality of voices and opinions can be given space and where rational debate can be held’. It goes on to support the use of ‘new technologies’ ‘to provide ways for audiences to become more active citizens and contributors to the national debate’ (BBC 2004: 65). Though hard to recognise or measure as an intangible good, the decline or absence of informed citizenship is easier to recognise. The BBC has made some interesting recent efforts to analyse the extent to which its promotion of informed citizenship results in greater public awareness of important issues, greater public curiosity about the world, more public discussion about civic issues, more informed judgments by voters and a greater understanding about how to participate in democratic life. Their research suggests that 17 percent (8 million) of the British people have been encouraged to participate in public life as a direct consequence of BBC output. A repeatedly stated reason given by people for not engaging in politics and civic life is that they do not know where to start or whether anything they do can make a difference. In 2003 the BBC launched the iCan e-democracy project designed to help its users enact changes by offering them a database of resources on approximately 1,200 civic issues, a community space online where they could find others with whom they share a concern and campaign tools allowing them to work together to aggregate their influence. iCan responded to a key finding from BBC research that: people who now play an active part in securing their rights in consumer life are chafing at their lack of power over their civic life. They want information which is not defined by party politics but by the issues which interest them. They want to be able to judge what a politician promises and, if they disagree, they want to register this more than once every five years. (Interview with Sian Kevill, April 2004) Sian Kevill, who led the review, concluded that ‘the BBC is well placed to become a key facilitator in this emerging e-democracy world, using its strong, trusted brand combined with its ability to attract audiences 121

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through both its online and broadcast output’. In an interview with one of the authors, Martin Vogel, the iCan project leader, explained that: iCAN . . . tried to come up with a way for people to engage in politics through their own definitions of the issues that concern them, so instead of looking at the Westminster village, looking at the issues that affect me and helping people to have an influence on them through connecting with others and finding sources of information which get you started. (Interview with Martin Vogel, April 2004) iCan is an intriguing e-democracy case study because it was established under the aegis of a trusted public broadcaster and was therefore able to draw upon the huge audience of the BBC, providing it with the kind of critical mass that eludes most online civic projects. In addition to its site within the BBC web portal, there was close collaboration with BBC local radio and television with a view to attracting broader BBC audiences than those who generally go online. iCan journalists mined the site for stories that could contribute to local and national broadcast news programmes. Tim Burke, who led this online-broadcast collaboration, explained that iCan helps broadcasters to reflect what people are bothered about: iCan helps inform the agenda of local TV and radio. It moves that ship in the direction the passengers – audience, consumers – want to go. It means regional TV, local radio and even network news becomes more relevant to people because they are part of setting the agenda. iCan also extends people’s contact and experience with the BBC. It enables their campaigns, their stories to sit on iCan, to develop and mature. It means that a campaign about anti-social behaviour can begin, mature a little, then become a feature on TV or radio if it’s of local interest. Further down the line the campaign may develop and inform something wider on a national scale. The by-product is that iCan also helps the BBC recognise better what issues are important to its local audiences – it would be crazy, criminal, crass to ignore those issues local people think are important. This case study draws upon research into the project’s first year of operation, during which 43 online interviews with its users were conducted. These were self-selected interviewees who volunteered to respond to a message on the iCan web site inviting them to participate in a research study, so no claim is made that their views were 122

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representative of all or most iCan users at the time. However, the sociodemographic profile of interviewees suggests that they were typical of BBC online users. They were twice as likely to be male (67%) as female (33%), and twice as many respondents were aged over 60 (14%) as under 21 (7%). On a scale of 1 to 10, almost half of all respondents (48%) indicated low levels of support for any political party, with only 14% expressing strong party affiliations. When asked whether they would describe themselves as ‘political animals’, 21 percent of respondents said that they were, and 28 percent said that they were not. Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported visiting the iCan site once or twice a month. Sixteen percent visited the site once or twice a week, and 7 percent went to it once or twice each day. Thirty percent of users reported spending under five minutes at the site on each visit, and over half (58%) spent under 15 minutes per visit. From their responses, it was possible to identify two main types of user: message disseminators and information seekers. Amongst registered users, almost half were seeking to disseminate a message. Message disseminators tended to be users on a mission: instrumental actors, more interested in telling the world what concerned them than listening to others. Interestingly, though, message disseminators were by no means all experienced political activists: although approximately one-third of the message disseminators we interviewed described themselves as political activists, another third were self-described nonactivists. Men were much more likely to be message disseminators than women. Message disseminators regarded iCan as an opportunity to win friends and influence people: I came across the site while searching around the BBC’s pages, I did not decide to actually go there, more a choice to use it once I had found it. Having discovered it, it became an invaluable tool in getting my message across. (Respondent 8) I was motivated to start an online group and did not have the expertise needed to set up my own web site. (Respondent 37) I wanted to ‘socialise’ my opinions on ageism and my fight to beat age discrimination in the U.K. workplace. I also wanted to make people aware of my new online job search and selection services for those people who feel they have been victims or have been discriminated against as a direct result of their age . . . above I wrote an article on age discrimination called the 123

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Nothing Man, which was basically a true account of how I overcame redundancy and ageism. (Respondent 9) A majority of respondents went to iCan to seek rather than impart information. These information seekers used the site to find out about how they might become more active citizens: I was . . . interested to see if I could find anything going on in my local area. The trigger really was that at the top of my road are a permanent fixture of old drunks who always sit at the bus stop offending passers by. I wondered whether I’d find anyone in my area who might have set up something about anti-social behaviour but all I found was info about my MP (which was very comprehensive – but not quite what I wanted at the time). (Respondent 14) After browsing the web site of where I live I came across the iCan web site link had a look at it and was interested in what was going on in my locale . . . at the time there was something close to my heart which is anti social behaviour . . . I joined a common group. (Respondent 71) Over half of the respondents reported no particular changes in their beliefs or actions as a result of visiting the iCan site, and 30 percent reported that their original attitudes were reinforced. But a significant 16 percent claimed that their knowledge, beliefs or behaviour had changed in some way as a result of visiting iCan. When these figures were broken down into different user categories it became clear that the most affected group were information seekers, three out of four of whom reported that their beliefs or actions were changed in some way. Most respondents reported finding new information from the iCan site: The information I have found has been connected to my campaign mainly, so it was used to help further its cause and add weight to our argument. (Respondent 8) It enabled me to contact my MP. (Respondent 6) I found other web sites related to the issues I was discussing; including the ‘Fax Your MP’ site . . . I sent a message to my MP via the ‘Fax Your MP’ web site. (Respondent 55) Was there any evidence of iCan users meeting new people and organisations, thereby making it easier for them to combine 124

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with others as active citizens? A significant one in four of the registered iCan users reported that they had made contact with other people as a result of visiting the iCan site. From the interviews, it was clear that for some users iCan served as a school for civic participation: I’ve joined a campaign on food and nutrition and regularly keep in touch with the guy who runs it. I give him tips and advice on running the campaign. (Respondent 18) I was contacted by the BBC TV News at 6 programme producer who showed an interest in running a short film on age discrimination. (Respondent 9) I made contact with many old friends and contacts that worked with me in the eighties. ican helped to bring us together because it is a way of spreading information over a group of people with similar interests. It encouraged people to involve themselves and contribute to the subject . . . I contact all who register support for my campaign, this has led to one or two messages via ican or several e-mails and even personally meeting. (Respondent 8) They’re not the sorts of people I’d meet normally, that’s why it’s interesting. (Respondent 55) I have made a couple of good friends in particular the campaign organiser and another supporter . . . They are people I would have liked to know on the basis of shared interests but may not have had the chance otherwise (because of distance etc.) – except perhaps somewhere else on the net. (Respondent 23) It was comforting to see that things could be done and that other people were suffering a similar type of issue, so it was helpful to contact/read their thoughts . . . Some of the people I have contacted and asked what was their way of dealing with this and also to get involved with the neighbourhood watch program because of it. (Respondent 71) Since this research was undertaken iCan was redesigned and rebranded as the BBC Action Network (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ actionnetwork) but subsequently closed down on the grounds that too few people were using it. The BBC plans to build upon their experience with this project by establishing a portal comprising links on a range of civic issues. These will include BBC-produced information guides; links to news reporting in text, audio and video; 125

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and links to outside organisations, media organisations and blogs. Despite the BBC’s decision to abandon the iCan citizen-to-citizen model, there are still conclusions that can be drawn from this brief experiment. The first is about trust. A knowledge-sharing community of this kind depends upon the extent to which it is regarded by citizens as a credible public space. The BBC’s position as a widely trusted institution allows it to manage this space without compromising its character as a peer-topeer network. This is promising in relation to the civic commons proposal we set out in Chapter 7, which depends upon the development of a similar kind of public space managed by a democratically accountable agency. Interviewees were overwhelmingly of the view that they could trust both the BBC and one another in the context of the iCan information exchange: It’s an impartial service written and scrutinised by the stakeholders for the stakeholders. (Respondent 9) I know that the site is moderated properly and that any problems can be raised with a reliable support team. (Respondent 23) Because it is a ‘bottom-up’ system which is driven by users, you tend to find these types of things evolving in a far more appealing way. For example, self-governing things like this and Wikipedia just work because of the passion of the people who contribute something. (Respondent 17) The second conclusion is more critical. A major weakness of iCan and the Action Network has been their aversion to politics. The kind of citizenship encouraged by iCan took a markedly individualised and depoliticised form, similar in many ways to that promoted by the producers of the Bristol Community Campaign Creator. Conflicts between competing interests and values were not debated; political parties were not mentioned; the civic and political spheres seemed to be carefully separated. The understandable reason for this is that the BBC does not want to compromise its impartiality by providing a platform for traditional political campaigning. Without the presence of real-world politics, however, the project was in danger of cultivating a sham representation of citizenship, devoid of the agonistic elements that make politics inevitable. The question for the BBC is how the knowledge-sharing which they are facilitating can be linked to real-world policy formation and decision-making. We return to this question in the final section of this chapter. 126

E-Democracy from Below CASE 2 – NETMUMS: A GRASS-ROOTS INFORMATION NETWORK

A 2001 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 50 percent of U.S. Internet users had contacted an online group for people who share a hobby or interest, 28 percent had contacted an online group of people with whom they shared a medical condition or personal problem and 22 percent had contacted an online political group. Communicating with such online networks does not constitute membership in a virtual community, which would involve longer-term involvement and a degree of emotional attachment unlikely to emerge after one or two visits to a web site, but it does indicate that new forms of civic association are emerging online. According to the authors of the Pew study: This type of activity might be likened to what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls ‘the third space’ – the corner bar, cafe or bookstore where people hang out to talk about things that are going on in their lives and neighborhood. Although Oldenburg very clearly has physical interaction in mind in talking about third places, the Internet has spurred in cyberspace the types of conversations that Oldenburg describes in third places. (Horrigan, Garrett and Resnick 2001: 10–11) From the perspective of democratic citizenship, this possibility of opening up new spaces for people who would not otherwise know one another to interact, share experiences, exchange information and make plans is enticing. This study of netmums (http://www.netmums.com) explores the extent to which one particular U.K.-based online group is achieving these ends. Sally Russell, who helped to found netmums in 2000, describes its purpose as being ‘to support mothers locally – help them build real “social networks”, so they feel less lonely, they have friends to turn to in good times and bad, and can have more confidence in their parenting’ (interview with Sally Russell, March 2007). The project originated out of personal experience: After my second child was born I suffered from postnatal depression and had to give up work. I found myself in a new world – I didn’t know where to take my children when I felt we needed to get out of the house, I didn’t have any friends we could visit, I didn’t have family nearby and didn’t even really know my neighbours. Finding out about baby groups and playgroups and starting to 127

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make new friends was hard work and sometimes nerve-wracking. But I also didn’t really have much to talk about with old friends . . . I’d moved into a parallel universe. Siobhan Freegard had experienced the same thing and planned a website for mums in Harrow with practical information to help others find their way around – from the toddler group in the scout hut behind Tescos, to the story-telling session on a Tuesday at the local library. Together we built up a resource which also included the help and support side such as the local group for parents of children with autism, and the domestic violence dropin at the local church. The aim was that parents could ask each other questions, contribute to the information and that by passing on the knowledge of more experienced mums to new mums coming along it would help them feel less isolated and vulnerable. We built the first Harrow netmums site in 8 weeks, and soon after it was launched we had mothers from other parts of the country asking if they could also have a netmums in their area. We were joined by Cathy Court, and taking our Harrow site as a template we gradually helped mums up and down the country to build local sites for their areas. Having done the first four sites, Tesco funded netmums for a year to get the network to 40 local sites. Since then we’ve grown to cover the UK with local sites, and we are reaching out to more and more people in those communities. (Interview with Sally Russell, March 2007) Women go to netmums to find their nearest local parent and toddler group, child care facilities or playgroup, to seek and give suggestions about somewhere new to take the kids, to ask about or recommend a good local GP or to make new friends in their local area. Netmums currently has 300,000 members and is visited each day by up to 50,000 mothers (Interview with Sally Russell, March 2007). It is now the second most visited parenting site in the United Kingdom, after Johnson and Johnsons’ BabyCentre (Hitwise, March 2007). Netmums connects parents both in their local areas (through 139 micro-sites) and nationally. Much of the content for the national and local sites is produced by members, with approximately 10,000 entries per month generated by members. In a recent survey of 5,312 netmums’ users (conducted via the netmums web site between 10 and 22 July 2007) 51 percent of respondents 128

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reported that they were looking for new friends, and 7 percent said that they had no friends with whom they could ‘really talk’. Asked where they would turn to for parenting advice or support, 69 percent said that they would turn to a friend, and 63 percent said that they would turn to a web site, ahead of close family (57%), a husband or partner (52%), a health visitor (49%) or a helpline (3%). Asked who they would turn to if they were feeling ‘down’, most said that they would speak with a friend, husband or partner, but 19 percent said that they would go to an online forum or message board, ahead of those who would speak to a health visitor (14%), counsellor (13%), local support group (4%) or helpline (3%). For a significant number of respondents, netmums provides direct access to other mothers who can advise them about parenting issues, discuss personal problems and possibly become friends. In interviews, users of the site explained how they had used the group in these ways: Before I had the Internet I found it extremely difficult to find out information in my local area for toddler groups or anything. It seems like people mainly ignore the needs of mums with very young children to a large extent. When I, myself, asked my health visitors, they did not have any actual information about toddler groups or even know where any were – although there has been one right across the road from the surgery for the last 18 years! My local newspapers do not bother to put toddler group sessions in their paper unless they really have to, and unless you know where to look, it can be so hard to find out any relevant information. Mums need somewhere to turn especially when they feel alone and isolated. A web site like netmums could be all the difference between that isolation becoming depression. It is important someone is out there to help mums cope with their everyday life. (Jane, netmums) When I first moved from Leeds to Liverpool I had an eight-weekold baby, no friends and no job. I was very lonely. It was really hard to build up friendships with other mothers. I did not know how to find information about my local area: where were the local toddler groups, what do people do on a rainy day. I had friends come to visit from Leeds; I didn’t know where to take them with their children. It was a nightmare. I searched the Internet for help but didn’t really find much at all . . . this was back in 1999/2000 before the netmums concept had been born. It was in 2004 when netmums was featured on Steve Wright’s show that I logged on 129

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and found out about it. I was disappointed that there was not much information about my area. I’m now a mother of two who has lived in Liverpool for five years. I have built up a lot of information about where to go and what to do. I was keen to help. I sent in my information and before you know it I was editing the site myself. A lot of the emails I get are from mothers who like me back in 1999 feel isolated and want to find other mothers in their situation to talk to and give support. True, there are Government bodies . . . that you can get some of the information from, but this information comes in the form of a sterile list without any of the useful tips that we include from parents who have been there and done that. Most people like to do things that are recommended by others. (Alia, netmums) Clearly netmums is performing an important service for mothers. But can it be described as democratic citizenship? Sally Russell is reticent about claiming to be involved in e-democracy: I used to say that netmums was an example of e-democracy . . . and I was corrected and told that that was really just about elected representatives and so I have tended to stop using the phrase. But what we do does allow parents to engage with politics, on issues that affect them, both locally and nationally. We get complaints in about local council services and then we forward them to the council, then they reply, and they do take notice of them, increasingly . . . they write long replies and take an interest in what we’re doing. So I think that we do have a role to play, however you define e-democracy itself. (Interview with Sally Russell, March 2007) It would be perverse to define citizenship, e-democracy or politics purely in terms of instrumental efforts to influence the state. There is something manifestly democratising about women having the capacity to find and share information without needing to depend upon expert services. Democratic citizenship is clearly strengthened as a result of the enhanced confidence experienced as a result of being part of a community, albeit dispersed, occasional and virtual. When neglected or silenced people begin to talk to one another; that is in itself a political act, not least because the simple process of communication raises the chances that they will subsequently engage in effective collective action. 130

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Indeed, although the primary function of netmums is networked knowledge-sharing, it has promoted a number of campaigns that have influenced government policy. According to Sally Russell, ‘Mothers often feel that their opinions no longer count, particularly those who stay at home to look after children, who feel a loss of status. By joining together, netmums has proved to have a powerful voice on a number of issues’ (Interview with Sally Russell, March 2007). It conducted a survey on postnatal depression that highlighted the role of health visitors in identifying sufferers, providing support and in some cases treatment. Netmums has drawn attention to the critical shortage of health visitors and has made several representations to government about this. Other national campaigning organisations are now supporting netmums in this campaign. Since 2003 netmums has been campaigning on food issues and has presented evidence to Parliament arguing for a simplified food labelling scheme. The success of netmums as an online space has attracted the interest of government. Ministers have been eager to express support for the project, and it is frequently cited as an example of how the Internet can be used to empower ordinary people. This places netmums in a potentially difficult position. The network’s credibility derives from its independence – ‘I do think that netmums succeeds where Government sites fail because it has been built by mothers; it has come from an understanding of the needs of mums’ (Interview with Sally Russell March 2007) – but its likelihood of influencing policy and receiving much-needed financial support would increase if netmums had a more direct relationship with government. Would moves in the direction of co-governance strengthen or weaken netmums as a grass-roots democratic network? The answer to that question depends largely upon institutional arrangements. If, as is often now the case, a closer relationship with government policy-making entailed the sacrifice of the network’s control over its own policy agenda and deliberative process, co-governance would lead to a weakening of grass-roots e-democracy. But if ways can be found to preserve the autonomy of citizen-led agenda-setting and debate, while ensuring that there is a trusted channel linking grass-roots output to policy input, co-governance need not be regarded as a threat to e-democracy. Both the now defunct BBC Action Network and the currently vibrant netmums represent examples of how e-democracy from below can operate beyond, around and across institutionally controlled communication channels, while at the same time seeking to gain the attention of government. 131

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship CASE 3 – STOP THE WAR COALITION ONLINE: AN E-SUPPORTED PROTEST MOVEMENT

The (U.K.-based) Stop the War Coalition (http://www.stopwar.org. uk), which was established in September 2001 to oppose a military response to the 9/11 attack on the United States, is a campaign that has no expectation of receiving positive attention from government. It exists to expose the errors of government foreign policy and to mobilise public dissent. Unlike the BBC Action Network or netmums, the Stop the War Coalition’s online efforts are mainly intended to support its offline presence as a political movement engaging in traditional activities such as demonstrating, distributing leaflets, organising paper petitions and seeking to influence the mass-media agenda. From the perspective of democratic theory, a key test of the Internet is its capacity to facilitate challenges to the interests and agendas of political elites. Social movement theorists have long argued that the success of protest groups is dependent upon ‘political opportunity structures’, defined as ‘constraints, possibilities, and threats that originate outside the mobilizing group, but affect its chances of mobilizing and/or realizing its collective interests’ (Koopmans 1999: 96). One such determining factor is the degree to which a government is open to influence from those outside its official realm (Eisinger 1973). The more open to influence governments are, the greater the opportunities facing protest movements. As Tarrow has astutely put it, ‘rational people do not often attack well-fortified opponents when opportunities are closed. But gaining partial access to power provides them with such incentives’ (Tarrow 1994: 86). The Internet has been central to the strategies of a number of protest networks over the past decade, enabling them to have a global presence and organisational flexibility that would have been impossible in predigital times. For example, in his evaluation of the ‘Make Poverty History’ news media campaign, Raymond (2006: 15–16) identifies nine objectives, which can be placed in two categories: external (‘to extend the campaign’s reach to new audiences’; ‘to promote and explain calls to action’; ‘to inspire, motivate, educate and connect’; ‘to leave a lasting legacy of new supporters’) and internal (‘to support coordination of participating member organisations’; to ‘manage and/or direct to members a massive online community’; ‘to provide mechanics for interactions between supporters’; ‘to report back . . . about coalition activities, coverage and actions’; ‘to provide community and connections 132

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in lead up to and during landmark events’). The same dialectical interplay between the Internet as a shaper of new social movements and as a channel for publicising protest characterises the anti-globalisation (sometimes referred to as alter-globalisation) movement (van Aelst 2002; Routledge 2003; Juris 2005; Kavada 2005). Of course, grass-roots social movements have long relied upon the mutually reinforcing qualities of efficient internal organisation and effective outward-facing publicity, but within the spatial porosity of the Internet there is a blurring of distinction between internal and external orientations. Activities traditionally conducted by officials within the secure walls of organisational headquarters are part of the outward face of an online movement. Distinctions between members and supporters are hard to sustain, as are strategic divisions between the setting and implementation of tactics. The danger here is that online movements can become amorphous: merely an echo of noise within the public sphere rather than entities with discrete political identities. If there are no boundaries between inside and outside, how can definitive principles or coherent strategies be advanced? In an interview with national officials from the Stop the War Coalition, the convergence of internal and external uses of the Internet became apparent. The Internet was used to convene the movement and remains a principal means of maintaining communication between members: ‘E-mail was used extensively to build the first meeting as there was no time to organise in any other way in the ten days between the attacks and our first meeting. We receive regular feedback from our members by e-mail and text’. The Coalition’s web site serves as a shop window to the wider world, but its equally important function is as a ‘first point of contact’ for members and supporters who help to create it and use it as a networking tool: ‘Our web site is the first point of contact for Stop the War members and supporters. Sections of our web site can be updated by members themselves. This allows for eyewitness reports from local events to appear very quickly. Regular contributors to the web site can communicate with one another through the web site’. The Coalition links online to offline campaigning by using its web site to ‘collect names for petitions and encourage our supporters to e-mail MPs before important debates’. Finally, the Internet serves to globalise the Coalition’s presence: We used e-mail to develop and sustain international links to other organisations. Our web site is visited regularly by other groups 133

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around the world campaigning against war. Our logo has been downloaded and used in dozens of countries as the official Stop the War logo for that country. E-mail lists were essential in co-coordinating international action, particularly on 15th February 2003 when millions of people marched in hundreds of cities across the world. Two clear factors emerged from studying the Stop the War Coalition’s e-strategy. First, they were keen to point out that the success of their online activism was highly dependent upon traditional offline organisation: ‘Whilst e-mail and the web site have been crucial in forging a mass campaign with finite resources, we could not have sustained it without the organised support of local groups who meet regularly and hold frequent public meetings’. The capacity of civic and political networks to switch swiftly between online and offline modes of communication contrasts with political parties, which, in almost all cases, expect their online operations to be little more than marketing vehicles for organisations that can only ever possess legitimacy in a physical environment. Second, the Stop the War Coalition is not characterised by the traditional division of labour between institutional maintenance and externally oriented publicity. Activities that might once have been regarded as administrative were not only transparent, but assumed an instrumental function, highlighting the openness and flexibility of the anti-war movement. Externally orientated publicity activity, that traditional political movements – most notably, political parties – would seek to control from the centre, took a more fluid, interactive form, often emerging as a consequence of a collectively-produced, iterative narrative. THE LIMITATIONS OF E-DEMOCRACY FROM BELOW

Democratic citizenship is undoubtedly strengthened by the information-sharing, community-building and new repertoires of collective action that characterise online civic and political networks. They contribute to a reversal of some of the more dispiriting trends in contemporary society by fostering a greater democratic connectedness. There are lessons here for any government that is genuinely interested in giving greater substance to democratic citizenship. Rather than inviting citizens to visit badly designed government web sites to find 134

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civic information or interact with elected representatives, politicians and officials should be going to the civic and political networks in which people articulate and represent their own interests and values – and they should be pointing other citizens in the same direction. Just as in the past politicians spent many evenings in drafty civic halls or behind tables in public libraries, they should now be seeking out and entering into dialogue with the online networks that represent the new loci of active citizenship. Engaging with horizontal networks will be a testing challenge for vertical and centralised governments used to dealing with ‘lobby groups’ that speak with one voice in the language of advocacy. Online civic and political networks are less likely to advocate a single ideological position (although they sometimes do) than reflect a set of values, experiences and reflexive disclosures of identity. As Fairclough (1998) has suggested, ‘in effective public sphere dialogue there is a process of becoming in which people’s individual identities, their collective identities as members of particular and diverse groups, and their universal identities-in-common as citizens and human beings are collectively constituted simultaneously through a complex weaving together of different facets of the self’. Governments prefer to deal with settled public interests expressed as aggregate demands than informal collectivities working towards a common identity through mutual disclosure. Those who are active within civic and political networks do not necessarily know what they demand: they are searching for articulations of their interest through a process of ongoing production of and exposure to new knowledge. Preferring intersubjective dialogue to strategic advocacy, they want to talk with rather than to government; they see government as one of many contributors to conversations about who they are and what they need. E-democracy from above is unlikely ever to provide the setting for this kind of relationship. But neither, we would argue, does e-democracy from below, which, in the broad and diverse forms that we have described it in this chapter, is revealed as having a number of democratic weaknesses. The first of these weaknesses could easily be read as strength: the disconnection of most online civic and political networks from institutional politics. Power continues to reside in government agencies, elected legislatures and transnational, intergovernmental bodies. For some purposes, such as consciousness-raising and information-sharing, it makes sense for networked citizens to work around and across these mainstream institutions, but, taken too far, such detachment risks 135

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marginalising the ideas and energies of civil society. Effective democracy depends upon government at every level being held to account and responding to those it claims to represent. For this to happen, there need to be channels of common discourse between the official and informal political spheres. A key function of institutionally-based representative democracy is the aggregation of the public’s often inconsistent interests, preferences and values. One way of doing this is through political parties, each packaging their own range of policies which voters are asked to support. Such packaging is a crude way of reflecting public judgement – and one from which citizens seem to be increasingly retreating. An alternative approach, as we have discussed at length in Chapter 1, is democratic deliberation. For open, candid and critical public discussion to take place, diverse networks – as well as individuals who remain outside networks – need to be brought together. Single-issue campaigns and value-driven social movements exist to pursue their single issues and promote their own values rather than to engage with competing actors. To adapt the language of social capital theory, online networks are frequently successful at achieving political bonding, but less often at achieving political bridging. Bridges between competing political interests, preferences and values are most likely to be built within institutionally-protected spaces designed to facilitate cross-cutting deliberation. A second democratic limitation of online civic and political networks is their sometimes elusive and ephemeral nature. Blaug refers to ‘the tyranny of the visible’ within ‘modern, western, male political science’ (1999: 43) which ignores the ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990) which are produced beyond the eyes of the elites. The problem is that these subterranean acts of resistance are often hidden from ordinary citizens as well as elites; they are products of a political underground which may well be inviting and accessible if one can find and make sense of it, but comprises an esoteric subculture which only some are likely to enter. For most people, online networks devoted to matters of democratic citizenship, rather than socialising or commerce, are rather abstruse entities. Those who are digitally proficient, socially confident and politically articulate are the most likely to take the trouble to search for an online network with which they can establish and sustain a virtual relationship. These are precisely the citizens who are currently over-represented in political participation. For less technically or politically minded citizens, the ordeal of finding an entry point to 136

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online activism could well lead to frustration, thereby exacerbating participatory inequality. The task of engaging as an e-citizen is made harder still by the ephemeral nature of many online networks. Lin and Dutton (2003), in their study of a Californian online campaign against plans to change local telephone numbers, point to the short-lived nature of many online networks. Institutions, by their nature, are durable: they have long-term memories and strategies. Innovatory e-democracy networks owe much of their vibrancy and inventiveness to their singular commitment to the present. The spontaneity of oppositional networks is likely to present formidable problems for settled, stolid political institutions, but over the long term it is hard to sustain innovatory energy and institutional rationalities tend to prevail. There is a need for synergy between the innovatory energy of networked citizenship and the resources of institutional democracy. The engagement of citizens in democratic politics should not be left to the chance of stumbling upon an appropriate online network while it still exists. There is a need for a well-publicised, enduring democratic space to which citizens can turn in the same way that they can go to a library if they want to borrow a book. Third, while there is much to be said in favour of the autonomous creativity of some forms of culture jamming and hacktivism, this kind of guerrilla activism is often characterised by a destructive and nihilistic quality. There are occasions when spoofs, exposures and caricatures can shed appropriate whimsical light upon corrupt or hypocritical political practices, but once that job is done there needs to be more to democratic citizenship than discomforting the powerful. Even Blaug, in his defence of the rhizomatic qualities of invisible, autonomous activism, concedes that ‘rhizomatic action cannot run the state. Indeed, running a state is not, after all, a suitable task for the spontaneous and ephemeral, nor for the joyful, the committed or the autonomous’ (Blaug 1999: 51). We are more sanguine than Blaug about the contribution that the joyful, committed and autonomous can make to democratic governance. Indeed, we are sceptical of any plan for participatory democracy which seeks to circumscribe forms of counter-cultural self-expression. Turner (2006) has argued that citizens’ relationship to the state in late modern society, with its ambitions towards cosmopolitanism, should be characterised by ironic distance. Encounters between political institutions and citizens need not be dominated by what Nichols 137

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(1991) has referred to (in another context) as a discourse of sobriety. Online spaces of democratic interaction, if they are to possess more than the atmosphere of managed debating chambers, should have room for ironic and whimsical forms of civic expression as well as those more commonly associated with deliberation, consultation and protesting. Indeed, it is the critical importance of making room within contemporary politics for all voices, tones and aesthetic proclivities that prompts us to argue that the establishment of a more expansive and inclusive democratic space calls for policy commitment at the highest level. Democracy cannot be left to ad hoc initiatives. It is to the problematic history of e-democratic policy formulation that we turn in the next chapter.

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hat policies and strategies, techniques and technologies are required to foster democratic citizenship? Are there effective ways of encouraging citizens to become more actively engaged in the political process? Are such policies or strategies as likely to affect the unconfident, less educated and under-resourced as much as those who are the traditional participants in the democratic process? Can the quality of democratic interactions at various levels of political life be enhanced as a result of policy designs and implementation? We know surprisingly little about the ways in which policies of various kinds impinge upon the making and maintenance of democratic citizens. As Mettler and Soss have stated: Political science stops short of exploring public policies’ influence on what citizens want, how strongly they want it, and whether they engage the political processes that hold the power to supply or deny it to them . . . Political scientists should be able to explain why some policies draw citizens into public life and others induce passivity. We should have a sense of how living under a given policy regime affects citizens’ goals, beliefs, identities – and hence the possibilities and limits for future political action. (Mettler and Soss 2004: 56) We regard Mettler and Soss’s argument as offering an important insight into the weakness of much contemporary discussion about the promotion by government of policies for more active, inclusive or reflective citizenship. In recent times such policies have included citizenship education in schools, innovative methods of voting, the regulation of media coverage during election campaigns, simplified voter registration procedures, the establishment of neighbourhood councils and 139

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several well-funded projects involving the use of digital technologies to bridge the gap between government and governed. A chorus of political leaders from various countries have been enthusiastic in their advocacy of policies for e-democracy, arguing that ‘Governments must use new technologies such as the Internet to empower citizens and provide them with a greater ability to scrutinise and influence Government decisions and actions’ (Paul Martin, former prime minister of Canada); ‘ICT [information and communications technology] can facilitate the exchange of ideas and increase participation in the decision-making process’ (Crossing Boundaries National Conference, ‘Governing in the Information Age,’ Ottawa Congress Centre, 8 May 2003) ; ‘ICT can facilitate the exchange of ideas and increase participation in the decision-making process’ (Erkki Liikanen, former European Commissioner for the Information Society, ‘Reinforcing eDemocracy seminar,’ Brussels, 12 February 2004); and ‘We must begin to create new institutions, democratic ones, where consulting through the Internet becomes a democratic right’ (George Papandreou, leader of PASOK, speech to World Congress on Information Technology, 21 May 2004). There is a growing pressure upon public administrations at all levels to devise policies that will give substance to these aspirations. But what effect can such policies be expected to have upon the ways in which people experience democratic citizenship? The function of policy is to employ effective means to achieve desired ends. The aim of this chapter is to explore what exactly politicians are seeking to accomplish by initiating policies to promote e-democracy and how far such policies can be expected to affect the possibilities and limits of political action by citizens, as opposed to elites. We pursue this exploration through three stages. First, we examine how one specific national government (the United Kingdom) has attempted to shape a policy for e-democracy. Rather than undertaking a conventional political-science analysis in which the making of policy is evaluated in terms of competing interests, collective actor problems, agenda-setting strategies and bureaucratic stages (Hill 1993; Kingdon 2002), we are primarily interested in exploring the discursive construction of e-democracy by key government actors (Hajer 1995; Fischer 2003). We proceed on the basis that political meanings are always discourse-dependent and the best way to illuminate these meanings is through close textual analysis of the arguments intended to articulate them. Not only by examining what is said, but by observing the rhetorical linkages, emphases and absences, is it possible to 140

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extract from policy texts the ways in which governments intend to enunciate sense and knowledge and the way in which the governed receive, contest or redefine them. As Rose argues, ‘It is not so much a question of what a word or text “means” . . . but of analysing the way a word or a book functions in connection with other things, what it makes possible, the surfaces, networks and circuits around which it flows, the affects and passions that it mobilises and through which it mobilises’ (Rose 1999: 29–30). Having tried to make discursive sense of the British government’s intentions in relation to e-democracy, we review the rather fragmented and incoherent implementation of e-democracy policy in the United Kingdom (to date) and note some inconsistencies between claims and outcomes. Finally, we return to our initial concern about the shaping effects of e-democracy policy upon democratic citizenship. The latter consideration poses interesting theoretical and methodological questions: first, about the extent to which subjective experiences of citizenship are susceptible to policy shaping and, second, about ways of understanding the entangled relationship between public policy and mass behaviour. THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF E-DEMOCRACY

Tony Blair’s New Labour government was elected to power in 1997, with a strongly declared commitment to the modernisation of political institutions. The idea of e-democracy fitted well with this agenda. Fuelled by the feverish dot-com mood of the late 1990s and a sense that e-technologies were at the heart of what Giddens (1999: 78) referred to as ‘a social revolution of our time’, the political allure of the Internet seemed irresistible. The previous Conservative government, led by John Major, had done much to promote e-government in the narrow sense of online information provision and service delivery and had associated itself closely with an active conception of citizenship, most visibly in the form of its Citizens’ Charters. New Labour sought to connect these themes, problematising notions of changing citizenship and interactive technology as related parts of an inescapable historical shift. In December 2001 the Prime Minister established a Cabinet committee (MISC17) with the task of outlining a policy for e-democracy. It was chaired by the then Leader of the House of Commons, Robin Cook, and comprised several government ministers. Inside the Cabinet Office an e-democracy unit of three civil servants was set up, charged 141

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with producing and promoting a government policy that would embrace both the use of the Internet as a means of voting as well as its use as a participatory space beyond elections. The decision to link these two objectives was not an obvious one. The Office of the e-Envoy, which had been established with a view to generating a push from the centre of government towards the electronic delivery of services, regarded e-voting as a major symbolic opportunity to demonstrate the government’s commitment to technological adaptation. Proposals for e-voting were well received by politicians who were deeply concerned by the unprecedented 12 percent fall in turnout in that year’s general election. As a consequence, the government found itself involved in two almost separate debates: a quite arcane one about the technical and legal safety of allowing people to vote via their computers from home, and a much broader one about the potential for e-enabled political participation beyond the voting booth. While a number of technology suppliers enthusiastically supported both objectives, and technophobes trusted neither, many advocates of e-participation regarded e-voting as a distraction from e-democracy, and several advocates of e-voting were little interested in wider forms of e-participation. Between March 2001 and April 2002 three U.K. government ministers made speeches setting out a rationale and policy for e-democracy.* Ministerial speeches are explicit declarations of government values, priorities and intentions. Texts are carefully prepared; emphases and omissions are rarely accidental. As with all texts, there are underlying discourses which frame them in particular ways, giving them a rhetorical quality that reflects ‘particular ideological configurations’ (Moss and O’Loughlin 2005: 166). Three elements of this political discourse are examined below. Before turning to them, we consider the ways in which the ministers articulate their policy intentions. Graham Stringer, addressing an international conference on e-government, tells his audience that ‘it is time we put e-democracy on the information age agenda and begin to explore the role new technologies may play in revitalising democracy’. The suggestion here is that governments must *

The three ministerial speakers were Graham Stringer MP, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, to Global Forum in Naples, 15 March 2001; Douglas Alexander MP, Minister of State with responsibility for e-commerce and competitiveness, to Conference on ‘Democracy in the Information Age’, Wilton Park, 25 October, 2001; Rt Hon Robin Cook MP, Leader of the House of Commons, to yougov Conference ‘Reviving Democracy’, London, 10 April 2002. The texts of all three speeches were published on their respective departmental web sites.

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catch up with an inevitable trend, even if only in an exploratory fashion. Douglas Alexander, addressing a closed audience at a residential conference, goes further than Stringer, arguing in favour of a clear policy on e-democracy which would reflect the government’s considered definition of the term: ‘I believe that it is now time to set all this activity into a clear policy framework and put e-democracy on the information age agenda. Government should set out what it means by e-democracy and how it intends to use the power of technology to strengthen democracy’. Robin Cook, addressing a public conference in London, goes further still, using his leading position as head of the new Cabinet committee on e-democracy to provide an expansive conception of what is at stake: The Cabinet Committee on e-democracy was set up to make the connections between government and public, which the new technologies offer. In this context I do not mean government in its limited sense of a ministerial collective. I use it to embrace all forms of public and accountable authority, including all the diverse range of agencies, regulators and quangos [quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organisation] that make up modern government. All three speeches start from the basis that something needs to be done to promote e-democracy. The issue is not whether the Internet has a role to play in contemporary democracy, but how that role should be conceived and enacted. It is from this point of commitment that the three discursive themes we shall consider emanate. Re s p o n d i n g to H i s t o r y

The speeches invoke history in two ways. First, there are accounts of decline in political participation, with specific reference to electoral turnout: ‘The 2001 UK general election gave us the lowest turnout since universal suffrage – only 59 percent of the electorate were sufficiently engaged in the democratic process to take a stake in choosing their government’ (Alexander). Narratives of decline define a moment of crisis, which is in turn related to a second invocation of history. This relates to what is described as an epochal revolution: a new information age. This transformation, referred to by Cook as ‘the revolution in communication technology’, is not presented as a consequence of policy – or, indeed, any human action, but as an autonomous and irreversible tectonic shift: ‘We are at the beginning of the information age 143

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revolution, which is changing societies all over the world . . . It is also changing government itself: the organisation of government, its relationships with its citizens and the international co-operation between governments. Information and communication technologies are the driving force in this process’. Faced with this ‘revolution’, governments have a duty to respond. Policy is reactive rather than proactive, meeting an historical responsibility to adjust to the consequences of revolution. At one level, such an account is correct: governments are indeed unable to do little more than react to the forces of globalisation, of which new forms, flows and values of information are an intrinsic part. But in another sense there is a danger of policy seeming to be technocratic and inevitabilist, rather than culturally shaped and politically determined. Technology is conceived in essentialist and uncritical terms as comprising hardware, software and technical circuitry as opposed to less tangible phenomena such as systems of knowledge, practices, roles and cultural devices. Such a notion of technology fails to ask questions about how technologies have been designed in particular ways; who owns or controls the patents, licenses and corporations that condition their use; or whether their shape, functionality or accessibility can be altered. In this way, technology assumes an independent, ahistorical potency of its own. Cook brings together these two historical narratives – the atrophy of citizenship and the ascendancy of technology: ‘There is a connection waiting to be made between the decline in democratic participation and the explosion in new ways of communicating’. This is a creative and logical policy linkage, but not the only one that could have been made. One could have argued, for instance, that a connection needs to be made between declining democratic participation and growing social inequality or the absence of mass-media accountability or the need for clearer ideological distinctions between the major parties. In making the connection with technology, there is an implication, however unintended, that there is a technical fix for the problems of democratic citizenship – a panacea afforded by the unstoppable revolutionary energy of the new information age. C o n s t r u c t i n g Ci tizensh ip

Ministers describe nonparticipation in politics in pathological terms: ‘if unaddressed, this level of disengagement would pose a threat to the long-term health of our democratic institutions’ (Alexander). Norms of civic health are implicit, identified narrowly, in quantifiable 144

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terms of declining numbers choosing to vote. Stringer is almost funereal in his account of the shift of young citizens from political voting to popular cultural polls: ‘Sadly enough, I can tell you that in the U.K., the televised Big Brother produced higher voting rates than the election to the European Parliament. We must face that traditional democratic channels have lost much of their ability to engage people. Politics has become an issue of interest for fewer and fewer people’. No attempt is made to explore why young people are uninterested in European elections or, more radically, what political campaigners might learn from the strategies employed by popular reality TV, with its creative use of interactive features (Coleman 2007b). The speeches do not offer a normative account of what constitutes this civic malaise, nor do they raise any explanations that could be interpreted as selfcritical. It is as if political disengagement is an inexplicable malaise, a natural illness calling for remedial technologies of treatment. Because they are required to advocate a policy that has e-voting as a major (and costly) element, there tends to be an overemphasis upon electoral turnout as an indicator of healthy citizenship. They do not express concern in these speeches about declining participation in trades unions, protest groups or street demonstrations. Nor do they refer to the democratic value of strengthening interpersonal networks in which neighbours help one another, friends talk about current affairs or people negotiate power relationships within homes, workplaces or communities. For example, when Cook recognises that low electoral turnout ‘does not mean that the public is apathetic or uninterested’, he goes on to make his point by telling his audience that ‘the public shows a healthy appetite for turning out and recording its vote when it believes their votes can make a difference’, and gives the example of a recent local referendum in Glasgow on the future of council housing where turnout was significantly higher than in the previous election. It is as if voting is the only way of measuring active citizenship. At other points in these speeches, when ministers are not speaking of the need to introduce e-voting, they refer to a much broader repertoire of participatory activities as constituting democratic citizenship: We must make citizens feel democratically empowered beyond their few seconds in the polling booth. (Stringer) While a healthy representative democracy is dependent on people voluntarily participating in elections, participation goes beyond voting. (Alexander) 145

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Democracy is richer than the right to vote every four years. Democracy must also offer the right in between elections and the opportunity to shape the policies pursued by those who are elected. (Cook) Although these acknowledgements are not given with explicit reference to nonvoting forms of political participation, the implied reference is to a new form of conversational interaction which digital communication technologies are particularly well placed to facilitate. It is at this point in the speeches that the government discourse touches on the vulnerable democratic potential of the Internet and the scope for direct representation as we have been outlining it in this book. The emphasis in this discursive account is upon the unique opportunities provided by interactive communication technologies which can make public feedback to government more effective. Techn ologi es of H e ar i n g

The speeches suggest that e-democracy will herald a new, more responsive system of representation and governance: The Internet offers us a tool for participation without precedent in democratic history. It is different from the traditional communication of government to governed explaining and justifying their policies. By its very nature it provides for a two-way flow of communication and instant response. Equally important is that it allows everyone taking part to see the responses of everyone else. It produces a healthy debate that should allow the dialogue between participants to develop and not be confined solely to responding to an official document. (Cook) In future, the possibilities for interaction online will mean that constituents will be able to eliminate the traditionally higher cost and longer time frames to contact Members of Parliament and harness the capacity for dialogue the Internet provides. (Alexander) Interactivity is spoken of as a new feature of governance, but, in fact, feedback mechanisms existed long before the Internet. The emergence of cybernetics in the 1940s led governments to think of feedback as being integral to the liberal democratic process (Wiener 1948; Beniger 1986). As Agar (2004) has shown in his study of the British civil service, the mechanisation of bureaucratic routines, from the use of punch cards to computers, served to shift authority and expertise from 146

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individual powerbrokers to institutionalised channels. The proponents of new public management (NPM) in the 1980s adopted the cybernetic image of democracies as self-regulating mechanisms which function best when they are responding to public demand (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Reschenthaler and Thompson 1996). But in the consumerist context of NPM, public feedback was mediated through the market rather than the public sphere. Reference to interactivity in these speeches implies more than consumer feedback about government services. The term is used to imply partnership: an interdependent and ineluctable relationship between governors and governed. At its best, interactive communication conjures an image of transparency, mutual understanding and respect. A more sceptical interpretation might regard the rhetoric of interactivity as an attempt to appropriate individual political energies within official circuits of power. As Andrew Barry has astutely observed, ‘intensive interaction with “the public” in carefully managed environments is expected both to maximise and intensify feedback between government and the governed and to minimise the possibilities for unexpected political controversies and conflicts at a later date’ (Barry 2001: 148). Any policy to promote democratic interactivity between government and citizens depends for its success upon the extent to which feedback loops are bidirectional and to which governments are willing and able to respond to them. This challenge is clearly acknowledged in the ministerial speeches: In order to attract people to get involved in online consultations, governments must prove that there is a relationship between the citizen’s engagement and policy outcome. Democracy is not about symbolic or cosmetic consulting – but to actually use the peoples’ voices in the decision-making. (Stringer) But the real challenge if we are to convince the public of the potential of e-participation is for government to prove that it is ready to listen. The Internet not only enables the public to respond more quickly, more fully to government consultation, but will also make more transparent to the public whether the government itself is willing to respond to the views that have been expressed. (Cook) In order to attract people to get involved in online consultations and discussions, it is vital that government and representatives 147

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demonstrate their commitment to listening to and learning from the contributions that are made and to respond to them in a timely and transparent way. (Alexander) Despite the central role accorded to the wired networks of computer hardware and software in the rhetorical discourses we have been examining, it is interesting that the final ‘challenge’ is stated in political rather than technological terms. The success of interactivity is not dependent upon the technical operations of the Internet, but upon measures capable of enhancing political efficacy. As Scharpf (1997, 2006) has argued, political legitimacy in democracies is dependent upon a balance between public inputs and policy outputs. The key question that must be asked of any e-democracy policy is whether there is any evidence that it is likely to result in the public feeling themselves to be more influential in relation to the decisions that govern their lives. Given such an objective, it will be useful to catalogue the ways in which the British government attempted to translate this ambitious policy discourse into policy outcomes. ENACTING E-DEMOCRACY

The most conspicuous first outcome of these speeches and the Cabinet committee on e-democracy was a policy document, In the Service of Democracy, launched in July 2002. It defined e-democracy as ‘using new technology to energise the democratic and political life of the nation’ (7) and acknowledged that ‘Regardless of what the Government does, elements of e-democracy will become a reality’ (8). The policy for e-democracy was presented in the context of a wider agenda for constitutional modernisation: ‘decentralised decision-making, improved transparency and guaranteed rights of individuals. Government is being modernised and both Houses of Parliament are being reformed’ (11). In the Service of Democracy was emphatic that ‘e-Democracy should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement of existing structures’ of governance (4) and that the Government’s aim was to ‘use people’s energy and interest in politics to support and enhance the traditional institutions of democracy’ (11). The policy was presented as a response to potential – ‘ICT could help open new channels of dialogue between citizens and government, elected representatives, political parties and civil society’ (17) – and to public demand – ‘citizens expect to be able to use new technologies to 148

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participate in all ways, including voting, and the Government has a responsibility to respond’ (17). It was emphasised that information and communication technology was not a ‘panacea’ for the ills of political democracy, but that, with active government policy, they could support greater citizen participation in governance. The policy comprised ‘two separate but interdependent tracks: electronic participation (e-participation) and electronic voting (e-voting)’ (18). The former was defined as ‘the use of ICT to open new channels for participation in the democratic process between elections’ (18), the latter as ‘The use of ICT to facilitate participation in elections or other ballots under statutory control’ (19). Both ‘tracks’ are ‘underpinned by five principles’, which are summarized as follows:






Inclusion – a voice for all Openness – electronic provision of information Security and privacy – a safe place Responsiveness – listening and responding to people Deliberation – making the most of people’s ideas. (21)

The document concluded with the following policy recommendations: all policy consultations should be accessible via the government’s UK Online portal; all consultations on Green or White Papers should include a moderated public discussion forum; feedback reports from all public consultations should be published online in a timely and transparent way; all central government public consultations should encompass strategies on using online consultations to engage key stakeholders, and especially ‘hard-to-reach groups’, in the process; the Citizenspace section of UK Online should be redesigned ‘to provide a “trusted area” on the Internet where citizens can participate in the policy process’; ‘an e-consultation toolkit and mandatory guidance for central government department’s should be produced; a series of pilots should be created to demonstrate best practice in e-consultation; government should ‘work with Parliament to see if there is more scope for online consultations on draft bills’; and proposals should be created to pilot e-voting with a view to having an ‘e-enabled election’ at some point after 2006. These were ambitious intentions. In the consultation following the publication of the policy paper there was broad support for its aim of establishing a coherent e-democracy policy, although some concerns were raised about the inclusion of e-voting. For example, Ken Ritichie, 149

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the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, expressed anxiety about the technocratic flavour of the document: a primary concern is whether developments will be led by the democrats or the technocrats. So far, it is the technocrats who have taken the lead. E-voting has developed more because the technocrats have spotted commercial opportunities in the elections business than because politicians and election administrators have felt a pressure for change. With such an approach goes the danger that democracy might be bent to suit the answers which technology claims to provide without the questions being properly formulated. (Message in consultation web forum, August 2002) Following the publication of the policy document and the subsequent consultation, policy development has proceeded in a fragmented and incoherent fashion. No single minister has taken ownership of this policy area. Initiatives have emerged from different government departments, without any overarching supervision or evaluation. Three main areas of policy have been pursued. E-V otin g

The British government introduced remote electronic voting for the first time in five electoral areas at the May 2002 local elections. As well as Internet voting, text-message (SMS) voting was piloted in two electoral areas. In the following year’s local elections 17 e-voting pilots were conducted. The 2004 e-voting pilots were cancelled when that year’s local elections were held on the same day as the European parliamentary elections. (Extensive all-postal pilots took place instead, resulting in major concerns about the security of remote voting.) Since the passage of the 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, the newly-established Electoral Commission has had responsibility for evaluating experimentation with innovative electoral methods. The Commission sponsored evaluation studies on e-voting before and after each of the annual rounds of pilots. After the 2007 pilots, conducted in 12 local areas, the Commission concluded that ‘The level of implementation and security risk involved was significant and unacceptable. There remain issues with the security and transparency of the solutions and the capacity of the local authorities to maintain control over the elections’ (Electoral Commission 2007b: 4). The Commission’s recommendation to government that there should 150

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be no further e-voting pilots until major administrative changes were in place is likely to draw a halt to further experimentation in the near future. One of the two elements of the government’s e-democracy policy is limping at best. Lo c a l e -Pa r t i c i p a t i o n

In 2004 the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now the Department for Communities, Local Government and the Regions) established a national programme for local e-democracy, designed to pilot innovative methods of e-participation in around 20 local areas of England. All of the funded projects were initiated by one or more local authorities, often in collaboration with interested local citizens, organisations or communities. The pilot period was very short: all of the funded projects had to commence in late 2004 and to have reached the stage of implementation by the end of March 2005, at which point their central-government funding ended. The ODPM funded an expert review team (including the first author) to evaluate the projects. The overall view of the evaluators was that the projects were rushed into being and given too little time to be seriously evaluated in terms of their political effects. A wide range of projects were funded, aiming to use digital technologies in a variety of ways. For example, two local issues forums were established in Brighton and Newham, based on the model of the Minnesota e-politics forum; a web forum for people aged over 50 was set up by Surrey County Council; e-petitions to local councils were tested; online surgeries involving councillors and school students were facilitated; and a number of ‘e-democracy games’ were trialled. The quality of these projects was disparate, and only a few were sustained beyond the pilot period. The government followed up the national project with a product-production phase, making available tools such as the Voice, a web-publishing toolkit, and free ‘blogs in a box’ for use by local councillors. These had very limited impact and government funding before this project ceased in 2008. In addition to these projects, there were other nationally-funded experiments in locally-based e-democracy. Camden Council was funded to lead the Practical e-Democracy in London project, which led to the design of tools to support a local online citizens’ panel. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Innovations Fund provided support for Bristol City Council’s Community Campaign Creator project (see Chapter 4 for a detailed account). 151

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The great problem with all of these projects was their lack of coordination and integration. Teams managing them seemed not to share lessons or common objectives, and there was a lack of political leadership for the projects. Their results have never been debated in Parliament or examined by the National Audit Office. Thus a pressing need exists to take stock. Go v e r n m e n t Di alo gu e s

As discussed in previous chapters, a number of government departments have experimented with various forms of e-enabled dialogues with the public. The evaluation of these pilots by the Hansard Society has been helpful in making sense of their value and setting standards of success. It is too early to say how far the lessons from these ‘digital dialogues’ will inform a longer-term institutional commitment to online policy deliberation involving the public. The Number Ten e-petitions web site has been the most widely publicised e-democracy initiative. It allows members of the public to make policy proposals via the Prime Minister’s web site, which can then be signed by anyone else who supports them. Within weeks of the e-petitions system being piloted, almost two million people signed a petition calling upon the government not to proceed with road tolls. Another popular e-petition opposed the building of a mosque in an area of London – even though the London authorities have stated that no permission to erect such a building has been sought. Here lies the problem with e-petitioning of this kind: it is wholly nondeliberative. In many respects, it uses technology to facilitate the kind of unreflective populism that we have argued is at the root of the problems of contemporary democracy. The proposal by both Labour and Conservative parties to introduce parliamentary debates on wellsupported e-petitions demonstrates a symbolic willingness to listen to citizens, but, in the absence of a deliberative framework, it will be easy for elected representatives to ignore e-petioners in the same way that they feel legitimately able to dismiss any self-selected ‘voice of the public’. C ivic I n i t i a t i v e s

The most innovative projects to have emerged in recent years have come not from national or local government, but from a group of engaged social entrepreneurs within the MySociety project. With start-up funding from the Department for Communities, Local 152

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Government and the Regions, MySociety has pioneered a number of projects designed to make it easier for citizens to access political information and connect with one another. According to its Director, MySociety aims ‘to give citizens sites and tools on the Internet that provide them with simple but very tangible benefits in the civic and community parts of their lives’ (Public Administration Committee 2008: Q108). For example, TheyWorkForYou (http://www.theyworkforyou.com) is a web site launched in 2004 with the aim of aggregating content from the official Hansard reports so that they are more accessible to the lay public. The site allows users to track a particular issue or MP, comment on parliamentary proceedings and register for regular updates on selected themes. By acting as an independent intermediary, MySociety can ignore the silos, routines and hierarchical sensitivities of institutionally-bound information provision. The MySociety model changes the terms of democratic accountability, using digital technologies to establish a citizen-centric, needs-based approach to parliamentary transparency. But it is dependent upon citizens who are outside the loop of state officialdom having access to official data, which have tended to be vertically integrated within the government machine. The UK government has indicated that it recognises the risks of monopolising information. Minister of Government Transformation Tom Watson has stated: There are circumstances where public servants have to act as the custodians of people’s data. But there are others where this is simply no longer necessary – where we really should just give it back. Make it freely available to a wider community to find solutions to problems we can’t even begin to imagine. There are three rules of open source: One, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it. Our future thinking must view government more like a giant open source community. So far government ticks boxes one and two, no one person owns it and everybody uses it. Our task is to crack the elusive point three, ensure that every citizen has the ability to improve it. (Watson 2008) If this kind of policy thinking is acted upon, there will be scope for the MySociety model to develop without the obstacles that currently confront it. But that calls for rhetoric to be matched by seriously embedded policy measures. 153

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Returning to Mettler and Soss’s valuable attempt ‘to explain why some policies draw citizens into public life and others induce passivity’, we should not shy away from the question of whether there is a role for government-driven policy in responding to public disengagement from politics. Critics of policy interventions argue that citizens are ill-served by state meddling in aspects of political behaviour that depend for their authenticity and effectiveness upon autonomous forms of popular mobilisation. Governments are not entrusted to organise demonstrations or riots (although their actions often prompt them), so why should they be expected to facilitate democratic deliberation and exercises designed to enhance citizens’ political efficacy? Mettler and Soss disagree with such critics, quoting Schattschneider’s famous observation that ‘Whoever decides what the game is about decides also who gets into the game’. Referring as an example to voter turnout, Schattschneider states that ‘The root of the problem of non-voting is to be found in the way in which alternatives in American politics are defined, the way in which issues get referred to the public, the scale of competition and organization, and above all by what issues are developed’ (Schattschneider 1960: 107). Policy interventions can, potentially at least, affect all of these terms of engagement. According to Mettler and Soss (2004: 62), they can ‘create material incentives for mobilization . . . play a key role in building and distributing civic skills within the citizenry . . . supply resources for political mobilization . . . [and] shape citizens’ personal experiences with government and hence influence processes of political learning and patterns of political belief’. Furthermore, public policies ‘define the universe of participants and demand makers, expanding or restricting the subset of individuals who are able to engage in particular types of political action’ (63). It is quite clear that policies do have consequences for citizenship: making it easier to register to vote results not only in higher voter turnout, but more socially inclusive and representative turnout as well; providing better resources for education at all levels results in a more literate population that is likely to participate in civic affairs. Indeed, the best place to begin exploring a possible relationship between e-democracy policy and political behaviour is the literature on traditional, offline political participation. Understanding how and why citizens participate, and the associated policy stimuli, is a first step 154

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towards a policy rationale for e-democracy. Smith and Ingram (2002: 56) draw attention to the ways in which social groups are constructed by policy-makers in positive or negative terms: ‘The ways in which various publics are treated by policy – whether their views of problems are recognized as legitimate or ignored; whether they are targeted for burdens or benefits; the rules to which they are subjected such as means testing; and the reception they encounter in interaction with implementing agencies – all teach lessons related to democracy’. Pierson (1993) suggests that there are two kinds of policy effects: resource effects, which provide citizens with more money or time, and interpretive effects, which redefine for citizens their place within the political system. Campbell (2005) identifies how government policies shape citizens’ capacity to participate in politics and how, in turn, that participation influences subsequent policy outcomes. Policy sets in motion a cycle of efficacy, sometimes overriding traditional predictors of who will and who will not engage in civic or political action. These useful acknowledgements of the function of policy in stimulating or constraining democratic participation relate directly to the divergent anxieties about political disengagement that we identified in the introduction: governments worrying about not being trusted and citizens frustrated by unrealised efficacy. There are strong grounds for concluding that neither of these weaknesses in the contemporary democratic system can be fixed on their own or in isolation from the other. Citizens will not (and, moreover, should not) trust government as a nonreciprocal relationship in which state legitimacy increases as the public confidence in their own capacity to make a difference atrophies. Conversely, the political efficacy of citizens is unlikely to increase unless policies are in place to ensure that governments can be closely monitored, challenged and engaged honestly in diverse public agendas. This prisoners’ dilemma cannot be resolved by simple appeals for the democratisation of ‘political culture’, for cultural agency is never unconstrained by institutional structure. Policy can make institutions work better, develop new institutions that reflect and promote desirable social norms and – as importantly – provide citizens with the capacity, confidence and constitutional structures likely to engender efficacy and engagement. Any attempt to devise policy that will encourage citizens not only to engage, but to experience this as a valuable use of their energy, must engage critically with theories of political culture and traditional accounts of offline participation. The seminal work on civic 155

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participation was Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture, published in 1963, which drew upon an earlier tradition of political-cultural analyses led by Merriam (1931). The strengths of Almond and Verba’s study were the use of cross-national data and the endeavour to explain the health of democratic structures and processes in terms of the public’s cognitive and affective attitudes towards them. According to Almond and Verba, democratic stability tends to be sustained when there is congruence between the attitudes of the public and the effective working of the political system. This ‘civic culture’ thesis is open to two substantial criticisms. First, it represents political culture as little more than a support mechanism for the political structure. The argument’s normative bias denies culture an independent status beyond political instrumentalism; it is as if there could be no other role for good citizens than to participate in existing structures and processes of power. Second, Almond and Verba’s empiricist definition of culture as the aggregate sum of citizens’ values and behaviours is excessively individualist, behaviourist and mechanistic. In contrast with the empirical conception of culture are anthropological theories, most notably articulated by Geertz (1973), whose well-known argument is that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’. For Geertz and other symbolic theorists of culture, the key object of study is not the inherent truth of the empirical data (such as who and how many vote), but the ‘imaginative universe’ within which behaviour occurs which explains why and how various actors produce the different meanings which constitute culture. By analysing terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘e-democracy’ from the perspective of symbolic interpretation, one comes to see them as contested discourses which mean different things in terms of both their forms of transmission and reception and the socially structured contexts in which they are produced and circulate. Stated more concretely, a concept such as ‘participation’ is bound to be conceived in different ways by different actors, for whom the construction of the term’s meaning will contribute to a contestation of its legitimate use (Pateman 1970; Coleman 2007d). Democratic governments tend to favour public participation in politics, regarding it as being normatively linked to an active and virtuous citizenry. But political elites recognise and encourage some participatory activities more than others. In general, governments support methods of public engagement that are formal and bilateral, but are more cautious, and sometimes even hostile, towards informal, horizontal networks of 156

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participation that are beyond their control. Participatory activities such as voting, joining parties and writing to elected representatives are regarded as positive and legitimate civic behaviour, whereas demonstrating, boycotting products or resisting ‘bad’ laws are less welcome and often actively discouraged. From the citizens’ perspective, the meaning of participation has less to do with legitimising state power or colluding with government intentions than pursuing strategies of autonomous empowerment, selfrepresentation and, sometimes, cultural subversion. Governments sometimes see participating citizens as busybodies, unrepresentative activists or dangerous mobs. Citizens sometimes regard government exhortations to participate as calls for collusion or regimentation. Citizens have at least three reasons for participating in political life, often quite unrelated to, or in conflict with, the interests of government. Much participation is instrumental: it is aimed at achieving specific political ends by directly or indirectly influencing government. People who campaign to stop an airport runway being built near their homes or send money to a pressure group considered to represent their personal or class interests are instrumental participators. A second motive for participating is a communitarian sense of duty or belonging. People who volunteer to run neighbourhood associations are often motivated by communitarian principles, but so, in a quite different way, might be people who campaign to keep foreigners out of their area. Third, there is expressive or symbolic participation where people are motivated to join in because they want to identify with a cause or gain pleasure from an occasion, such as attending a gay pride march, a state funeral or an antiracist carnival. Of course, this typology of reasons to participate is oversimplified: in reality participatory motives are hybrid in character. For example, voting in an election might be an instrumental act of seeking a government that will serve one’s ends, as well as a communitarian act of civic duty and a symbolic act of going to the polling station and being part of a collective ritual. But it is a useful typology insofar as it explains political participation as having multiple rationales and needing to satisfy often conflicting purposes. Some activities are on the borderline of political participation, such as reading or watching political news, talking to friends and family about politics, organising in the workplace or volunteering in the community. The extent to which such activities are included in definitions of political participation will affect claims made about the condition of civic or democratic culture. For example, if the ‘health’ 157

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of democracy is measured on the basis of electoral turnout and membership of political parties, but not more informal behaviour such as boycotting products on political grounds or talking to friends about the news, the resultant sense of democratic malaise might seem to be more acute than it actually is. In the past 30 years participation in formal politics has declined, but citizens are participating much more in informal, nongovernmental, sporadic ways. Whether or not people participate is determined by a range of personal and environmental factors. The five most significant, empirically measurable individual-level determinants of whether people participate politically are their socioeconomic status, the extent of their interpersonal networks, their sense of efficacy, their beliefs about civic duty and their patterns of media use. 1. Socioeconomic status. More affluent and better-educated people are more likely to participate than those who are poorer and less formally educated. This was the main finding from Almond and Verba’s classical comparative study and has been reinforced by most subsequent research. Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley (2003: 627), on the basis of their Citizen Audit of civic attitudes and behaviour conducted in 2001, conclude that ‘political voice is concentrated among those with the greatest resources, defined in terms of those with skills and income’. 2. Interpersonal networks. The wider people’s interpersonal networks, the more they are likely to participate, especially if they spend time talking to contacts about politics or politically-related issues. Frequent talkers are significantly more likely to be participators than nontalkers. 3. Efficacy. The more people believe in their capacity to influence the political environment the more likely they are to participate. People whose sense of personal (internal) efficacy is low are less likely to ‘waste time’ (as they see it) trying to produce effects in which they have little faith (Lane 1959; McCluskey et al. 2004; Amna, Munck and Zetterberg 2004; Coleman, Morrison and Svennevig, 2008). 4. Civic duty. Predictably, the more people believe that they have a duty to participate, the more they do so. Civic duty is strongly correlated with age: people over 60 believe that they have a duty to vote and participate in other, mainly formal, ways, whereas under-25-year-olds are much less likely to be motivated by a sense of obligation. Some political scientists are of the view that the demise of civic duty is a 158

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cohort effect, carried with young people as an enduring ethos as they grow older (Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley 2003). 5. Patterns of media use. The mass media are a potential resource for citizen learning about public affairs. Newspaper reading is more positively associated with such learning than is television viewing, although the latter is a significant resource for less informed citizens. Learning via the mass media is heavily skewed towards the bettereducated and older sectors of the electorate. For many people, mainstream news services are not easy to understand and do not give them the kind of information that they think they need and want. Young voters seem to be tuning out of public affairs media use in considerable numbers, leading some news producers and journalists to fear that we are witnessing a long-term decline in the audience for civically nourishing content. Given these uneven and differentiated patterns of public participation in the democratic process, policies to mould and manage the public’s civic behaviour have been developed ever since the rise of the mass franchise, and particularly since the emergence of a more consumerist, less deferential social culture in the 1960s. Walters, Aydelotte and Miller identify five purposes for involving the public in government policy-formation and decision-making: 1. Discovery – Aid in the search for definitions, alternatives or criteria 2. Education – Educate the public about an issue or proposed alternative 3. Measurement – Assess public opinion regarding a set of options 4. Persuasion – Persuade the public towards a recommended alternative 5. Legitimisation – Comply with public norms or legal requirements. (Walters, Aydelotte and Miller 2000: 352) Some participatory policies are based on more than one of these purposes, and different rationales for participation are more relevant at different points in the policy cycle. Any attempt to develop a policy for e-participation should build upon the extensive knowledge that exists about what has worked and failed in the past half century, but there has sometimes been a tendency for e-democracy discourse to convey the impression that interactive technologies are facilitating hitherto untried forms of public involvement in the political process. For example, some of the literature about online 159

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consultations is more concerned to explore the potential of new technologies than to draw comparative lessons from the extensive experience of offline consultations. This problem was compounded in the case of British government e-democracy policy by the fact that there was a dedicated unit within the Cabinet Office working on e-democracy, but no equivalent unit of central government dedicated to offline democracy or participation. The e-democracy unit’s brief was to explore policy options for using ICT to increase public participation in the democratic political process, but without a comprehensive evaluation of comparative offline initiatives there was an inevitable tendency to overstate the policy significance of technological factors. In reality, technological affordances are one of several factors determining public participation in politics. The significance of e-factors can be understood only in relation to broader explanations of how and why people participate politically, as well as the social profile of participators. E-democracy has too often been confined to pilot exercises that are inadequately evaluated and unsustainable. If such policies are to go further than experimental novelty, two questions must be addressed: Do they create useful, new opportunities for the public to engage with democracy? Are they sustainable and transferable to other areas of governance? Answering these questions calls for evaluation techniques and strategies that go beyond technocratic (does the software work?) or economic (is it cheaper?) attempts to assess the worth of e-democracy pilots and programmes. Generally speaking, policies designed to stimulate democratic participation have been poorly evaluated. Rowe et al. (2001) are right to observe that ‘There have been virtually no attempts to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the different public participation exercises being conducted’ and that there is a need to develop appropriate instruments to measure immediate impacts and longer-term effects. We are impressed by Rowe et al.’s nine-point evaluation criteria, as shown below, followed by the definition of each: Criteria

Definition

1. Representativeness

The participants in the exercise should comprise a broadly representative sample of the affected population The participation process should be conducted in an independent (unbiased) way

2. Independence

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3. Early Involvement

4. Influence 5. Transparency

6. Resource Accessibility

7. Task Definition 8. Structured Decision-Making Process 9. Cost Effectiveness

The participants should be involved as early as possible in the process, as soon as value judgments become salient or relevant The output of the procedure should have a genuine impact on policy The process should be transparent so that the relevant population can see what is going on and how decisions are being made Participants should have access to the appropriate resources to enable them to successfully fulfil their brief The nature and scope of the participation task should be clearly defined The participation exercise should use or provide appropriate mechanisms for structuring and displaying the decision-making The procedure should in some sense be cost effective from the point of view of the sponsors

This evaluation framework asks a series of questions about the process and impact of different methods of participation. Although devised to evaluate offline exercises, it is appropriate for the evaluation of ICT-enabled exercises; questions about the accessibility and usability of information and communication technologies could be addressed under the heading of ‘resource availability’. In the case of e-democracy projects, evaluation should not overemphasise the role of hard technologies, but need to assess these as one component of broader systems of knowledge systems and networks of interaction. Assessing the impact of an e-democracy exercise is highly problematic, as is any attempt to isolate the effects of a single political activity. ‘Impact’ is a more complex concept than at first might appear to be the case. Although related, it is not the same thing as output or outcome. For example, an investigation of the impact of an online consultation should pay attention to more than outputs in terms of the amount or quality of information processed or outcomes in terms of policy, legislation or rules affected. Beyond that, there is a need to assess 161

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the actual and potential impact of virtual forms of participation on policy-makers, policy, participants and the policy process. There are likely to be different types of impact affecting each or any of these categories of actors:
Democratic – the use of online consultation might, for example, increase or decrease the inclusiveness of the consultation process
Political – e-consultations might result in different policies if the views expressed using this channel of communication are very different from those that would have been reached via more traditional methods
Administrative – efficiency savings in staff time and speed or ease of data processing are often presented as justifications for using online methods
Financial – while online consultations may cost money to set up, overall financial impact might be more positive if this method means that document storage or staff contact time can be reduced. It is too early to make definitive or conclusive statements about the long-term impacts and sustainability of e-democracy policies, and there is a need for longitudinal studies of cumulative effects. Without extensive and comparative evaluations, there is a danger of perpetual ‘pilotitis’, dooming e-democracy to the politics of gesture rather than systemic integration. POLICY AND SPACE

There is an important, but often overlooked, way in which policy can shape democratic citizenship: by creating spaces within which social practices are placed, ordered and discovered. Public libraries are a good example of such spaces. They are funded as a result of a policy determination to encourage particular cultural norms. In recent years, libraries have adapted to public demand for access to more diverse literacies encompassing a broad range of ethnic texts, digital forms and communitarian activities. Library policies both facilitate and shape such activities, while excluding or marginalising other activities that do not fit in with the spatial intentions of policy-makers. Another example of how policy carves out public space are Citizens Advice Bureaux, first established in Britain in 1939 and flourishing since the passage of the 1957 Rent Act. Like other public spaces that are funded as a result of state policy (they receive half their funding from local authorities and 162

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half from central government), Citizens Advice Bureaux face the challenge of being funded by the state and at the same time having to be free to challenge and criticise government on a day-to-day basis. David Harker, the Chief Executive of CAB, has explained his organisation’s response to this dilemma: Our assessment of our role and our strength is that we have the confidence and trust of the public precisely because of our independence from the state. For us, that means more than maintaining the freedom to speak out and use our evidence to tell it like it is, important though that is. It also means maintaining an independence from the transactions that the citizen has with the state. I think this is vital for a service that offers information, advice and advocacy. It means that however closely we work with government we cannot become a delivery agent for government services. The way we describe it is that we are a conduit, not a gateway; an intermediary and not an agent. Our slogan is that ‘we are for the citizens, not the state’. In what sense can policy create democratic space? What is the problem that such policy would be trying to solve? Bauman’s lament for ‘the blatant inconsequentiality’ of anything that takes place in contemporary public spaces is helpful in reminding us of the crux of the problem: Assuming for a moment that the extraordinary happened and private/public space was filled with citizens wishing to debate their values and discuss the laws which are there to guide them – where is the agency powerful enough to carry through their resolutions? The most powerful powers float or flow, and the most decisive decisions are taken in a space remote from the agora or even from the politically institutionalised public space; for the political institutions of the day, they are truly out of bounds and out of control. (Bauman 1999: 6) The proposal for a civic commons in cyberspace, which we outline in the next chapter, is intended to address this spatial deficit. When we speak of creating a democratic online space, we do not have in mind a geographical referent that is comparable with the idea of ‘Spain’ or ‘Earth’ or ‘Broadcasting House’. Rather, we are thinking of the kind of moral space that Silverstone (2007: 143) has argued is needed if ‘the possibility of dialogue, interactivity and other forms of mediated intimacy’ is to extend ‘beyond the excluding private’. For such a sphere of intersubjective sensibility to take shape, all social actors must 163

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be prepared ‘to open their space to the stranger irrespective of their position in the media hierarchy’. The civic commons proposal draws upon two related senses of the term ‘democratic space’: firstly, that of a recognised, accessible and trusted place or common ground, and secondly, the idea of a space between – a sphere that is neither state nor market, neither incorporated within existing constellations of power nor detached from them. The concept of common space that is the property of no one goes back to the medieval existence of unenclosed land which was ineligible for ownership and constituted a freely accessible public domain. In an agrarian economy the existence of meadows, heaths and forests within which peasants had the right to grow food, feed animals and gather firewood amounted to a remnant of communal democracy. The common lands were destroyed by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure movement, described by Polanyi (1944: 35) as ‘a revolution of the rich against the poor’. By 1876, 98 percent of the agricultural land in England and Wales was owned by just 0.6 percent of the population. But still, in the midst of global capitalism, a remarkable range of goods remain as common resources. As Hess (1999) has shown, in relation to contemporary common-pool resources (CPR) tradition, such common goods include surfers’ waves (Rider 1998), sports (Bird and Wagner 1997), budgets (Shepsle 1983), public radio (Brunner 1998), traditional music (McCann 2001), air slots (Riker and Sened 1991), campus commons (Boal 1998), highways and transboundary transportation systems (van Vugt 1996), the Internet (domain names, infrastructure, information, acceptable use policies) (Nathanson 1997; Noonan 1998; Reilly 1997; Benkler 2000; Lessig 2004), tourism landscapes (Healy 1994), cultural treasures (Sax 1999) and car-sharing institutions (Prettenthaler and Steininger 1999). The importance of these examples is that they provide evidence of society’s pragmatic need to share certain resources if public interests are to be satisfied. The choice of such resources is not accidental: they comprise goods which increase in value when everyone has access to them. Whereas exchange commodities gain value by being scarce and unattainable, common goods perform their functions well only when everyone can use them. For example, the value of public transport is determined by the number of people able and choosing to use it; the utility of a language as a form of common communication depends upon everyone knowing and wishing to use it; the value of the Internet is dependent upon a critical mass of users who cannot only send, but receive and send back, messages. Democracy is a classical 164

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common good which works only if it is inclusive and accessible. According to Arendt, it is the publicness of democracy (she calls it ‘the public world’) that provides the necessary context for citizens to act as a collectivity rather than as atomised individuals. A polling station which only a few people could reach and fewer still were attracted to enter would hardly fulfil its function as a barometer of public choice. Similarly, spaces of public discussion, such as party meeting rooms, market squares or online forums, have limited democratic value if they are accessible or attractive only to the rich, the well-educated or the technically literate. Democracy’s status as a common good requires its institutions to be rooted within public space and designed to facilitate participation rather than exclusion. The second conception of public space defines it as being neither part of the state nor the market, but constituting space in between and beyond these overarching spheres of domination. For Habermasian democratic theorists, the public sphere is to be found within autonomous cracks in the structure of social power: informal sites of social interaction, such as coffeehouses, pubs and piazzas, where publics gather to speak and act for and as themselves. At a grander and more strategic level, institutions such as public-service media contribute to the creation of a public sphere by exposing citizens to unanticipated information, people and perspectives; providing universal access to content that is in the public interest, such as news bulletins and weather forecasts; and providing for minority interests that would not otherwise be catered for by commercial media. In both of these senses, public space is defined in terms of its negative relationship to power elites. The metaphorical strength of the commons is its invulnerability to the claims and tactics of vested interests seeking to buy out, shut up, drown out or override the voices of the public. But spaces of democratic deliberation are unlikely to emerge spontaneously, except in very localised and homophilic forms. The creation of trusted and protected spaces facilitating cross-cutting and pluralistic flows of public communication calls for the kind of policy initiatives hitherto applied to free education, library services and public service broadcasting. In economic terms, these are externalities that can be sustained only by an institutional commitment to the public good. It is precisely such a policy that our enervated democracy now requires.

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C H A P T E R 7

Realising the Democratic Potential of the Internet

TRANSCENDING POLITICAL DISTANCE

T

he premise of this book is that democracy is in trouble and the Internet possesses vulnerable potential to improve public communication. This position is in contrast to that which says that the Internet is an inherently democratising technology, so it is bound to democratise governance. Our study is rooted in the problematics of contemporary democracy. We take the view that what has gone wrong with democracy concerns its capacity to sustain mutually communicative and respecting relationships between governments and governed. A yawning chasm has grown up between those elected to represent and those who are represented which can be addressed only through strategies to shrink and transcend political distance. For people to get closer to democracy, three things need to happen. First, democratic institutions and processes must become sensitised to the ways in which real people tell their stories and express their fears and desires. For most people, life is recorded in fragmented narratives rather than coherent speeches, in heartfelt values rather than ideological stances. Only through translation into this expressive vernacular can governance speak to humanity. Second, democracy must keep in touch with those in whose name it governs. Occasional communication when votes are needed is bound to be dismissed as cheap and cynical. The democratic conversation must be incessant if it is to be credible. Third, public interaction with the democratic process must leave its mark. Citizens of a democracy do not want to be asked their opinions merely so that a government can say it has asked them their opinions; they want to see an authentic relationship between speaking and being heard, input and output, touching the lever and seeing the wheel turn. 166

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Far too often democratic consultation amounts to pedalling a bicycle that’s nailed to the ground. The intangibility of formal democracy arises from its profound aura of untouchability. Pre-democratic authority appreciated the power conveyed by touch: the royal laying on of hands (‘divine touch’ as it was known) was performed by British monarchs until the early eighteenth century and by French monarchs until the 1789 Revolution. Shaking hands with the public still remains a most potent act of intercourse for contemporary politicians. It is as if the touch provides fleeting evidence that the representative is more than a mere representation of power. Insensitive state structures, routines and physical environment are in need of redesign with a view to developing the haptic qualities that could make them approachable and memorable (Bourriaud 2002). The aesthetic recovery of the unfriendly state entails the development of humane techniques and technologies for democratic involvement as distinct from governing. Too often e-democracy has been promoted in the name of convenience: vote from bed, text-message your MP while you’re on the bus, press red buttons as a substitute for articulated opinion. There is hollowness about much of this interactivity – more like the dead-end languor of a south-coast amusement arcade than the vibrancy of empowered citizenship. The elusive goal of democratic communication is not the quest for instantaneity, but the pursuit of mutual recognition. Democracy’s problem is not its inability to synchronise touch-screen inputs and responsive outputs, in some cybernetic and populist fashion, but its failure to engender relationships of accountability, empathy and respect between representatives and represented. At its most democratic, representation entails an endeavour to mediate the presence of absent voices. The democratic challenge for technology is not to simulate community or communion – the pretence of togetherness – but to help us deal with a world where we are never and can never be one and together. It is not reconnection that democracy needs most, but a healthy respect for the reality of disconnection. Technologies of instant connection are confidence tricks, like the White House web site to which one can ‘send a message to the President’. ‘I think you’re a lying trickster’ says the message; ‘The President thanks you so much for your message’ says the almost-instant response. Authentic acknowledgement lies in the irregular, non-instant response, just as real music lies in the instrument that is not preprogrammed to have a perfectly regular beat. 167

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The project of mass communication in the twentieth century was to transmit messages to ever-wider audiences through ever-more sophisticated channels. Radio and television were the highpoint of this quest for communicative connection. The emergence of the World Wide Web at the end of the century has been represented as a qualitative advance, allowing messages to interflow freely between sender and sender, many-to-many (Dutton 2008). With digital interactivity arose the hope of ending the dichotomy between sender and receiver, transmitter and audience. The consequences of this hope for democratic communication are hugely important. But democratic relationships are determined by more than the reach or interflow of public communication. Two-way indifference, misunderstanding and disrespect is no more than a new route for soiled goods. Changing the nature of communicative relationships entails more than copper wire or wi-fi. The twentieth-century project was to cultivate techniques and technologies for delivering messages to a mass audience. The project for this century is to address the other side of communication: to design more effective and sensitive ways of hearing and acknowledging the millions of voices and actions, not to mention silences and inactions, that constitute meaningful human interaction. In pre-modern society most communication was between people who knew one another. There were established rights and rites of acknowledgement. With rigid hierarchical stratification went deference and hauteur. With parochialism went distrust of the stranger’s voice. Modernity, by contrast, is a land of strangers and uncertainty. It is an age of communicative overload, where the world contains more accessible messages than the brain can ever process. Modern society has developed ubiquitous techniques for recognising, prioritising, filtering, categorising, retrieving, linking, trusting and responding to messages. Embedded within such techniques and protocols are assumptions about what sort of information is valuable and what is not, who is likely to be worth hearing and who not, what is credible and what is dubious, who deserves an instant response and who can wait their turn. Contemporary communication is characterised by inequalities of acknowledgement that arise less from political authority or material wealth than beliefs and prejudices about the qualities and defects of different social strata. A good example of this is revealed in Norris and Armstrong’s (1999) well-researched study of police surveillance using close-circuit TV (CCTV) technologies. They point out that in a medium-sized city centre with 80 cameras the police receive 168

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172 million pictures per day. Because they are unable to look at all of them, they select target groups for surveillance; some of these are demographic selections (blacks, teenagers, men), and others chosen for their ‘suspicious’ behaviour, such as running, loitering or laughing in the street. The consequence of being selected for this kind of negative acknowledgement is to increase one’s chance of being deemed criminal. Such crude and routine determinations of acknowledgement and disrespect permeate relationships between citizens and the state, for these are inherently and inescapably encounters between strangers. If public engagement in politics is to be taken seriously, the democratic state needs to design ways of acknowledging citizens without this seeming like an empty or disingenuous gesture. This entails creating connections between the discrete and episodic moments of civic action (casting a vote, serving on a jury, attending a community meeting) and the wider process of democratic governance. Civic action needs to be invested with consequence. People need to understand what they can expect from participating in civic behaviour. Joining a supermarket loyalty scheme, signing up for evening classes or booking a holiday are associated with transparent outcomes, but the consequences of opening the door to an election canvasser or filling in the census return tend to be mysterious and opaque. In an age when blind civic duty could be relied upon, consequences hardly mattered – for the essence of duty is its moral indifference to outcomes. But now that the public is more critical (and those entrusted with authority should learn not to resent this), it is vital to demonstrate clear and honest connections between individual actions and collective results, neighbourhood input and global output, and single-issue choices and systemic effects. This requires a more sophisticated, but accessible, approach to the presentation of politics rather than any notion of ‘dumbing down’. At a most basic moral level, there needs to be a more sensitive official comprehension of people’s natural desire to be acknowledged as individually consequential actors rather than data in a geo-demographic calculation. Thanking people for their civic input would be a good start. Maintaining an ongoing conversation with them would be better still. A CIVIC COMMONS IN CYBERSPACE

But where are the spaces in contemporary society within which such ongoing public conversations might take place? What kind of inclusive, expansive and meaningful forum for democratic interaction can we 169

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envisage as the appropriate setting for a more deliberative democracy? We would argue that the shared virtual space of the Internet (cyberspace) possesses precisely the characteristics that could, given the right policy framework, allow it to be used for this purpose. After many years of engaging with the problematics of public communication and exploring the scope for developing a more democratic mediascape, the present authors joined forces at the beginning of the current century to produce a manifesto for a civic commons in cyberspace. We wrote Realising Democracy Online (2001) because we believed that the new, digital media could be seen as having a vulnerable potential to improve public communication. For this to happen, we argued, called for a policy intervention that was both visionary and practical. In this section we revisit the terms of our original position, with a view to presenting an expanded proposal in the final section of this chapter. Our original case was founded upon the contention that democracy, if it is to be saved from its increasing contemporary hollowness, needs a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centres of governance: local, national and transnational. It would be a space in two senses: an accessible and trusted common ground and a space between: a sphere that is neither state-dominated nor privatised, neither incorporated within existing constellations of power nor detached from them. The power of an online civic commons would inhere in its invulnerability to the claims and tactics of vested interests seeking to buy out, shut up, drown out or override the voices of the public. Our proposal for an online civic commons in cyberspace called for the creation of an enduring structure which could realise more fully the democratic potential of the new interactive media. This would involve the establishment of an entirely new kind of public agency, designed to forge fresh links between communication and politics and to connect the voice of the people more meaningfully to the daily activities of democratic institutions. The organisation would be publicly funded but would be independent from government. It would be responsible for eliciting, gathering and coordinating citizens’ deliberations upon and reactions to problems faced and proposals issued by public bodies (ranging from local councils to parliaments and government departments), which would then be expected to react formally to whatever emerges from the public discussion. This should encourage politicians and officials to view the stimulation of increased participation not as 170

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mere ‘citizens’ playgrounds’ but as forums in which they must play a serious part. There is scope for the online civic commons to become an integral and accepted part of the representative process. Local government councils, which have been weakened in terms of both powers and legitimacy in recent decades, could use their local commons to reestablish direct communication with communities. The U.K. Parliament, which has been undergoing a crisis of legitimacy and confidence about its role, is an ideal institution to take advantage of the online commons. Legislators could establish regular consultations with their constituents, and with communities within their constituencies. Parliamentary and Congressional committees, which take evidence from expert witnesses, could extend their reach by taking regular evidence from citizens with fresh and diverse experiences and expertise. Pre-legislative scrutiny of draft bills could be opened up to the public, either in general or via recruited groups with special knowledge. The Modernisation Committee of the U.K. Parliament has floated the idea of post-legislative scrutiny. Who better to contribute to an evaluation of the implementation and effects of new laws and policies than members of the public themselves? The online civic commons would not (indeed, could not) supplant the many initiatives that have burgeoned in recent years to promote public deliberation and consultation over civic issues. But it could bring many of those efforts under a more capacious electronic roof, backing them up with substantial production resources and expertise, and enhancing their visibility, status and clout. Its role would be both responsive to ideas for such ventures put to it by others – and proactive in proposing initiatives that its staff might regard as opportune. And it would have a particular interest in exploring new ways of consulting intelligently with the broadest possible range of citizens, often including for the first time in public debate groups that have been marginalised for reasons of lifestyle, economic circumstance, language or disability. Core watchwords of the agency’s work must include transparency and accountability, and it should be answerable to an extensive range of stakeholders, including communities (local and of interest), local authorities, public-service broadcasters, organisations promoting citizenship and democracy, as well as the parliaments and assemblies of the United Kingdom. Overall, its brief should be regarded as exploratory and developmental, and its activities should be conceived 171

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as a cumulative civic learning exercise, assessed in such terms in its periodic reports. The proposed organisation would be charged with promoting, publicising, regulating, moderating, summarising and evaluating the broadest and most inclusive range of online deliberation via various new media platforms, including the web, e-mail, newsgroups, and digital TV. In terms of promotion, the new agency would have a principal task of promoting access and accessibility for all to technologies and spaces of public information and debate. Ensuring social inclusion is central to the success of any project for e-enabled democratic citizenship, but this must go further than the simplistic notion of a dichotomous ‘digital divide’ between information haves and have-nots. Citizens are excluded from the benefits of digital technologies in a range of ways, including having access to only unsophisticated hardware and software; lacking the skills needed to make use of available technologies; being unable to find spaces or content that relate to their own circumstances, orientation or experiences; and finding themselves frustrated in their efforts to make a social impact through digital communication. The agency would be well advised to conceive digital exclusion as ‘a hierarchy of access to various forms of technology in various contexts, resulting in differing levels of engagement and consequences’ (Selwyn 2004: 351). In placing particular emphasis upon the democratic right to be informed and to communicate with other citizens, the agency would need to promote opportunities for inclusive access to the online commons by seeking imaginative ways to make communication resources available to the public in such places as libraries, schools, doctors’ surgeries, community centres and municipal offices. The agency might well work with business (supermarkets, banks and post offices) to open up new, user-friendly kiosks giving public access to the online civic commons. Alongside the crucial democratic issue of equal access, the agency would need to work on ways of promoting accessible online content so that the current tendency of the web to be primarily textual, monolingual and made in America can be redressed. If the new media are to serve democracy, the design and language of their content has to establish and then take account of user needs. The new agency would perform a crucially important publicity role and would need resources enabling it to do so. The Internet is littered with dead web sites which few people, if anyone apart from their creators, have ever visited. The freedom for anyone to set up shop 172

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within the World Wide Web has given a degree of libertarian romance to the new media age, and there are some forms of peer-to-peer interaction which benefit greatly from this. But democracy requires a trusted civic space to which all know that they can come when they have something to discuss with their fellow citizens and elected representatives. The agency would seek to establish trust in such spaces, locally, regionally, nationally – and perhaps at European or even global levels. It would support gateways to worthwhile discussions and consultations and offer easily accessible archives of previous public deliberations. Just as local authorities devote resources to voter education, the agency would seek to make citizens aware of their civic rights and opportunities in the deliberative arena. The agency would have a light-touch regulatory function. The principle of free speech is central to democracy. But so is civil behaviour. The agency would endeavour to address the sensitive balance between individual rights to be heard and the collective need for civilised conduct in public spaces. Recognition of such a need emerged strongly from Dutton’s survey of Californian members of two computer-based discussion groups, many of whom expressed concern over the dogmatic and discourteous contributions of other participants. As he concluded, ‘Developing sound and fair rules for public electronic fora appears vital to realizing their potential’ (Dutton 1996: 285). Safeguards are needed against the exploitation of interactive media for ulterior purposes, such as commercial gain, plebiscitary support, populist agitation, administrative convenience or cosmetic PR exercises. In short, there exist a multitude of ways in which governments, lobbyists, pressure groups, businesses or others could appear to be promoting electronic democracy when their real goal is to advance their own political, financial or publicity interests. We are far from proposing that such activities should be prevented or censored in any way (even if they could be), but we do favour making clear distinctions between opportunities to enhance civic democracy and distractions from that purpose. For citizens to trust the integrity of the electronic civic commons and to use it as a portal to local as well as national and wider forums for debate, there needs to be an accountable body which can illuminate best practices and report critically on those exercises less worthy of public trust. The agency, then, would set out best practices for public deliberation, ranging from basic rules of engagement to proven ways of arguing a case without giving offence. Free speech without regulation becomes 173

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just noise; democracy without procedure would be in danger of degenerating into a tyranny of the loudest shouter – or, in the case of e-democracy, the most obsessive, loquacious message posters. Civilising public deliberation through considered regulation is no less necessary to a robust democracy than has been the long evolution of parliamentary procedure and rule-making (currently being modernised). An innovative role for the new agency would be to facilitate democratic moderation, both by training skilled moderators and by initiating debates about good practices in the conduct of public discussion. For online discourse to work well, sensitive skills of moderation are needed. Where can one learn such skills? It is a reflection of the decline of public discussion in the United Kingdom that there are few contemporary settings in which people can acquire those skills that used to be called ‘chairmanship’ (Citrine 1952). Courses for online facilitators are now emerging, and there are helpful discussion guides for those who moderate online communities (Salmon 2000). These skills need to be pulled together, defined and disseminated. The agency could offer training in moderation techniques, including means of facilitating discussions in ways that enable the voices to be heard of citizens who do not necessarily feel bold, articulate or firmly committed to a particular point of view. A key democratic role of the agency would be to produce summaries of large-scale public conversations, perhaps utilising innovative visualisation and conversation-mapping techniques (Sack 2000; Renton and Macintosh 2007). Allowing everyone a chance to have their say is only one part of the democratic project. Effective representation requires accountability. An important role of the agency would be to secure the provision of useful summaries of public discussions and consultations so that these may be fed in at appropriate levels to institutions of democratic representation. For example, a local authority seeking public views on transport policy options would gain less from an account of each citizen’s contribution than a broad (though not simplified) picture of the overall threads in the discussion and people’s responses to them. This is where the strict independence and impartiality of the proposed agency is of utmost importance: the responsibility of providing balanced and trusted accounts of public deliberation is crucial if there is to be confidence in the electronic civic commons by both citizens and representatives. Finally, the agency would be charged with ensuring that its work is independently evaluated. Evaluation should not be seen as a 174

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retrospective add-on to the civic commons project, but would be integral to its everyday operation. Political scientists spend a great deal of time and money analysing how people vote. We also need to look at how they discuss, for ‘it is in . . . ordinary conversation about politics . . . that . . . democratic culture receives its most concrete realization’ (Wyatt, Katz and Kim 2000: 72). The agency would therefore be responsible for commissioning evaluative research that would cast light on the process of online public deliberation. Of course, they would not be called upon to reinvent the wheel – the literatures on political participation generally and online activity specifically do include some material on how ordinary people think about and discuss issues that matter to them. The value that an agency might bring to this would be cross-disciplinary research in which analysis could be combined with practical involvement in setting up and improving projects. In conclusion, our original proposal to increase public engagement in the policy process was founded upon five key expectations for an online civic commons:
Its aim would be radically transformative, but not idealistically utopian; it would be big enough to make a real and visible difference to the conduct of politics, but in a feasible and pragmatic fashion.
It would have to be clearly meaningful – much more than just going through the motions. There would need to be convincing evidence that public authorities listen, understand and have taken into account what emerges from the process.
It would win public respect by combining the virtues of amateurism – creativity, enthusiasm, commitment and idealism – with those of professionalism – especially thoroughness of pre-planning, organisation, carry-through, summarising of results, as well as after the fact evaluation.
It would aim for selective inclusiveness. Although in a viable participatory democracy, everything would no longer be left to determination by representatives, elites, interest groups and experts, neither should it aim for Athens writ large, in which everybody would be expected to have a view on everything all the time. Without excluding anyone keen to take part, involvement in the envisaged exercises would ideally be doubly targeted – on the one hand, to elicit the views of those with relevant experience of and involvement in the topic concerned, and on the other hand, to help 175

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bring to the table the kinds of people who are often left out of the debate, because they lack the competencies needed to gain a voice.
It would be publicly funded, but politically independent. If e-democracy is government-organised, its agenda may be weighted too heavily to, and its outcomes may be too heavily interpreted in terms of, government concerns. E-democracy should be run not by government but by civil society. Public funds could be allocated for the purpose either to a newly constituted agency or in the form of an earmarked grant to an existing public broadcaster, such as the BBC in Britain and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States. THE CIVIC COMMONS 2.0

Since its publication, our original proposal has been widely discussed by academics, the media industry and policy-makers in several countries. It has contributed to a more focused policy debate about e-democracy. But it has been challenged by some criticisms that call for a response. While granting our intention of maintaining clear distance between the new agency and the shaping powers of government, some critics have expressed doubts about the institutional nature of our democratic model. Born (2006: 107), for example, expresses concern that, like public-service broadcasting in the past, a civic commons would seek to promulgate a single public sphere. Contrasting this with Keane’s (2004: 376) assertion that ‘a healthy democratic regime is one in which various types of public spheres are thriving’, Born argues that a normative requirement of a public-service media policy for a pluralistic democracy in an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous society must be a sensitivity to the ‘democratic politics of difference’ (Born 2006: 107; Keane 1991: 376). In a similar vein, while accepting many of the ‘potential benefits’ of our proposal, Wright offers a valuable critique of its institutional design. Drawing upon Edwards’s studies of online moderation, in which he explores the potentially constraining effects of government moderators upon democratic deliberation and concludes by arguing for independent, third-party moderation ‘especially in governmentinitiated Internet discussions that are always under a certain “shadow of control”’ (Edwards 2002: 19), Wright raises doubts as to how far the new agency’s role in moderating and summarising public discussion would be compatible with democratic legitimacy. He argues 176

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that ‘the censorial power of the moderator would most fruitfully be enforced by an independent person or group following detailed (and openly available) rules set by the institution in negotiation with a range of stakeholders’ (Wright 2006: 263). Both of these criticisms reflect the deep tensions within democratic theory between models of participation promoted by incumbent power-holders and autonomous initiatives driven by ‘self-actualizing citizens’ (Bennett 2007). They serve to remind us that any new democratic institution which cannot demonstrate its independence from government is likely to meet with public mistrust. Such criticisms have been reinforced by a paradigm shift in the social uses being made of the Internet. The emergence of social network sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Flickr and YouTube; of user-generated media sites, such as Indymedia and OhMyNews; of the blogosphere; of wikis; of the creative commons licensing initiative; and of a range of peer-to-peer (PTP) communities of interest and practice has in some ways exceeded our own cautious optimism in 2001. Uricchio argues that ‘participation in these PTP collaborative communities constitutes a form of cultural citizenship, and . . . the terms of this citizenship have the potential to run head to head with established forms of political citizenship’ (Uricchio 2004: 140). Benkler suggests that we are moving towards a ‘networked public sphere’ which ‘promises to offer a platform for engaged citizens to cooperate and provide observations and opinions, and to serve as a watchdog over society on a peer-production model’ (Benkler 2006: 177). A pioneer of open-source online networking, Douglas Rushkoff, argues that: One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the ‘open source’ software movement . . . By publishing software along with its source code, open source developers encourage one another to correct each other’s mistakes, and improve upon each other’s work. Rather than competing they collaborate, and don’t hide the way their programs work. As a result, everyone is invited to change the underlying code and the software can evolve with the benefit of a multiplicity of points of view . . . The implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth it in the new context of our networked reality. (Rushkoff 2003) 177

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Bruns outlines four characteristics of this new form of online behaviour which he calls ‘produsage’, referring to the collapsing boundaries between production and use:
A shift from dedicated individuals and teams as producers to a broad-based distributed generation of content by a wide community of participants
Fluid movement of produsers between roles as leaders, participants and users of content – such produsers may have backgrounds ranging from professional to amateur
Artefacts generated are no longer products, in a traditional sense: they are always unfinished and continually under development – such development is evolutionary, iterative and palimpsestic
Produsage is based on permissive regimes of engagement which are based on merit more than ownership: they frequently employ copyright systems which acknowledge authorship and prohibit unauthorized commercial use, yet enable continuing collaboration on further content improvement. (Bruns 2006) These developments in the uses of online space are commonly referred to as ‘web 2.0’. O’Reilly, Musser and O’Reilly (2007) who has popularised the term, argues that web 2.0 marks a new phase in the history of the web characterised by networked collaboration and collective intelligence. (Tim Berners-Lee, a principal inventor of the web, is dismissive of web 2.0 claims, insisting that web 1.0 had precisely the same aspirations and characteristics.) Whichever period the historians of Internet history might think we are in, it is quite clear that democratic effects are being realised in ways that have little to do with institutional politics. This piecemeal emergence of public space is indicative of precisely the kind of self-confident, autonomous, culturally porous civic behaviour that Blaug associates with critical democracy (Blaug 2002). Frustrated and disappointed by government consultations in which they are not being genuinely consulted, media discussions in which the public voice is marginalised or manipulated and e-democracy projects which pay more attention to technological than political efficacy, the public – or, at least, significant numbers within it – have taken matters into their own hands and improvised a series of open-source solutions to the problems of social interaction, some of which have significant political ramifications. And yet fundamental features of politics persist, foremost amongst which is the need to connect collective will formation to the exercise of state power. As long as representative democracy is retained – and, as 178

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we have argued in Chapter 3, alternatives do not seem feasible, with or without the Internet – there is going to be a need for mediating agencies which provide a legitimate conduit between diverse public voices and politically legitimate decision-making. This will not happen automatically, even if, as Uricchio (2004) suggests, online networks are capable of sustaining forms of cultural identity in which the logic of political citizenship is countered. Unless publics and counter-publics are able to reach and influence institutional power, online networks risk the fate of previous attempts to establish democratic media: that they wither under the shadow of their own political insignificance. Bruns acknowledges the need ‘to deliberately enable, encourage and facilitate the encounter and debate between different positions and to guide such debate towards the formation of consensus and the adoption of collaboratively created policies’ (Bruns 2007a). Such a task requires an impersonal, institutional body capable of gathering together diverse and fragmented perspectives with a view to facilitating meta-deliberative outcomes. Given the developments that have taken place since we set out our original case for an online civic commons, it makes sense to expand and revise our conception of its shape and scope in accordance with the now inescapable logic of networked organisation. Our original proposal was in danger of placing too much emphasis upon a singular, univocal public. Indeed, democratic theory is dependent upon the symbolic existence of a demos which can either speak or be spoken for. But the reality of contemporary society is that those who constitute the demos are highly differentiated, possessing disparate economic and political resources, and adopting diverse cultural styles, values and notions of identity. It is insensitive to imagine that a single public sphere, conceived as a unifying forum, will ever be sufficient to allow all of these fragmented publics – or strata within a single public – to account for themselves on their own terms. For democracy to work, everyone does not need to be talking to everyone else at the same time, but nobody should be so shut out from the discussions of others that public agendas can be set and decisions made without their right to participate in them. The public sphere has a connecting rather than integrating function. The role of the civic commons would be to connect diverse social networks that could only hope to arrive at public judgments through the mediation of an impersonal institution committed to facilitating communication between people who do not necessarily know or understand one another. The function of such an impersonal institution is to serve as a 179

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democratic magnet, attracting dispersed democratic energies to a space in which they can interact meaningfully with the resources of power vested in representative institutions. The agency running the civic commons would be entrusted with the political responsibilities of helping diverse social networks to be fully open and accountable to one another; connecting local experience, habits, knowledge and common sense to official structures of political representation; and promoting deliberative mechanisms that are sensitively responsive to asymmetries of social power between and within networks. In thinking of the public sphere as a constellation of intersecting networks, rather than a space occupied by an ontologically homogenous collectivity, we are seeking to adapt the civic commons to the co-productive logic of contemporary governance. Whereas governments in the past tended to be centralised, vertical and hierarchical, exercising top-down authority via a well-recognised chain of command, the exercise of power through governance is less institutionally centralised and more diffuse, devolved and collaborative. ‘Governance can be seen as the pattern or structure that emerges in a socio-political system as . . . outcome of the interacting intervention efforts of all involved actors’ (Kooiman 2003: 258). Collaborative governance raises citizens from mere consultees, whose responsibility ends at the point of making recommendations, to co-producers of policies that will affect their everyday lives. The administrative state takes the form of a steering agent, building and managing relationships between a range of horizontal networks. In such a context the rationality of governance becomes ‘dialogic rather than monological, pluralistic rather than monolithic, hierarchic rather than either hierarchic or anarchic’ (Jessop 2000: 16). Governance is more pluralistic than government, insofar as it is a shared political space of power contestation by many actors, some of which would have no voice in traditional government. And governance is less predictable than government, in that ‘the outcomes of administrative action are in many areas not the outcomes of authoritative implementation of pre-existing rules, but rather the result of a “co-production” of the administration and its clients’ (Offe 1996: 100). The concept of co-production, as articulated by Ostrom (1996: 1079), is based upon recognition ‘that the production of a service, as contrasted to a good, was difficult without the active participation of those supposedly receiving the service’. It follows from this that ‘The potential relationships that could exist between the “regular” producer (street-level police officers, school teachers, or health workers) and 180

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“clients” who want to be transformed by the service into safer, bettereducated, or healthier persons. Co-production is one way that synergy between what a government does and what citizens do can occur’ (Ostrom 1996: 1080). As governance comes to be increasingly dependent upon co-productive networks, mass-media organisations, particularly those which have a public-service remit, are faced with new democratic responsibilities. Specifically, it is through these media that social networks can be made accountable. The Internet is not, in the traditional sense, a mass medium. Indeed, one of the most common mistakes made by top-down political leaders is to imagine online communication as a form of broadcasting, free from the interference of journalistic intermediaries, but still based upon a model of transmission between a well-resourced centre and a remote audience. Experience suggests that the Internet is most likely to engage users when it is conceived as a distributive space – a network of networks in which power is polycentrically dispersed. Bruns’s notion of produsage well describes the ways in which many aspects of the industrial-consumerist model of mediation is becoming redundant. There is, however, one characteristic that has been traditionally associated with democratic mediation that cannot be dispensed with: the need for interpretive intermediaries. As online and offline media converge and the boundaries between television, the web and telephony come to be culturally and technically blurred, the responsibilities of journalists are reconfigured and become more important than ever before. One such role will be to encourage and moderate conversation between citizens who are, as they inevitably must be, strangers to one another. A second role will be to help keep debate informed by providing accessible and balanced accounts of social reality. A third role for journalists will be to interpret different perspectives and point to ways of resolving impasses in discussion. Finally, journalists have a role to play for which they are historically well qualified: to help make public discussion lively, appealing and dramatic. Some of these roles could be well performed by the existing journalistic profession, abandoning its ‘ravenous’ quest ‘for conflict, scandal, splits, rows and failure’ (Lloyd 2005: 89). Other aspects of such democratic intermediation might be performed by politicians, adopting a new role as facilitators of public discussion rather than remote orators addressing an increasingly disengaged audience. It is to be hoped that, as well as regarding the civic commons as a major resource for new stories and bottom-up agenda-setting, journalists and 181

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politicians will be prepared to take on the responsibility of helping to represent the public to itself. Whereas the public is presently addressed and depicted by the media as an audience of a political drama in which they are outsiders, by assuming a role as principal reporter of the civic commons, press and broadcast journalists could play their part in representing dispersed and fragmented public voices to one another, providing an interpretive thread within and between otherwise distanced communicative networks (Coleman and Ross 2008). Thinking of a civic commons as a space of intersecting networks, pulled together through the agency of a democratically connecting institution, raises questions about the scale of such a project. In the longer term, it would make sense to aspire towards a transnational civic commons. As Nancy Fraser has cogently argued, ‘From its inception, public sphere theory has always been implicitly Westphalian and/or nationalist’, but ‘no longer unified in a single institutional locus, sovereignty is being disaggregated, broken up into several distinct functions and assigned to several distinct agencies, which function at several distinct levels, some global, some regional, some local and subnational’ (Fraser 2005: 3). Cyberspace may well be the most promising domain in which the complex communicative arrangements of cosmopolitan citizenship can be nurtured. There is already evidence of this happening in instances such as the environmentalist, antiglobalisation and antiwar social movements, as well as civic journalism of the kind supported by Indymedia. But the project of creating and sustaining a transnational public sphere cannot be instigated by institution-building; on the contrary, an institution capable of sustaining a global civic commons is likely to emerge out of political practices: in the case of states, such practices will involve increasing policy convergence, of the kind classically seen within the politics of the European Union; in the case of civil society, the driver is likely to be a growing acknowledgement of the links between local issues and the need to hold global institutions to account on the scale at which they operate. However, the growth of cosmopolitan consciousness is a gradual historical process and should not be regarded as a deterministic effect of the Internet as a medium. In the meantime, nation states continue to matter a great deal. They remain key political centres, even if they do not possess the sovereign powers that they once assumed they had, just as localities remain key spaces of experience and attachment, even if they are more than ever before interdependently connected to the wider world. As Kymlicka and Norman (1994) rightly argue, national 182

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communities ‘remain the primary forum for participatory democratic debates’. To argue for a civic commons in the United Kingdom – or any other country – is not a retreat into a Westphalian view of the world, but an acknowledgement of where political power can most practically be reached and influenced in the early years of the twenty-first century. Even at the subglobal level, national and local discussions involving vast numbers of people, connected in countless, dispersed networks, present significant challenges of scale. How can hundreds of thousands or million of citizens hear from and listen to one another in a thoughtful, respectful fashion? How can intelligent mass deliberation take place in relation to issues and policies that affect and concern all of them? Here again, emergent practices of collation, argument-mapping and visualisation of network content and linkages could provide solutions to the coordination problems of an online civic commons. Such analytical approaches are already being applied to the study of blog content, where it is impossible to gain a sense of the flow of communication without tools that can trace the presence of conceptual and semantic clusters, and their interlinkages, across the entire blogosphere. For example, tools such as Technorati and IssueCrawler are now employed to crawl the web and identify the fluid patterns of content relating to particular topics (Rogers 2003; Bruns 2007a). Sack’s conversation mapping uses sophisticated textual analysis to analyse large-scale discussions within newsgroups, producing a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive (Sack 2000). This relates to exciting research into ways of ‘visualising’ data, allowing outputs from public discussion to be accessed without having to read vast amounts of stored text (Donath 2002; Mancini and Buckingham-Shum 2006; Atkinson, Bench-Capon and McBurney 2006; Renton and Macintosh 2007) To summarise, we continue to see a pressing democratic need for a civic commons and for a government-funded agency that will be charged with promoting, publicising and facilitating public deliberation between government at its various levels and the dispersed networks which constitute the contemporary communicative landscape. Given its remit to connect as well as summarise diverse spaces of online discussion, the agency would need to have access to sophisticated technologies for mapping and visualising metadata. Indeed, it should be at the forefront of research into innovative technologies and cultural forms likely to generate more informed, inclusive, reflective and consequential online deliberation. Central to the agency’s thinking 183

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must be the growing convergence of information and communication technologies; the deliberative potentials of mobile telephony and interactive digital television are underdeveloped areas within e-democracy, calling to be addressed by the new agency, working in partnership with the telecommunications and media industry. Governance of the new agency should reflect the diverse range of cultures, languages, political perspectives and socioeconomic strata that make up contemporary society. A Reithian ethos would not be welcome. BUT IS IT REALLY PRACTICAL?

If our proposal is to amount to more than a utopian aspiration, three politically crucial questions remain to be addressed. First, are there grounds for believing that citizens would want to make use of a civic commons of the kind that we have outlined? The mismatch between institutional supply and public demand has blighted many an enthusiastically-conceived policy innovation in the past, leaving governments frustrated after having poured vast resources into schemes that attracted few participants. (It is surprising how many projects intended to promote ‘public participation’ are launched without any participation from the public in their conception or design.) Second, what reasonable expectation can we have that governments at various levels will engage with the civic commons as a source of intelligent input to policy formation and decision-making? Without an assurance that governments really can and would listen and learn from the public’s deliberations, we can be accused of merely devising a recipe for an elaborate talking shop, detached from any real power. Third, what is it about this proposed democratic innovation that will make it stable and sustainable in ways that previous e-democratic innovations have not been? Public D e m an d

Are there grounds for believing that an online civic commons would be of interest and practical use to the majority of the British population who have access to the Internet? To answer this question, we shall draw upon findings from a nationally-representative survey‡ of U.K. Internet ‡

The survey was designed and analysed by Stephen Coleman and conducted by the online polling company yougov. Agnes Schneeberger helped to analyse the data. Sample characteristics were as follows:

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users aged between 18 and 75 (n ¼ 3,229) conducted in 2005. These findings do not tell us about the minority of the population which did not have access to the Internet in 2005; nor can they be applied directly to other national populations. But we are of the view that they point to trends that are sufficiently revealing to be of help in establishing the extent to which there might be public demand for an online civic commons. Rather than beginning by asking respondents about their uses and expectations of the Internet, the survey began by asking a number of questions about their experiences of democratic citizenship. There was an almost equal split amongst respondents between those who were satisfied with the way that democracy works in the United Kingdom and those who were not. Over one in 10 (13%) were very dissatisfied with democracy, with nonvoters in the most recent (2005) general election twice as likely (22%) to be very dissatisfied with the working of democracy as those who did vote (11%). Despite the low turnout in the recently held 2005 election, most respondents (82%) said they believed that citizens have a duty to vote in elections. This belief was weaker amongst 18–25-year-olds (61% of whom did not vote in the 2005 election), with one in four (25%) disagreeing with the statement that they had a civic duty to vote. While believing that they had an obligation to vote, most respondents (58%) stated that they had no faith in politics to solve their problems. Women (62%) were significantly more likely to think this than men (54%), and less affluent respondents (in the C2DE band) (61%) had significantly less faith in politics than the more affluent (in the ABC band) (55%). Eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds were the least likely to express faith in politics as a way of solving their problems, with only one in four expressing such confidence. Almost a third (32%) of respondents stated that they ‘leave politics and current affairs to other people’. There was a significant gender difference here, with 24 percent of men and 39 percent of women distancing themselves from politics in this way. Asked about activities that they had engaged in within the past 12 months, 7 percent had participated in a demonstration, 8 percent had Age: 18–24 (n ¼ 356); 25–9 (n ¼ 296); 30–4 (n ¼ 319); 35–9 (n ¼ 306); 40–9 (n ¼ 592); 50–9 (n ¼ 682); 60þ (n ¼ 696). Gender: Males (n ¼ 1,554); females (n ¼ 1,674) SES: ABC1 (n ¼ 1,742); C2DE (n ¼ 1,487).

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joined a pressure group, 11 percent had attended a political meeting, 15 percent had sent a letter to their MP, 16 percent had sent an e-mail to their MP and 57 percent had signed a petition. Contrary to the assumption that demonstrators are likely to be young, there were no significant age differences amongst the small group who had demonstrated; indeed, 25–29-year-olds and 60-plus-year-olds were equally likely to have participated in a demonstration. Similarly, those joining pressure groups were more likely to be aged over 50 than under 25. There was no significant difference between people who posted letters to their MPs and those who sent e-mails. Twelve percent of respondents aged over 50 had sent a letter to their MP within the previous year – the same percentage as those aged under 50. Nineteen percent of those over 50 had e-mailed their MP within the previous year, compared with 14 percent of those aged under 50. In almost all of these areas of participation, more affluent respondents were significantly more likely to have participated than the less affluent. Asked whether they were involved in any way in the policy or decision-making of their local council, 90 percent of respondents said that they were not. But a majority of respondents (55%) said that they would like to be more involved in local council policy and decisionmaking. Asked to explain why they were not involved, around a third of respondents (34%) stated that they believed that their council is not interested in them and that their participation would be inconsequential. For the 90 percent of local nonparticipators – and particularly one in three of them who might participate if they felt that they would be listened to and could exercise some influence – there are strong indications of low political efficacy acting as an obstacle to civic engagement. Political efficacy refers to people’s belief in their capacity to influence the world around them (internal efficacy) and in political institutions to respond to them (external efficacy) (Lane 1959). Seventy-eight percent of respondents expressed the belief that what they think about political issues is unlikely to influence government, and 75 percent took the view that governments don’t care what ordinary people think. Asked how much influence they have on politics (with 0 lowest and 10 highest), only 5 percent of respondents fell into the 7–10 band, while 70 percent fell into the 0–3 band. Asked whether they would wish to have more influence on the running of the country (with 0 lowest and 186

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10 highest), only 2 percent fell into the 0–3 band, while 58 percent fell into the 7–10 band. In short, lack of political influence is not a direct consequence of a lack of desire to be influential. Respondents were sceptical about the ways in which governments use consultative mechanisms to find out what the public thinks. A minority (44%) considered that these mechanisms helped governments to understand the public well, but an equal number (44%) agreed strongly (7–10 on a 0–10 scale) that consultations tend to be a waste of time because politicians always think they know best. Asked whether they had actually participated in a local or national government-run online consultation within the last 12 months, 13 percent of respondents said that they had done so, with men (15%) more likely to have participated than women (10%) and more affluent respondents (16%) considerably more active consultees than the less affluent (9%). This social-class contrast is particularly striking, given that the sample comprises only Internet-connected people. In short, despite the skew produced by the digital divide, poorer people are still less included. Although actual experience of participating in online consultations was limited, when asked whether they would be prepared to participate in an online government consultation in the next 12 months, most respondents (80%) expressed interest in doing so. But, once again, the findings pointed to important divides relating to social class, gender and age. While 84 percent of the more affluent respondents said that they would have liked to be consulted online, this fell to 75 percent in the less affluent band. However, fewer than one in 10 (9%) less affluent respondents said that they did not want to be consulted online, leaving a significant 15 percent of ‘don’t knows’ – compared with only 9 percent of ‘don’t knows’ in the more affluent band. Eighty-five percent of men expressed willingness to be consulted online, compared with 76 percent of women – but, again, 16 percent of women remained undecided. Eighty-four percent of respondents over 60 expressed an interest in being consulted online, compared with 69 percent of 18–24year-olds, of whom almost a fifth (19%) were undecided. This suggests that there is work to be done to persuade the less affluent, women and young people that online consultations have particular relevance to their lives. As things stand, they are uncertain rather than hostile. Asked how often they would be willing to be involved in online deliberations about local issues, 12 percent said that they would be willing to register their opinions once a day, 34 percent once a week and 187

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10 percent once every two weeks. (The figures were slightly lower for national issues.) Asked how much time they would be prepared to spend participating in online deliberation about issues with which they were familiar, a majority of respondents (58%) said that they would devote more than 20 minutes. For more complex issues, most respondents (61%) expressed a willingness to devote more than an hour to an online consultation. More than one in 10 respondents (11%) would be willing to devote up to two hours to complex consultation issues, and almost one in 10 respondents (9%) said that they would be prepared to devote between six hours and more than one day to such deliberation. Less affluent respondents were just as likely to be willing to devote more than a day to online discussion as those in the more affluent band. Interestingly, there was no significant correlation between participation in online consultations and satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with democracy. Both the satisfied and the dissatisfied were equally likely to have participated. Indeed, respondents who were dissatisfied with democracy were slightly more likely to express an interest in participating in future than those who were satisfied. Most respondents (59%) took the view that councils should always follow the results of a consultation, provided a sufficient number of people have responded. But 24 percent of respondents took the view that politicians should make their own decisions and leave it to the election for the public to hold them accountable. Significantly more women identify with the former view: 63 percent compared with 55 percent of men. Regardless of whether councils take up the views expressed by consultees, a clear majority of people (83%) think that councillors and council officials should personally take part in online consultations. A majority of respondents (57%) believed that involving more people in the decision-making process would lead to better government. On the specific question of an online civic commons, a clear majority (79%) said that they were in favour of creating a public space online for citizens to debate policy issues. These findings capture a widespread demand by citizens to be consulted – a demand that stretches through parts of the population who are both disengaged from and dissatisfied with existing democracy. Given that dissatisfaction with the democratic process tends to stem from a common perception that governments and elected representatives are unresponsive to public experience and voice (see Chapter 1), it would seem that the civic commons, with its key 188

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requirement for political feedback, could contribute to a restoration of confidence in the democratic system. There is evidence to suggest that positive attitudes towards online discussion and consultation are supported by active behaviour when citizens are given opportunities to state and share their views online. Significant examples include:
The BBC News web site, which receives tens of thousands contributions each month to its message boards. In the month of the Iraq war the site received 350,000 e-mails and postings from people wishing to express their views.
The move from offline to e-rule-making in the United States, which has led to considerable public involvement. Whereas pre-online rule consultations attracted a median of 33 comments per rule (West 2004: 79), the number of postings in the Forest Area’s Roadless Area Conservation rule-making reached 1.5 million, over 300,000 in the USDA’s National Organic Standard rule-making and 490,000 in the EPA’s Proposed National Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants rule-making. (Shulman 2006)
Twenty-five thousand people a day visit the Ten Downing Street e-petitions site, and popular petitions have garnered over a million signatures.
In the remote Russian town of Kondopoga (population: 35,000) the online discussion forum (http://cityk.onega.ru) has seen over 2,000 various issues raised between mid-2005 and mid-2007, with some 74,000 replies received to posted messages. Political issues are the most popular, comprising two-thirds of the total views on all the forums. The problem with each of these popular exercises in e-participation is their uncertain relationship to constitutional decision-making. The public demand to speak and be acknowledged is beyond question; but is anybody listening? As one participant in a focus group discussing the relationship between new media use and political efficacy has put it, ‘I think you can contribute [to government online consultations], but you’re not sure how you are making a difference to government policy’ (Coleman, Morrison and Svennevig 2008). En g a g i n g G o v e r n m e n t s

Our second question has less to do with engaging citizens than considering whether there is any good reason to expect governments to engage democratically with an online civic commons. This is not a new 189

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question thrown up by interactive, digital media. Since the participatory turn of the 1960s, at least, questions have been asked about the authenticity and effectiveness of governments’ professed desire to consult the public. As reported earlier, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee’s 2001 inquiry into new forms of public participation, was informed that one in five local authorities considered that consultations they had run had very little impact on decisions and the same proportion took the view that consultations had merely confirmed decisions that were already made (House of Commons Public Administration Committee 2001b: 29). In a 2002 survey of local authorities by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, one in four authorities reported that exercises in public participation were only ‘occasionally influential’ upon decision-making (45). In the National Health Service, despite the extensive efforts to establish patient and public involvement (PPI), a report by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), found that ‘PPI is not yet having a major impact on policy and practice. This is despite a plethora of PPI initiatives. It is almost as if there is a brick wall between the activities going on and any changes on the ground that happen as a result’ (11). In the first six months after its formation at the beginning of 2004, Ofcom completed 33 consultations, which attracted an average of 35 responses to each. A recent Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) consultation on ‘managing the nuclear legacy’ received 63 responses, several of which ‘referred to “consultation fatigue” and expressed scepticism about the value of consultation, which can involve a lot of effort for little result. Many consultees made the point that the value of participation in the first phase will be judged against evidence that their views are ‘being taken properly into account’ (DTI web site, http://www.dti.gov.uk). As the public increasingly experiences consultation fatigue and frustration with the futility of being consulted to no effect, consultative governance risks being regarded as little more than a participatory ritual. In the United Kingdom, both the government and the courts have set out clear guidelines for legitimate consultations. These include the Code of Practice on Consultation, the Code of Good Practice on Consultations and Policy Appraisals and the Policy Maker’s Guide to Public Involvement, all produced by the Cabinet Office. The courts have also articulated principles that governments are required to follow when running public consultations: the consultations ‘must be at a time when proposals are at a formative stage; the proposer must give sufficient reasons for any proposal to permit of intelligent consideration 190

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and response; adequate time must be given for consideration and response; the product of consultation must be conscientiously taken into account in finalising any statutory proposals’ (R v Brent LBC ex parte Gunning [1985] 84 LGR 168). The failure by government to adhere to such principles has on occasions been challenged in the courts. For example, in 2007 the High Court, responding to an action for judicial review from Greenpeace, found the U.K. government’s consultation on nuclear power to have been ‘very seriously flawed’ and ‘procedurally unfair’. Greenpeace’s submission was that the government had reneged on a promise made in a 2003 White Paper that there would be ‘the fullest possible consultation’ before it reached any position on the role that nuclear power would play in the future U.K. generating mix. Although something described as a public consultation was initiated by the government, Greenpeace described this as ‘a sham’ (Sarah North, head of Greenpeace nuclear campaign, Guardian Unlimited, 15 February 2007). The grounds for this allegation were that the government did not clearly inform consultees of the question to which they were being invited to respond, and much of the information on which the government relied in making its final decision was published only after the consultation closed. Mr Justice Sullivan quashed government plans to build new nuclear power stations until a properly conducted consultation took place. There is a manifest disjuncture between government’s intentions in setting up consultations and their capacity to learn from them. The failure here is cultural rather than technical; the platforms adopted for consultations, be they offline or online, are not the issue. Any successful attempt in making e-deliberation meaningful will not involve tweaking the technology but calls for genuine commitment by the various levels of government to rules of engagement that reinforce rather than undermine citizens’ political efficacy. We do not propose to prescribe the precise form of the new institutional agency that will be responsible for running the civic commons, but we are clear that, as a matter of basic principle, it must be independent from government, while at the same time powerful enough to maintain close contacts with all levels of government with a view to ensuring that they receive and respond to public deliberations. The agency’s work must be fully transparent and open to the public above and beyond the usual accountability requirements for public bodies. The legislation which establishes the new agency would benefit from adopting aspects of the codes of e-engagement that have already been 191

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adopted in some other countries. For example, a key principle in the Australian government’s Information Management Office’s eightpoint e-consultation code states that ‘Agencies need to inform participants at the outset about how their input will be received and used in policy-making. Once a decision has been taken, agencies should indicate how citizen input through online engagement has been used’. Similarly, the Canadian Government’s report on online consultation technologies states that: Consultation participants expect to see how their contributions are being used and to be acknowledged for their efforts. The feedback and follow-up stage ensures the consultation host is accountable to participants for the process. The first step in accountability is feedback. Participants and the consultation host are encouraged to give feedback on the effectiveness and efficiency of the process, which is reflected in the final consultation report. The consultation team not only thanks the participants for their contributions, but informs them as to how their input was used in recommendations regarding the policy, program, service or initiative on which they were consulted. In the United Kingdom the Prime Minister has suggested that e-petitions should be debated in Parliament if they reach a certain threshold of support. While we are extremely sceptical about parliamentary time being taken up by proposals that have not been exposed to a process of public deliberation (for example, the Number Ten e-petition signed by over a quarter of a million people protesting against the siting of a £100million mosque in London which nobody has proposed to build), the idea of making space within the parliamentary timetable for citizeninitiated issues is a good one. Parliaments and local councils, at both a plenary and a committee level, should allocate times to discuss issues brought to them by the civic commons agency. The agency’s task would then be to report back to the civic commons on these debates and their outcomes and, as importantly, to facilitate continuing interaction between the deliberations of the public and those of their representatives. This translation and integration function will be crucial in ensuring that citizens regard the civic commons as a politically consequential rather than solely expressive discursive arena. The civic commons agency must, therefore, have the power and confidence to gain entry to the agendasetting offices of governmental and legislative institutions at all levels, and 192

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to be quite candid with citizens when such entry is refused or government responsiveness to the public debate is ill-considered or tokenistic. The scenarios which follow are intended to give a picture of how the civic commons might work in specific instances: A local council has received an application from a company seeking permission to establish an amusement arcade in a high street that is within walking distance of two local schools. Some local people have written to the council to complain, and leaflets have been given out in the high street and outside local schools. The issue is raised on the local area section of the civic commons, and over 150 local people contribute comments, mainly in opposition to the arcade on the grounds that it would encourage gambling, but also from a few people who argue that it would cheer up the area and provide much-needed part-time jobs. The civic commons agency intervenes after a week, urging participants to check out a nationally-based online discussion that is taking place elsewhere in the civic commons about the principle of legalised gambling. (This debate followed from a national government policy to set up super-casinos.) The agency also contacts the local council and asks if councillors involved in the arcade decision would be willing to join the online discussion. Two of them do, but they are both councillors who are opposed to the decision, and the majority party on the council is known to be in favour of it. The agency returns to the council and asks whether the committee that will make the decision could participate in a three-week online debate with local people who have a view on the subject. The committee agrees and invites the licence-seeking company to join the debate. Over the course of three weeks both local councillors and the company are much clearer about local people’s anxieties and the specific policies they would want to see in place if the arcade is established.

The Secretary of State for Education appears on a series of major television and radio news programmes calling for ‘a national debate’ on different approaches to teaching reading. In the past a ‘national debate’ has been a code word for Ministers appearing in every available studio to tell the public what they think the issues are, with the occasional citizen speaking back via phone-ins or random 193

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e-mails. As soon as the Minister calls for the debate, a dedicated section of the civic commons is established, and the civic commons agency devotes resources to ensuring that a wide range of participants with an interest in the topic – parents, teachers, children, educational psychologists – are aware that it is taking place. The agency also calls upon the Minister to state how she intends to use the input from this discussion and to ensure that she and/or officials in her department are actively involved in the debate. The agency also contacts the education committees of the U.K. Parliament, the devolved parliaments, and assemblies and local councils to ensure that there is a joined-up debate. As a debate about teaching reading is bound to involve a good deal of technical information and research findings, the agency establishes an online library on the debate topic and, in collaboration with an expert advisory group, produces a series of short e-guides to aspects of the subject.

A television channel is broadcasting a reality TV series about how not to bring up your children. One of the prominent characters has been making racist comments about his neighbours and, possibly encouraged by the presence of television cameras, has acted in a bullying way towards some of them. A significant number of viewers have written to the broadcasting regulator (Ofcom) complaining that the man’s behaviour is offensive, possibly illegal and likely to set an unacceptable example, particularly to young viewers. The series producer says that this is good TV and they are only showing real life; viewers who are offended are free to switch off. Several hundred people open a discussion in the civic commons, urging the regulator to intervene. But as many more join the discussion to object to the ‘political correctness’ of the objectors. The civic commons agency acknowledges that there are two issues at stake here: a debate about the immediate broadcasting of this programme and a wider debate about acceptable speech and conduct. Two linked forums are established on the civic commons. Ofcom and the TV channel are urged to participate in the immediate discussion about what, if anything, needs to be done about the series. In the broader forum, the House of Commons Committee on Media, Culture and Sport agrees to take evidence from the public about televised depictions of bullying.

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In each of these cases, the alternatives to the space opened up by the civic commons would have been either government-driven ‘debates’, usually amounting to an exchange of soundbites in various studios, or grass-roots protests, often failing to connect in any deliberative fashion with decision-makers. The online civic commons is an institutional response to the absence of an existing democratic space in which representatives and represented can engage in free, open and collaborative dialogue. The civic commons will deserve to be taken seriously only if it is constitutionally connected and respected, while at the same time sufficiently distant from government to be able to hold it to public account. That is why we propose that the agency should be government-funded, but wholly independent from government control. To be sure, some government actors will do their best to ignore, work around or manipulate the civic commons so that they retain control of the policy agenda; and some citizen groups will prefer to protest and demonstrate without feeling compromised by any associations with government. The civic commons will not replace politics as usual, but augment and integrate its democratic elements. Su sta inin g th e Sp ac e o f t h e D em os

And yet it cannot be denied that the short history of e-democracy is littered with failed projects, dead web sites, earnest intentions that were never taken up and thoughtful dialogues that led nowhere. Why should the proposal for an online civic commons be any different? The problem with most e-democracy projects to date is that they have been either top-down or grass-roots in nature. The former have been limited by the rationalities of governmentality (Rose and Miller 1992) and the latter by institutional disconnection. For e-democracy to become sustainable, it must be seen to be both credible and effective. These two concepts do not well describe the consultation tradition as it has developed over the last 50 years. This point was ably expressed by Matthew Taylor, former Chief Strategic Adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee’s 2007 inquiry into public consultations. He argued that it is a mistake to imagine that the success of consultations is dependent upon process. More importantly, it is dependent upon commitment: For me, it is about the question that is asked. If the question is asked by a group of people up here of a group of people down 195

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here, it does not matter how you do it. There is something difficult about that question because that question is, ‘What do you think of the way we are performing and could we perform better for you’? That is not the question. The question has to be, ‘What do we want? What are we willing to do about it’? At the end of that, what are you willing to devolve to us as a group of politicians to do on your behalf? As long as the conversation we have about society is government-centric rather than citizen-centric, consultation cannot work because it is based upon an inadequate description of what the problem is. Most of the social problems we have to solve are as much to do with what I do as a citizen as they are to do with what you do as a politician, but that is not how most consultations are framed. They do not start with, ‘What are we as a community going to do to make our community safer? Let us spend a day talking about that together and from that we will derive some things that the council should do as well as a rich amount of things that we are going to do’. It starts from a group of people on the panel saying, ‘What do you think about the way in which we are policing your community’? You create a language of disempowerment as a consequence of which you feel quite rightly that people are just shouting at you because you almost invite the public to make a set of incommensurate demands to you. The room is full of people demanding this, that and the other. You do not give them the responsibility of trying to reconcile these conflicting demands. You invite them to be unreasonable to you and as a consequence you say, ‘This did not work. I am not going to do this any more’. (House of Commons Public Administration Committee 2007: Q394) Taylor well describes the debilitating contradiction that has dominated most official approaches to consultative exercises. By conceiving of the public as policy consumers rather than politically responsible citizens, the political class has created the inevitable conditions for inefficacy. Citizens, addressed as consumers, are conceived as embodying pure demand which governments, seen as providers, can never hope to meet. This relationship cannot possibly provide a foundation for anything more than an anemically parsimonious notion of citizenship: citizens as voracious supplicants, politicians as distributors of state largesse. For e-democratic innovations to be sustainable, rather than ad hoc and temporary offerings from benevolent rulers, they must occupy a 196

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space in which civic energy is capable of affecting the terms and uses of power. Arendt’s astute observation that ‘When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name’ (Arendt 1970: 44) points to the crucial function of the civic commons as a space in which power is enabled or facilitated rather than handed down or bartered for votes. To quote Arendt again, ‘What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them (Arendt 1998: 53). Allowing the mass public to become present to itself and to its representatives is indeed the central problem of contemporary democracy. If the civic commons is a feasible and sustainable project, it is because thus far no better way has been found to gather the public together, not as spectators, followers or atomised egos, but as a demos capable of self-articulation.

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Index

Bourriaud, Nicolas, 167 Brants, Kees, 54 Bristol Country Council, 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 111, 151 Brown, Gordon, 14 Bruns, Axel, 86, 117, 178, 179, 181, 183 Buckingham-Shum, Simon, 28, 183 Burke, Edmund, 23 Butler, David, 49, 59

Alexander, Douglas, 143–6, 148 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, 156, 158 Arendt, Hannah, 165, 197 Arrow, Kenneth, 24, 34 Ashley, Jackie, 112, 115 Bach, Jonathan and Stark, David, 84 Barbalet, Jack, 4 Barry, Andrew, 115, 147 Bauman, Zygmunt, 20, 163 BBC, 11, 14, 45, 52–5, 61, 65–6, 92, 120–3, 125–6, 131–2, 176, 189 Action Network (BBC), 125, 126, 131, 132 Building Public Value (BBC), 121 iCan (BBC), 121–6 Bebo, 177 Beniger, James, 146 Benkler, Yochai, 164, 177 Bennett, W. Lance, 6, 43–4, 48, 116, 118, 177 Berners-lee, Tim, 178 Billig, Michael, 5, 56 Bimber, Bruce, 12, 64, 84 Blair, Tony, 49, 58, 141, 195 Blaug, Ricardo, 3, 136, 137, 178 blog, 8, 37, 38, 67, 82, 86–9, 126, 151, 177, 183 Blumler, Jay G., 2, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 57–9, 60, 64, 65 Bohman, James, 18, 117 Born, Georgina, 176

cabinet office, 141, 168, 190 Castells, Manuel, 27 citizens’ juries, 16, 30, 36 citizenship, 3–7, 10, 11, 43, 44, 60, 65, 67, 102, 104, 108, 116, 121, 126, 127, 130, 134, 135–7, 139–41, 144, 145, 154, 162, 167, 171, 172, 177, 179, 182, 185, 196 CitizenSpace, 149 Civic commons, 32, 126, 169–76, 179–85, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197 CNN, 66 Coleman, Stephen, 6, 37, 46, 64, 78, 79, 80, 87, 91, 115, 120, 145, 156, 158, 182 community campaign creator, 120, 126, 151 Congress, 82, 83 Connolly, William, 113 consensus conferences, 16, 17, 18, 26, 30, 31

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Index Electoral Commission, 1, 64, 65, 150 Eliasoph, Nina, 36, 87, 113 e-petitions, 90, 103, 119, 151, 152, 189, 192 European Union, 6, 8, 91, 182 Interactive Policy-Making Unit (EU), 191 e-voting, 147, 145, 149–51

consultation, 1, 11, 16, 24, 38, 39, 67, 78, 80, 83, 91, 92–102, 111, 112, 113, 114, 138, 147, 149, 150, 160, 161, 162, 167, 171, 173, 174, 178, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196 convergence, 119, 133, 182, 184 Cook, Robin, 68, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Couldry, Nick, 117 crisis of public communication, 2, 42, 44, 45, 60, 62, 64, 65 Cronkite, Walter, 89 Cruikshank, Barbara, 4, 115 culture jamming, 119, 120, 137 Curran, James, 117 Davis, Richard, 99 Dean, Howard, 119 Deibert, Ronald, 84, 85 deliberation, 3, 4, 11, 15, 17–19, 21, 25–40, 48, 67, 80, 99, 101, 136, 138, 149, 152, 154, 165, 170–6, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 192 deliberative polls, 16, 28, 30–2 democracy/e-democracy, 1–3, 5, 7–11, 13–15, 17–20, 22–7, 33, 34, 36–41, 43, 44, 50, 68, 69, 78–81, 87, 89–91, 111–18, 120–2, 130, 131, 134–42, 143, 145–52, 154–6, 158–60, 162, 164–7, 170–4, 176, 178, 179, 184, 185, 188, 197 Department of Justice, 86, 114, 115, 118 Dewey, John, 15 digital divide, 172, 187 direct representation, 68, 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 111, 146 Downs, Anthony, 24 Dryzek, John, 34 Dutton, William, 12, 137, 168, 173 Ebo, Bosah, 32 Edwards, Arthur, 33, 115, 176 elections, 2, 15, 21, 23, 28, 45, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56–9, 65, 66, 74, 75, 78, 90, 99, 116, 119, 120, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 157, 169, 185, 188

Facebook, 177 Fairclough, Norman, 135 Fischer, Frank, 140 Fishkin, James, 21, 28, 31, 32 Flickr, 177 Fraser, Nancy, 182 French, Simon, 34, 35, 84 Gamson, William, 37, 87 Geertz, Clifford, 156 Gibson, Rachel, 79, 117 Giddens, Anthony, 27, 141 Gore, Al, 8 Goss, Sue, 15, 16, 39 Gould, Philip, 48, 49 Graber, Doris, 1, 57 Guardian, 66, 105, 191 Gurevitch, Michael, 1, 2, 48, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 65 Habermas, Jurgen, 1, 18, 117, 165 hacktivism, 119, 120, 137 Hain, Peter, 1 Hajer, Martin, 7, 116, 140 Hansard Society, 23, 83, 92–4, 114, 152 Heclo, Hugh, 84 Herring, Susan, 28 Hill, Kevin, and Hughes, John, 9, 32, 99 IndyMedia, 66, 67, 85, 177, 182 Inglehart, Ronald, 79 interactivity, 57, 80, 85, 89, 100, 112, 147, 148, 163, 167, 168 internet, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 27, 28, 32, 46, 65, 66, 67, 79, 80, 84, 88, 90, 91, 93, 98, 102, 108, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150,

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Index 153, 164, 166, 170, 172, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187 Isin, Engin, 4 Ito, Mimi, 118

156, 158, 161, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, 36 Norris, Pippa, 1, 2, 32, 62, 63, 64

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 57 Jankowski, Nicholas, 91, 180

O.D.P.M (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister), 102, 151, 190 O.E.C.D. Citizens’ as Partners, 111 Ofcom, 66, 190, 194 Offe, Claus, 180 OhMynews, 67, 88, 177 Ostrom, Elinor, 180, 181

Katz, Elihu, 12, 83, 175 Keane, John, 176 Lasswell, Harold, 2 Lefort, Claude, 7 Lessig, Lawrence, 164 Liffman, Limor, 120 Liikanen, Erkki, 140 Lippmann, Walter, 22–4, 69 Lloyd, John, 181 Lukes, Steven, 113 Lupia, Arthur, and McCubbins, Mathew, 42 Macintosh, Ann, 28, 91, 174, 183 M.A.I., (Multilaterial Agreement on Investment), 84, 85 Make Poverty History, 132 Manin, Bernard, 86 Margolis, Michael, and Resnick, David, 9 Marshall, T. H., 4 McQuail, Denis, 46, 48 Mettler, Suzanne, and Soss, Joe, 139, 154 Miller, Peter, 4, 6, 46, 62, 195 moderation, 35, 105, 106, 115, 174, 176 Morrison, David, 158, 198 Moss, Giles, 87, 142 Mouffe, Chantal, 26, 37 MoveOn, 119 MySociety, 152–3 MySpace, 8, 177 Netmums, 120, 127–32 network, 6, 36, 38, 42, 51, 54, 56, 66, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, 107, 108, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 145, 148,

Papandreou, George, 140 Parliament, 1–3, 14, 19, 20, 30, 54, 69, 71–4, 78, 79, 90–9, 101, 102, 111, 112, 131, 145, 146, 148–50, 152, 153, 170, 171, 174, 192, 194 participation/e-participation, 3–6, 8, 13–17, 33, 39, 40, 65, 91, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107, 111, 115, 125, 136, 140, 142–7, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156–62, 165, 170, 175, 177, 180, 184, 186, 188–90 Pateman, Carole, 115, 156 Patterson, Thomas, 2, 57, 59 Pitkin, Hanna, 68, 69 policy-making, 7, 85, 91, 111, 112, 131, 192 political communication, 9 political conversation, 19, 28, 36–8, 80, 127, 135, 146, 166, 169, 174–5, 181, 183, 196 political efficacy, 1, 3, 33, 39, 111, 112, 115, 148, 154, 155, 158, 178, 186, 189, 191, 196 politika portal, 85 preferences, 16, 18, 24, 25, 26, 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 68, 69, 71, 136 Price, Vincent, 32, 33, 39 professionalisation, 47–9, 79 public service broadcasting, 11, 54, 121, 165, 171, 176 Public sphere, 2, 9, 26, 28, 35, 43, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 17, 133, 135, 147, 164, 165, 170, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182 Putnam, Robert, 2, 107

219

Index Swanson, David, and Mancini, Paolo, 48, 49, 59

Rafaeli, Sheizaf, 100 Realising Democracy Online, 170 representation, 3, 28, 68, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 84, 86, 89, 126, 131, 146, 157, 167, 174, 180 Rheingold, Howard, 9, 118 Rogers, Richard, 115, 183 Rose, Nikolas, 61, 115, 141, 168, 195 Rushkoff, Douglas, 177 Russell, Sally, 127–8, 130–1

Taylor, Matthew, 195 television, 11, 17, 37, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 56, 60, 62, 66, 72, 121, 125, 145, 159, 168, 172, 181, 184, 193, 194 Ten Downing Street, 152, 189, 192 Thompson, John B., 81, 82, 147 Toynbee, Polly, 56 Trippi Joe, 117 Turner, Bryan, 4, 137

Sack, Warren, 28, 174, 183 Schattschneider, E. E., 154 Schneider, Steven, 28 Schudson, Michael, 4, 36, 43 Schumpeter, Joseph, 23–4 Scott, James, 136 Semetko, Holly, 45, 57, 117 Sennett, Richard, 19, 77 Shulman, Stuart, 189 Silverstone, Roger, 5, 163 Slashdot, 35 Stop the War Coalition, 120, 132–4 Street, John, 33, 115 Stringer, Graham, 142, 143, 145, 147 Stromer-Galley, Jennifer, 28, 33, 83 Sunstein, Cass, 9, 32

Van Zoonen, Liesbet, 37 virtual co-presence, 27, 28, 81, 83 Ward, Stephen, 79, 117, 120 Watson, Tom, 153 Wilhelm, Anthony, 99 Womenspeak, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101 Wright, Scott, 33, 87, 115, 176, 177 Yates, Simeon, 28 Young, Iris Marion, 25, 26, 186, 187 YouTube, 8, 177 Zaller, John, 51, 52 Zittrain, Jonathan, 117

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Titles in the Series (continued from page iii) Bruce Bimber, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power Murray Edelman, The Politics of Misinformation Frank Esser and Barbara Pfetsch, eds., Comparing Political Communication: Theories, Cases, and Challenges Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Ju¨rgen Gerhards and Dieter Rucht, Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States Hernan Galperin, New Television, Old Politics: The Transition to Digital TV in the United States and Britain Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan, eds., Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics Robert B. Horowitz, Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa Philip N. Howard, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide Pippa Norris, A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Society Adam F. Simon, The Winning Message: Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse Gadi Wolfsfeld, Media and the Path to Peace