The Ministry of Justice has launched a new programme called Building Democracy, where projects can bid for £15k or so of money from an innovation fund.

The way they’ve handled it is rather good - they’ve put a bloggish website up (at buildingdemocracy.co.uk) and ask people who are interested in bidding for the money to float their idea in front of the masses first.

We have two ideas we’re interested in. Society Governor Helen Cammack and her company, Niggle, have proposed a Text Your MP service, while the Society has suggested a development of the political compass idea that I posted about yesterday.

All comments - here or there - gratefully received.

Paul Evans discusses political compasses in this post from a couple of days ago. We at the Society took some initial steps down this road a few months back.

We wanted a feature on the site that would place users on a political map (rather than a simple graph). The map would show well known political figures and other users, so they could get a sense of where their political views lay.

We also wanted to find a helpful set of axes that reflected real differences in political view, rather than the obvious left/right split.

To do this we collected all the different axes we could find around the net and elsewhere, and my removing the obvious duplicates we came up with the following list:

• authoritarian - liberal
• conservative - socialist
• control - free expression
• interventionist - isolationist
• left - right
• nationalist - internationalist
• organic state - social contract
• rule of power - rule of law
• small government - big government
• tough minded - tender hearted
• traditionalist - modernist

We wanted to find out two things from our first piece of work. First, whether any of our ten remaining axes were seen as the same thing by the general public. Second, what position on the axes people would place others with particular political opinions.

We therefore set up a test on the website which presented a random political statement (from a list of about fifty), and a random axis. It then asked the participant to place someone who strongly agreed with the statement on the axis presented.

We had 2,500 answers at the end of the test, but when we took a look at them, it was hard to pick out definite results. For one thing, because of the number of questions and axes, 2,500 answers wasn’t enough to have each question answered for each axis more than four or five times. Some of the results were quite widely spread, as well.

You can find a 2.6Mb Excel spreadsheet with the full results here, and a PDF document with a short summary here.

My summary of what we learned is:

• You need to test axes for comprehension and to see whether people mean the same things by the same terms. This is one area where we can draw results from our survey.
• The left/right, big government/small government and conservative/socialist axes were pretty much identical, while the organic state/social contract axis didn’t seem to mean much to people.
• It’s much harder to use the web survey method to reach a political position for particular statements, taking into account differences in interpretation, the self-selection of users, existing political biases, mistakes and so on.

We’re still interested in pursuing a new political compass. I’d suggest from our axes the following shortlist:

• Either authoritarian/liberal or (because of the pollution of the word liberal in the US), control/free expression
• Intervention/isolation and nationalist/internationalist but only for questions with a foreign policy theme
• Rule of power/rule of law
• Tough minded/tender hearted and
• Small government/big government

I also like Paul’s suggestion of an idealist/pragmatist axis (which is how I’d interpret his idealist-cynic/not idealist axis), and possibly a solipsism axis as well - though here we’re getting towards psycho-sociology.

As for rating statements or answers on the axes, which you need to do to place users on them, that’s more difficult. I think, much as it goes against my instincts, that a panel made up of a balanced group of politically experienced people is probably better than just using answers from an open questionnaire.

As Paul says, the key is in the graphic that shows a wide range of people not agreeing with you. Rather like Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex (but hopefully less fatally) this provides a major dose of anti-groupthink corrective, and that’s something that would be very worthwhile.

• Charlie Beckett discusses whether journalists create coups
• Paul Evans on political transparency

Saturday, for those who keep an eye on such things, was 9 Thermidor 216 in the French Republican calendar, and the 214th anniversary of the moderate revolution that overthrew Robespierre and the Jacobins, ending the Reign of Terror.

E-democracy and online politics has had its own Thermidorian Reaction in recent years, where wild hyperbole about the Internet’s consequences for democracy has calmed down, and a more sceptical view has prevailed. Rather than the glorious future of democracy, the current argument runs, perhaps the Internet is actually a threat to civility, or even world peace (this is the argument of a piece in this week’s Economist).

In many ways, the hard-nosed attitude to internet democracy is a necessary correction to the irrational exuberance of the ’90s. Many of the criticisms of current online debate are accurate - I’ve made some here myself - and there are certainly serious problems with the spread of wild conspiracy theories and rumours online.

I would be sorry, though, to lose every part of the old Jacobin spirit in our thinking about internet democracy. For all the blogwars and bloviating, the Net has a unique capability to join people together across geographical divides. They may be joined together in a mad conspiracy theory, but they may equally be engaged in a thoughtful discussion - it’s the responsibility of all of us to discourage the first and encourage the second.

If we give people the tools and the confidence to think rationally, and get online and offline discussions to support each other, I think we can achieve the stronger, broader ‘politically-active’ class that we looked for in the past.

In fact, with broadband penetration rates rising (hi, Mum!), and kids who have grown up with the Internet getting towards voting age, today’s opportunities are probably greater than those of the age of hyperbole. Sí se puede, to coin a phrase, as long as we retain the spark of that first big, revolutionary idea.

I was at the Local Government Association last night, at the launch of Votes and Voices, a pamphlet on the complementary nature of representative and participatory democracy. The NCVO were the partners for the publication and the launch event.

The main thing I took away from the event was a very positive mood among local government around the participation agenda. The audience list was hefty. Paul Coen, the LGA Chief Executive, was enthusiastic. Points from the panel and the floor were forward-looking.

The pamphlet itself was less impressive. It was described as a series of essays, though a series of articles would be more accurate, touching on the complementary nature of participative and representative democracy. This description led me to expect a light philosophical treatise - along the lines of the Empowerment White Paper, in fact - but the essays divided between big unchallengable statements on the importance of participation, and descriptions of political engagement work in a couple of local authorities. There was little that made me sit up and take notice, although in fairness this may be because I work on this every day, and I doubt that I was the target audience.

In some ways it was not surprising that the pamphlet underdelivered on the speeches. There is a rhetoric gap around participation and engagement at the moment, with people picking up on the ideas in the Empowerment White Paper, but not yet really doing anything with them. I hope that the gap is a simple time lag. My worry is that the new enthusiasm for participation will be a flash in the pan, and either nothing will happen and local government will move on, or participation will be redefined to mean ‘the things we were going to do anyway’.

Involve have published a short new guide to principles of deliberative engagement in policy making. Download it in PDF here.

David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, gave a talk at the Fabian Society a little while back, on what lessons the left can learn from the American elections. One section of his speech is devoted to widening participation in political activities, and is worth a read. The summary line:

I think we have been far too cautious in finding new ways to lower the barriers to involvement in politics itself.

Earlier this year, the Council of Europe produced a generic e-democracy toolkit - a 142-page report reviewing the different ways in which people support democracy through electronic means.

Through a circuitous route I came across Andrew Wadge’s blog. Andrew is the Chief Scientist at the Food Standards Agency and his site is a good example of how government specialist blogs can impart complex information in ways that engage people and don’t preach.

Libertas, the Irish group that defeated the political establishment over the Lisbon Treaty, may stand Europe-wide in next June’s European Parliamentary elections. Declan Ganley, the businessman who leads the group, is quoted in the Telegraph and the Irish Times, saying that the campaign, if it happened, would be a proxy referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The idea of a referendum through a normal Parliamentary election has just been tried in our very own Haltemprice and Howden, and was not a great success. If Libertas and Mr Ganley are serious, they would not be able to run the Parliament on the basis of blocking the Lisbon treaty, even if they campaigned on that basis. They would need to have a proper set of policies and platforms, which would presumably come from the centre-right pro-business space that Mr Ganley himself occupies.

From the Society’s non-partisan position, I think that this would be an excellent development for European politics. If Libertas were to stand, and campaign strongly in all member states, it would be a big step towards a single European democratic space, the absence of which has long been a problem for the EU’s legitimacy (see previously on this blog). Although doubtless sceptical about business regulation and harmonisation, Libertas would not be a wrecking crew like UKIP and other organisations - they would believe as a baseline in the continued existence of the EU, and of Ireland’s membership within it. It is richly ironic that all this potential development comes as a result of a no vote in the Irish referendum.

A successful Libertas campaign could seed a European political space, with Libertas as one of the centre-right players. However, if Libertas are serious about democratising the business of the European Union, there is one other step that I am sure they would welcome: the creation of a similar pan-European movement to put the opposing case. It would be disastrous for debate if the Libertas argument were to come up against a ragbag of national establishments and national political parties - we have already seen the political outcome of that sort of tussle.

Hence the title of this post - if Libertas are going to create the field of pan-European democracy, they must not be left to march around it alone, or be attacked by a poorly co-ordinated army of midgets. One or more parties similarly committed to EU democracy must be created to put the case for closer integration, more social action and more regulation. Then we could have a meaningful election in June, and a stronger democracy in Europe.