An article, via Paulie.

I’m in Washington DC today and tomorrow, and wandering round the Federal Triangle (think Whitehall with even more stern neo-classicism) I was amused by the fact that all the Government buildings seem to have self-justificatory quotations carved over the doorways - the commerce building had something about the importance of regulated trade, the Justice Department something about the glory that justice brings to the world. Even the Internal Revenue Service had a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes over the door: something about taxation being the price we pay for a civilised society.

I’m not sure whether it’s done in a triumphalist spirit, or to make the case for Government, but even though the bleak monumentalism of the buildings is quite late British Empire, the sentiments carved into them make for a different feel. It’s as if the relation between state and citizen is based on a deal or an arrangement, more so than in the UK Government’s communications - where the presence of the Royal crest implies a much older, much less rational relationship.

Compare also the Royal crest and the French Republic’s logo - easily the best and most consistent Governmental branding.

The Joint [Lords and Commons] Committee on Human Rights has, reports the BBC, called for the Government to bring forward a new Bill of Rights (an issue that is currently out for consultation). The Bill, which would extend the existing Human Rights Act and European Convention, could include rights such as the right to trial by jury and various additional rights for vulnerable groups.

I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from adding to the existing rights in the Human Rights Act/European Convention, which are broadly drawn. (It should be noted that the Conservatives are apparently proposing that the new Bill would replace rather than supplement the HRA).

Human Rights is a powerful term, and I think it’s risky to overload it with lots of new soft rights like the right to work. These sorts of rights are hard to define and enforce, and are in some constitutions even have the rider ‘as far as the state can reasonably afford’. I worry that the non-absolute nature of these additional rights could pollute already established rights, and imply that budgetary constraints are a factor there too: a right to housing has to be ‘within reasonable budgetary constraints’; the right to free speech should never be.

One can put in safeguards to ensure that this doesn’t happen - say, by making some of the rights non-justiciable - but this leads to two bad endings. Either judges find ways round the safeguards and start making decisions that are properly the work of other branches of government; or there are two different sorts of rights - ‘real’ ones like freedom of speech and assembly, and ‘pretend ones’ like the socio-economic rights.

Something is happening in Georgia that looks a lot like war.

Georgia elected their president in January, and Russia elected theirs in March. So is this another blow to Democratic Peace Theory? Or does one or other of the combatants (or the South Ossetian government) not qualify as a democracy?

I liked this, from Cass Sunstein’s 2001 book, Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do:

A social or legal system that has produced preferences, and done so by limiting opportunities unjustly, can hardly justify itself by reference to existing preferences. The satisfaction of private preferences, whatever their content and origins, does not respond to a persuasive conception of liberty, welfare or autonomy. The notion of autonomy should refer instead to decisions reached with a full and vivid awareness of available opportunities, with relevant information, and without illegitimate or excessive constraints on the process of preference formation. When there is inadequate information or opportunities, decisions and even preferences should be described as unfree or nonautonomous.

Sunstein is referring to women’s rights, and specifically the argument that women in some countries are happy with the status quo and don’t want more equality. I think the argument applies just as well to claims that we don’t need to do more on participation because people are happy with the situation as it is.

John Lloyd wrote an article in yesterday’s FT on the decline of political parties. It was not particularly noteworthy, but near the end, he said:

As urbanisation and industrialisation produced the mass party, so mass participation in the internet begins to sketch a new democratic order – one that depends little on party.

While I think the Internet has potential for supporting a ‘new democratic order’, ’sketchy’ is an understatement in describing it.

The jury is definitely out on whether political parties are going to be killed off by the Internet - Barack Obama’s candidacy, for all the new media buzz around it, is fundamentally a party political campaign.

At a more philosophical level, political parties answered the main challenge of mass democracy - how do you take the views of millions of disparate people and discuss them rationally, in a way that political leaders and citizens can understand?

It’s not certain that the rise of the internet invalidates the old way of working. The challenge of mass democracy is the same online or off - and the online picture will get even more confused as internet penetration rates increase further.

Political parties are not the only possible solution, and British parties are proving slow to adapt to the online world. There may be better ways of framing online debate, but parties have a track record and it is hard to see anything, at least currently, that offers a better alternative.

The FT has an an article by a China-based economic analyst on the chances for greater democracy in the Middle Kingdom.

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.

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.