An article, via Paulie.

John McCain’s presidential campaign has started a programme whereby supporters are rewarded with loyalty points for posting positive commentary on various blogs and political websites. The points can be redeemed for McCain merchandise and books. The current featured sites include both left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and the right-leaning Red State.

This move is both depressing and entirely predictable. If you have an army of fired-up activists, what could be easier than getting them to push your message on the internet? Not only is it cheap labour and free advertising, the commenters may well be taken for regular Joes or Joannas, giving them much more credibility than a politician or a campaign staffer.

The payment angle feels a little more sordid. The participants in the scheme are almost certainly going to be McCain supporters already, so maybe the benefits won’t make much difference, but the reward element has an unpleasant odour of buying opinions for cash, or at least a signed copy of Faith of My Fathers. I appreciate that this may be a rather British view, given the fuss that paying MPs cash to ask questions caused in the 1990s.

Whatever the moral pros and cons, in starting this off, Sen. McCain has driven another nail into the coffin of emergent democracy - the idea that a representative popular will could arise, cloud-like, from the blogs and comments on websites. With enough cash and enough motivated people, the tenor of the comments can be whatever you like.

What’s more, he has dented the credibility of anyone supporting him in an internet discussion - the obvious rejoinder is “how much are you getting for this comment?” or “what’s in this for you?”. Could this be the first lurch downhill for public credibility of the public?

I’ve already written here about the mixed messages that come out of the Irish referendum result – and the waters are muddied further by opinion polling (reported by Mark Mardell) that suggests almost three quarters of Irish voters saw the no vote as a the start of a negotiation rather than a final answer. Today, with the dust having settled, and another period of reflection underway, I want to think a bit more about the contesting visions of democracy that the referendum and its aftermath set out.

‘Democracy’ has been one of the most overused words in Lisbon-related newspaper commentary and on blogs. We are told the Irish referendum result is democracy in action (or it is not democracy at all). It’s not democracy if the British people aren’t allowed a referendum, but it’s also not democracy if a hundred thousand Irish voters (the difference between the two sides) can dictate to half a billion Europeans. It’s even, some say, disrespectful for other national governments to ratify the treaty following the Irish no vote.

So what’s the truth? Every democratic system, from the EU down to your local cricket club, has to reach a compromise between the ideals of democracy as the rational form of government (where decisions are based on facts and reason rather than religion or the personal whim of a monarch) and democracy as the expression of the (ever changing and self-contradictory) popular will.

This is not just a question of sly technocrats versus noble democrats. Rationalist models of democracy, like the Westminster parliamentary model, can make a case that they are operating on the basis of a generally-expressed popular will (a sort of ‘popular will averaged over time’) that comes from their election. In this view, the desires expressed during the election campaign are acted upon over their time in office, allowing for consultation with affected parties, and changes resulting from professional and expert opinion. This is not an unreasonable argument on an intellectual level, though it’s hardly populist. Even the archetypal democracy, in Athens, had constitutional provisions preventing established laws being changed on the spur of the moment.

Right at the other end of the spectrum from this rationalist approach is the referendum. Citizens can vote in them without doing any research, for the wrong reasons, or on the basis of completely irrelevant issues, but they are still citizens, and their votes a true reflection of the popular will at that moment. To say that is not to imply, as many have done in the wake of the Irish vote, that referendums are automatically more legitimate and more authoritative than decisions of elected governments. Referendums are snapshots of a view, taken in isolation from other issues, and are different from, not better than elections. Given the media and political structures within which referendums take place, they are not even necessarily better or more honest than elections or the decisions of democratically-elected governments

The Irish referendum vote, and the commentary after it, was an excellent opportunity to see the rationalist and popular-will ideals of democracy go head-to-head.

The EU is perhaps the ultimate example of a rationalist government. All its main arms of government have some democratic element to them, but – as you might expect for an intergovernmental institution – the democracy they contain is at one or more removes, rather than from direct popular support. The Commission is appointed, though by democratically-elected politicians. The Council of Ministers, made up of members of elected Governments, has a form of mandate, but its members in theory act as representatives of national governments rather than as party politicians. Only the Parliament has a direct connection with the popular will, and even that comes from elections that are not fought on Europe-wide campaigns and have low turnouts.

The referendum was not the Irish government’s choice, it was mandated by their constitution, and as the only referendum taking place anywhere in Europe it was freighted with all sorts of expectations, from nationalists in the UK who wanted less Europe to socialists in France who wanted more.

So the Irish referendum was a tussle between two ideals, and looking at the coverage that has followed, it’s clear that the referendum easily won the popular legitimacy contest over parliamentary ratification in the other 26 member states. It’s fair to say that some of the cheering for the referendum result is motivated by partisanship, and comes from newspapers and bloggers who would have praised the wisdom of the coin if the treaty had been decided on a coin-toss. But scorning the result as worthless and the commentators as partisan doesn’t answer the whole question – after all, many general election voters don’t really know what they’re voting for, either.

To leave the pros and cons of the EU aside, and use the Irish vote as a political marker, it provides another example of how rationalist approaches to democracy are losing the battle for legitimacy with more direct forms. This is not to say that people in general want to tear down the Parliaments and distribute power to the people, whatever they say on blog comment pages. Few people would want to be governed solely on the basis of referendums, if it were a realistic prospect. But they should be believed when they indicate - repeatedly - that the current system is not close enough to the popular will.

This is a problem that all governments in the democratic world face, not just the institutions of the European Union. With few exceptions, western democracies rule through rationalism tempered by quadrennial expressions of the popular will. One of the Society’s aims is to create spaces where the popular will can be moulded by rationalism, and rationalist politicians can get an honest unmediated window on the popular will. The Irish referendum, and the reaction to it, shows how pressing that need is.

A post at Tree of Knowledge reports from the Personal Democracy Forum event in NYC, and confirms the impression I have got from the media coverage of the US elections:

the general agreement at this conference is that while ICT has enabled political campaigners to implement a panoply of innovative campaign tactics and strategies, the impact of these new strategies has been less about citizen empowerment and more about campaigning efficiency.

A local referendum in Haywards Heath, just up the road from the Society’s base in Brighton, has been won overwhelmingly (17 to 1) by the Yes campaign, who were protesting against the redevelopment of the rather shabby area around the station. The referendum is non-binding, and turnout was only 22%, so it will be interesting to see what the district council do in response.

At Telegraph Blogs (via NTAH)

Charlie Beckett from Polis makes some of the same points made here.

Early reports are suggesting that the Irish have rejected the Lisbon Treaty on a lowish turnout of 40% - low turnouts help the No campaign because their supporters are generally more likely to vote. The leader of the Libertas group (one of the anti-treaty campaign organisations) is quoted in the London Times as saying:

The Irish people should never have been taken for granted. In their enormous wisdom they have taken on board the treaty, looked at the arguments and, it seems that we have returned the same result again that our fellow Europeans in France and the Netherlands have already sent to the unelected Brussels elite.

Leaving aside the claim that the EU is run by an unelected elite - see Wednesday’s post - this is decent summary of the pro-referendum case: the Irish people voted no because they really looked at the issues and made a rational decision. However, the argument that a single-issue referendum is really participative democracy at work has several holes.

Least serious is the low turnout. Although the 40% who did turn out were likely to be heavily skewed towards ‘no’ voters, it’s generally accepted that local elections in the UK are legitimate, and they have lower turnouts.

The claim for the ‘enormous wisdom’ of the Irish people should really be left to one side. Though I don’t doubt that the Irish people are generally wise and know what’s good for them, the vox pops from various media sources over the past few days have suggested that - though wise - they don’t understand what’s in the treaty.

The claim that goes to the heart of the matter is the claim that the Irish voters have ‘taken the treaty on board and looked at the arguments’. It’s a clever way of avoiding a statement that the Irish people have read the treaty, which I am sure is demonstrably untrue. They have, as you might expect, taken on board the arguments, as presented in the media and by the two campaigns, but what if - as the Yes campaign and some foreign media have been asserting - the arguments they have been taking on are false or exaggerated?

(As an aside, it’s worth noticing that the British Eurosceptic press, in the form of the Irish Sun, Irish Daily Mail, etc., have, according to Le Monde, about a fifth of the Irish newspaper market.)

It seems rather of a piece with media coverage on many controversial issues: two groups or people in a room arguing head-to-head over an issue. It doesn’t matter that one side has lots of evidence and the other little - such as with the MMR scare in the UK - everything is presented as 50:50. In fact, given the political tenor of the times, a 50:50 presentation is more like a 40:60 presentation, because the anti-establishment voice always gets the benefit of the doubt.

To put it another way, it’s rather like the American creationists who want schools to ‘teach the controversy’ about evolution: put lots of boring evidence up against a few emotional arguments, and rationalism doesn’t often win.

It’s very well-known, but if you haven’t come across it, I can heartily recommend Electoral-vote.com for polling numbers on the US Presidential and Congressional elections.

The Issy e-democracy forum newsletter picks up on a decision by the Dutch government to steer away from electronic voting in favour of machine-read paper ballots.