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.

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.

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.