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?

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.

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.

If we are going to get more rational debate into online politics, we can’t do without the views of civil servants and policy makers. The new rules on civil service blogging are a good start. Ingrid at Policy & Performance reports from an FCO session on the role of blogging and social media in the Civil Service.

For those who don’t know, the New Yorker has caused a minor ruckus in the political world by running a satirical cartoon on its front cover, showing one of the US presidential candidates as a Muslim terrorist, standing in the White House with the US flag burning in the fireplace and a picture of Bin Laden on the mantelpiece.

In the standard unit conversion table of the political internet, one minor ruckus equals nine million anguished blogwords, and the present case is no different.

The scandal itself is not of much consequence - read up on it at the Guardian or CBS if you want the full skinny - but it is a good example of one of the intellectual fallacies of political commentary.

This is the idea that a single comment (or cartoon) is going to make much difference to voters’ attitudes. This fallacy is general, but particularly ridiculous when applied to the New Yorker, a magazine that - as as Gary Kamiya says - only makes the political weather between 110th Street and Canal.

It’s also a fairly patronising fallacy, assuming as it does that citizens in general are mere automatons, much more gullible and easily-led than readers of [your blog name here] (even though they apparently read the New Yorker). To give it a name, let’s call it the ‘outgroup gullibility fallacy’.

The church service used to say ‘fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ - perhaps the online catechism should be ‘respect for others’ intellect is the beginning of wisdom’.

Roy Greenslade writes in his blog today about the consequences of blogging for journalism, saying that he is coming round to the view that blogging will be the end of the traditional news media, rather than merely an adjunct to it. I wish I could be as confident as he seems to be that

the digital revolution is … bloodless, and democracy is at its heart

but it’s an interesting piece, nonetheless.

Commenting on the Personal Democracy Forum, currently underway, Eve Fairbanks at the New Republic complains that the social structure of the Internet has

atomized people, providing an outlet for venting frustrations without actually requiring people to get out of their chairs and start doing anything about their grievances.

I don’t usually spend time taking the mickey out of the BBC’s near-worthless Have Your Say feature, for the same reason that I don’t spend time shooting fish in barrels. However, the ‘most recommended’ page on the debate Are Britons miserable? is such a perfect example of the Have Your Say style that I couldn’t let it pass unremarked.