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.

Political party membership numbers are steadily falling, reports Liberal Conspiracy.

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died over the weekend, and a long and thoughtful biography in the New York Times pays tribute to his literary genius, while alluding to his more complicated political history.

The Times recounts:

[On returning to post-Soviet Russia in 1994,] he and his family began a two-month journey by private railroad car across Russia, to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. On the first of 17 stops, his judgment was already clear. His homeland, he said, was “tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition.” As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened. And after settling into a new home on the edge of Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia.

[...]

In October 1994, Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia’s Parliament. His complaints and condemnations had not abated. “This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy,” he declared. “Rule by the few.” He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn started appearing on television twice a week as the host of a 15-minute show called “A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn.” Most times he veered into condemnatory monologues that left his less outspoken guests with little to do but look on.

[...]

In the final years of his life, Mr. Solzhenitsyn [spoke] approvingly of a “restoration” of Russia under Mr. Putin, and was criticized in some quarters as increasingly nationalist.

Solzhenitsyn was a hero of anti-communist democrats outside Russia for years. It was, perhaps, not surprising that someone whose idealism had taken him to the gulag and into exile would return home to be disappointed.

I am not aware of any writing, at least in English, where Solzhenitsyn addressed what he thought democracy really meant. He seems to have seen a spiritual and nationalist element in his version of democracy that many liberal democracies would shun. Whether this attitude was specifically his, or whether it is an element of current Russian political character, it led him away from his fan club in the West and to a place that to me seems less democratic and less enlightened.

Solzhenitsyn’s literary works are acknowledged masterpieces, and will certainly survive. His political views and actions post-1994 are relatively unimportant, but they provide another example of a common truth: oppressed idealists are good fighters for the principle of democracy, but they are often bad at handling the reality.

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’.