Politics: The Art of Best Compromise

Politics could be seen as trying to satisfy as many people as possible by constructing the best compromise. The government that achieves this assuages fears and provides hope, and has the greatest chance of winning the next election. They know that causing a little pain for some voters can be soothed by other beneficent policies and balanced by the approbation of other groups. Pain at the beginning of a parliament fades over time if the opposition don't rub and needle. It's a messy business. More art than science.
Direct Democracy is different. Each referendum is decided to benefit the majority. But it can also incorporate compromise if the best policy is designed through debate before being sanctioned by the electorate. Interactive Democracy allows voters with a wide range of experiences to be involved in the development of policy, perhaps creating solutions that politicians may not have considered, but at the same time being guided by their expertise. Such a system may provide even better compromises, empowering and educating the electorate, too. It is transparent instead of opaque; immediate not cyclical; accurate not doubtful; incorruptible not dubious; democratic not for sale; technological not archaic... More scientific.

Science and Politics

On the BBC Radio4's Start the Week Andrew Marr asks how far scientific evidence can influence the political agenda. Professor David Nutt is a respected researcher working in the field of drugs, but is best known as the government advisor who was sacked by the Home Secretary for comparing the risks of horse-riding with taking ecstasy. He argues for a rational debate on drugs policy based on objective evidence. Mark Henderson despairs that this will never happen while only one of our 650 MPs is a scientist. But the former Labour minister, David Blunkett, defends his profession, arguing that even evidence-based policy must take into account public opinion and perception.
One of the dangers of all forms of democracy is that it ignores evidence. Or that only the evidence that supports a preconceived policy is used. Interactive Democracy has a number of ways of dealing with this problem:-

1. It provides an open, free and fair forum for everyone, including all the scientists in the country.
2. It allows leaders to emerge from all fields, not just from the political class.
3. The debate provides the opportunity to change people's minds, raise questions, challenge and clarify.
4. The system gives the opportunity for all to rank the type of evidence presented, from heresay to empirical and everything in between.
5. Contributions to the debate can be filtered by the type of evidence and by demographics, including the qualifications of the contributor. This provides both citizens and politicians the ability to filter the debate as they see fit, for example by those holding PhDs.
6. Politicians can both contribute to the debate in its early stages, in order to shape opinion, and analyse the debate in order to help formulate referendum options, request further study or instigate limited trials and experiments.
7. New laws and policies should have clearly defined measurable objectives, reviewed by the Office for National Statistics. Progress against the objective would be published on-line as part of the ID site, which would highlight failures of policy for reassessment.
8. This should all be done under the umbrella law against lies in public life.

Such a system may not be perfect, it may be quite a 'bun fight', but it goes some way towards counteracting today's problem of politicians wielding the power to silence evidential truth.

(Further news of Prof. Nutt.)

Science

Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse advocates that science should be at the centre of the economy, government and culture in his 2012 Richard Dimbleby Lecture. It has crystalised thoughts I've had for a while. At first I considered Interactive Democracy to be about individual empowerment; then I thought that the best democracies should have the best quality of debate; now, I wonder if objective facts are the essential ingredients.
That's not to say that empowerment, creativity and debates about values aren't important aspects of ID. They are. And it's not to dismiss the problems of feedback loops in social sciences, where participants adjust there behaviour to make the most of the rules and otherwise game the system; or of predicting the future; problems that confound a strictly scientific approach to some issues (admittedly, not what Sir Paul was alluding to). But it does lead to the conclusion that the pursuit of objective truth, not mass opinion, is essential.
In his wide ranging lecture, in which he entertainingly compares the turmoil of enlightenment Italy with the concurrent unproductive peace of democratic Switzerland, Sir Paul highlights the problem of scientists becoming ensconced in their own narrow subjects, unable to integrate creatively with the wider community, or even other scientists. Here, Interactive Democracy can help. It sets them free to profoundly influence government and culture by directly initiating or contributing to debates. Here's to a new enlightenment!

Science v Politics: The Moral Maze

Radio 4's Moral Maze debated the relationship between science and politics. It's worth a listen. Some of the points were:

• funding of what scientific evidence is to be gathered, adds a political bias
• scientists are human and therefore corruptible
• science its self is a process for gathering hard evidence which has no morality
• the media can sensationalise scientific reports
• lay people aren't often equipped to understand science
• there's more to politics than science (e.g. morality)
• scientists may consider their evidence as more important than debate
• debaters may reinforce their arguments with narrow scientific studies to try to quash debate

I think democracy should be informed by science. I would like to see a publicly funded scientific institution, honour bound to report hard, morally incorruptible, evidence. The meta studies they carry out should be instigated by Parliament (within the ID process) and not funded by pressure groups. This can then form one aspect of the debate about future policy.

Science in Politics

It seems that there are few people with the statistical skills to separate fact from assumption. I wonder how many politicians could do a regression analysis, calculate the significance of a sample size or understand the Monty Hall problem. It may be too much to ask for every politician to be fully conversant with all this, but maybe they can request the help and advice of academics on such matters. Or maybe there should be guidance from a civil servant adept at statistical analysis?

This is just as important to Interactive Democracy as to Representative Democracy.