Trust, Politics and Motivation

It would be great if we could trust politicians, but the evidence suggests otherwise. So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff; who can we trust?

Obviously, if there is hard evidence about what someone says, then trust comes easier. And, being social animals, we tend to trust a consensus of opinion, even if this isn't well founded. Another way is to try and understand the motivations driving an individual or organisation. Understanding the pressures that people are under can allow us to better judge what they are saying.

Now lets consider a general election. The motivation is to win the election and gain power by garnering as many votes as possible, especially in the marginal seats that matter the most. This can be done in a number of ways:

• Concentrate resources on marginal seats and the issues that are key to those voters
• Make sure that your party is credible and trust worthy and point out every folly of the opposition
• Dig up the dirt on the opposition
• Offer promises that are attractive to voters. If you can't deliver them you can blame it on other factors and by the time the next election comes around it will likely all be forgotten
• Be different to the opposition. Especially in matters of forecast: argue that they have got it wrong and you are right - and better. It doesn't matter too much if your forecasts aren't very accurate, because none are, but why not take the opportunity to undermine the opposition? If you gain power and your forecasts are proved to be wrong then you can blame it on a changing scenario... and by the time of the next election it will all be forgotten anyway
• Don't swim against the public mood - which may be propagated by the papers. Instead, go with the flow of public opinion

Within the Interactive Democracy proposal, or most forms of direct democracy, there will still be general elections and most of the issues of trust and skepticism will continue. However, ID does put pressure on politicians to be more trust worthy, because the electorate can, at any time, trigger a (good)bye-election, without waiting for the next general election.

For an alternative perspective on the role of trust in politics please see Anthony Seldon's programme "Trust Politics", available on iPlayer.

Secret Deals

In light of the Al Megrahi affair, do international relations rest on secret deals done between leaders? Would Interactive Democracy hamstring our international policies by granting more political power and control to the electorate in an open forum, accessible to foreign governments?

I suspect this is a mute point and that the banishment of secret deals would be good for international relations in the same way that the demise of bribery was good for business.

Making Institutions Accountable

Gordon Brown has commented that it is very important to make all of the countries institutions accountable. I wonder if he means those private institutions, the banks, or public institutions, including the police forces, Bank of England and MOD? Could the remit include charitable institutions or the Church?

Interactive Democracy could make all of these institutions accountable in a way that has never before been seen, as petitions may be launched to demand investigations into their behaviour or even demand the sacking of their senior officers. I doubt if many of these petitions would garner sufficient support to force the government to react, but this system may cause changes in these institutions, nevertheless, as they will be able to monitor the public sentiment and can change accordingly.

It is also interesting that this system gives customers, investors and workers a voice that they may not otherwise have.

Lobbying

There is concern about the proliferation of political lobbyists. This is one area where money meets politics. Barrack Obama understands the threat and has banned lobbyists from appointment to agencies they have lobbied in the last two years.

Interactive Democracy would reduce the power of political lobbyists as the population as a whole would need to be persuaded if an issue was going to referendum.

More here from The Times Online.

Foreign Influence

According to this article from the BBC "More than 20 MPs broke rules on declaring hospitality... on more than 400 occasions..." Is this another example of the ability of foreign influence in our political system? Isn't representative democracy about representing British Constituents?

The former commissioner for Standards in Public Life, Sir Alistair Graham said it "demonstrated the failure of the self regulating system". But who is to regulate the regulators?

Interactive Democracy allows the public the power to deal with errant MPs swiftly, without their misdeeds becoming lost in the rhetoric of electioneering or the complexities of multiple issues, manifestos and party politics. But it would be nothing without the power of a free press to bring such issues to light. Good on the BBC.

Income for Influence

There was once "Cash for Questions" and now 4 MPs have been caught in a sting set up by The Sunday Times and Channel 4, suggesting they could influence government policy for the payment of some extra income. Is this how Representative Democracy has always been?

Interactive Democracy ensures that power comes from voters, not from well funded political lobbyists via subversive MPs. In ID, if pressure groups want to influence policy they will have to influence the electorate themselves.

More from the Times On-Line.

Interactive Democracy Award

One of the common human motivations is to be recognised for your achievements and contributions. To encourage involvement in Interactive Democracy perhaps there should be an Interactive Democracy Award. This could be awarded for contributions of ideas to the ID system if those ideas added to a Parliamentary debate. Any MP could highlight those contributors, which may be many. Winners of the award would be able to use the letters "IDeA" after their name.

Direct Democracy Elsewhere

Other countries already do Direct Democracy. This site campaigns for its introduction in Britain.

The Veil of Ignorance

The veil of ignorance is a concept first introduced by John Rawls in "Towards a Theory of Justice". It is an imaginary veil behind which you know nothing of your race, sex, abilities, etc. and you become an unbiased, moral person able to exert free will. From behind "the veil" you can make decisions that aren't designed to benefit yourself but are based on "higher" criteria of justice and fairness.

But the real world doesn't work like this. We all have our biases, some of which we may not even be aware of. As this attorney writes, pressure groups manipulate democracy to formulate laws to benefit themselves. They may be well funded and powerful. Perhaps the only way of undermining their power is to implement more direct democracy. Interactive Democracy gives us all a chance to come up with a majority view less distorted by money and political connections. It doesn't use a fictional "veil of ignorance" to achieve justice, but balances one bias against another to get a similar effect.

Regress to the Mean

If everyone votes on every issue doesn't policy just regress to the mean and not benefit from the intellect of the best and the brightest and the decisions they make?

1. Issues that reach the referendum stage will have been discussed in detail by Parliament. The debate is televised and the plus, minus and interesting points that emerge will be presented as each voter casts their vote.
2. The choices available to voters will typically be very limited: perhaps yes or no or choice 1, 2 or 3. This isn't a regress to the mean type of scenario: it operates like a switch between one or the other. On the other hand, Political Parties usually try to appeal to the majority of voters and dominate the centre ground of politics. They may avoid contentious issues, radical proposals or decisions that leave them open to criticism. They may "regress to the mean".
3. Leadership and good quality debate can raise the average persons understanding of the issues and can enhance their empathy with disparate groups. The debate itself could enhance social understanding and the average point of view.
4. The brightest aren't only found in Parliament; there are many more people with a high IQ score in the rest of the population and they can draw on a wide array of professional and personal experiences that are not often found in the Westminster Village.

Evolving Interface

Interactive Democracy is a type of direct democracy, but at its core is the utilisation of information technology to foster debate. The design of the Internet interface - the web pages used by voters - can add lots of value to the system.

Anyone reading through these posts will realise that various ideas for the voter interface have sprung up:

• Adding initiatives
• Adding comments and questions to initiatives to create threads
• Voting and supporting
• Changing your vote after it is cast
• Questioning governments
• Calling for information and studies
• Listing Plus, Minus and Interesting Points
• Using unbiased search engines
• Linking to government reports
• Facilitating Liquid Leadership

Given that these ideas have evolved over time, it would be prudent to allow users of the system to make suggestions for new improvements of the system and allow them to register their complaints and problems.

Group Think in Social Networks

Group Think is the tendency for groups of like minded people to reinforce each others point of view. It is a concern that group think may dominate Interactive Democracy (and political parties). Social network groups, perhaps discussing political issues, may succumb to Group Think, engendering widescale conformism.

Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Colombia University has studied this issue. He recruited 14000 people on a social networking site and divided them into groups to rate music played by unknown bands. As the experiment progressed people were given more information about what others in their group preferred. Often songs that started off slightly more popular became even more popular as people within the group became more aware of others preferences. Members of a group eventually converged on the same songs. But other groups chose different songs and it was impossible to predict which groups would choose which songs. There was considerable diversity between the groups.

This evidence should be a warning sign for people who believe that politics should be the reserve of the Westminster Village and at the same time assuages the concern that mass Group Think, accelerated by our increasing internet interconnectedness, will dominate Interactive Democracy. Groups may coallesce around, work, religion, political party or any other institution, but there is sufficient diversity between them to avoid conformist thinking.

Bertrand Russell

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves."

Bertrand Russell in "Conquest of Happiness" (1930)

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."

Bertrand Russell

The Great Undecided

Given that we humans are given to bias and group think, involving the great mass of population that are initially undecided could be a great advantage of Interactive Democracy. They are more likely to listen to the debate with an open mind, offer alternative points of view and "out of the box" ideas. They are better arbiters of argument and may provide better judgment than those embroiled in policy. Ultimately, they may be persuaded to cast their vote one way or another to reach a sound conclusion.

Estonia

In Estonia all cabinet papers are available online and cabinet decisions are reported on the web as they happen! Their electronic system also allows participation by ministers who may be abroad.

The BBC wrote "With the click of a mouse a new draft law is passed by Estonia's government - welcome to one of the world's most high-tech cabinet rooms."

This early power point explains the issues of direct democracy, Estonian style.

Boosting Newspaper Sales

It seems that newspaper sales in the UK are falling and the trend is accelerating. Will Interactive Democracy boost demand for news? I think it could. The idea is that empowerment of voters generates its own demand for information.

There may also be an opportunity here for newspapers to sell political advertising. Interactive Democracy may cause a wholesale change in political financing as those advocates with money can focus their resources on specific issues, instead of political parties, perhaps by spending on advertorials in newspapers.

More from The Guardian here and here.

The Pressure Principle

"To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much
pressure they're under from the public."
Noam Chomsky

Interactive Democracy exerts a constant pressure on politicians that may be more powerful than the elections at the end of each term, when misdeeds may be long forgot. There should be a balance of power between government, parliament and the public that is felt every day, on each decision, not occasionally on an amalgamated and distorted history.

Walter Lippmann

The well regarded writer Walter Lippmann was, at times, critical of too much democracy. Here are some of his quotes and my arguments for Interactive Democracy:

"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute."

I'd expect leaders to make the complex and fractal truth understandable. Democracy, in general, cannot operate without leadership. But there is another argument against falling into the trap that considers public opinion ignorant: even if it is accepted that one group of voters did not consider all the detailed arguments before expressing their opinion, another group surely made up for their deficit, and the system amalgamates all those disparate views into a common, widely informed, decision.

"The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence."

It's essential to good decision making that there is a system to tease out the evidence and it is crucial to Democracy that the scientific and statistical evidence is subject to careful review. This, along with all of the points made during Parliamentary debate, should be presented on the web site where the public cast their vote. But, if you don't want to vote you don't have to, so it's no imposition at all.

"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority."

Humanity is at its most successful when it seeks mutual benefit. Anyone debating in a Democratic system would do well to highlight the benefits of their proposition to their audience, ensuring a degree of empathy and understanding that begets evolution, not revolution.

"In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment, public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court
their restless constituents."

Democratically elected politicians "have no sure tenure", but the role of Parliament within Interactive Democracy is to debate, analyse and call for studies into the proposals that are presented by ePetition. MPs in this system will be judged less on their salesmanship than on their contribution to the debate: their points will be catalogued on the ID web site for all to see and consider. Those MPs that make up the government will suffer the gaze of their opposition, the media and the public, as they do today.

Abraham Lincoln

"... government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth."

Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

The Gettysburg Address

Citizen Mundi

Citizen Mundi is a site that simulates how a type of direct democracy would operate. Anyone can join and participate.

In some ways it operates in a similar way to the Interactive Democracy proposed here, with initiatives that may be voted through to a second round debate and final referendum. But, one of its innovations is that your voting power depends on how much participation you have previously demonstrated. This can be measured by the technology. For example "Submitting an initiative is worth 5% towards your participation ratio."

To my mind, the big disadvantage of such a system is that it is prejudiced against in-frequent participants who may have key and detailed knowledge on a certain subject but generally don't get involved in every issue. Imagine if this was applied in the real world: there may be a busy nurse or doctor, with a family to look after, with little time or inclination for politics, but with excellent insight and a keen interest in voting on a health care bill. Indeed some may consider that these people should have more voting power on this issue than a frequent participant with no specialist insight. The proposed Interactive Democracy system doesn't give them any more clout, except that they are free to influence as many people as possible by the power of their well informed arguments.

But to be fair, Citizen Mundi could evolve away from the "participation ratio" system if someone were to propose a change and the vote was carried.

(The name Citizen Mundi means citizen of the world.)

Public Inquiry

Public Inquiries could utilise Interactive Democracy to gather questions that they could put to witnesses. If it were possible to vote for each question then potentially many thousands could be prioritised, getting over the problem of not having enough time to deal with them all.

Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry has been widely criticised for being too deferential to its key witnesses but this proposal would allow hard hitting questions to come from the public and perhaps from the parents of soldiers who sat in the public gallery and were, reportedly, disappointed with proceedings.

Questioning Government Statistics and Reports

Government Statistics and Reports may carry enormous power when presented on the Voter Interface, yet third parties may disagree with them. Perhaps there should be a system that allows complaints against these reports. This would allow journalists and academics to present their own findings and would act as a sort of peer review safeguard by people with specialist knowledge. This would best be supervised by a Parliamentary multi-party committee.

Agreeing with Comments

Should comments placed on the Voter Interface each have a button so that you can agree or disagree with them?

Should comments with the most agreement rise to the top of the list and those with the most disagreement fall to the bottom?

Given that the number of comments is likely to be vast, perhaps there should be some way of organising them other than on a first-come/first-served basis. This could be achieved by this votes per comment system.

It may also be worth dissuading new comments that are similar to previous comments. This may be achievable by automatically matching words in one comment with words in the new one and then presenting a list of similar comments to the commentor. They may then prefer to add an "I agree" vote to an existing one, instead of publishing their own.

Ideas for the Voter Interface

The design of the web site interface that would allow us to vote could have an enormous influence over how effective Interactive Democracy would be. Here are some thoughts:

1. It should be easy to use


2. It should be split between questions, ePetitions and Referenda for local, national and supra-national votes


3. Each proposal should allow comments structured around Plus, Minus and Interesting points


4. Each proposal should allow questions to be asked, creating a thread of answers


5. Comments arising from Parliamentary debate should be given priority on any referenda issue


6. Comments from the government should also be highlighted (these may relate to timescales, funding and practical difficulties)


7. Comments made by MPs should carry their name


8. Links to Government and Parliamentary web pages should be allowed, to facilitate the presentation of good quality background information


9. Security should be similar to that used by Internet Banks, with a user name and password system to allow access


10. The search facility on the site should not introduce bias and should be approved by a Parliamentary technical committee


11. A complaints system should be available to highlight swearing and abusive comments which can then be removed by the web master - there may be escalating sanctions against repeat offenders

It's worth noting that other web sites may hold alternative debates and present their own information. Obviously these can be found by anyone using a search engine but they shouldn't have links placed on the Voting Interface. Only approved and quality checked statistics and reports should be presented on this central web site.

Free Radicals

It is a human characteristic that we tend to socialise with people who have similar views to ourselves. This observation is equally valid on the Internet - perhaps more so - as discussion groups tend to cover narrow topics that attract others who hold similar interests and points of view. This can lead to the reinforcement and validation of ideas, radicalisation and extremism; what psychologists call group polarisation.

Interactive Democracy has a number of mechanisms to present diverse view points to counter balance radical points of view without inhibiting freedom of expression:

1. Parliamentary debate leads to the pros and cons of an argument listed on the web site used to cast votes.
2. The wider media present diverse arguments, reports and case studies that are easily accessible by the majority of the population. The vast majority are not radicals but can become well informed.
3. The wider media, through its reporting of radical political groups, may encourage new members to join those extremist on-line communities, ask questions and debate points, perhaps watering down some of their radicalism.
4. The slow pace of this type of democracy encourages wide debate and contemplation.