Can we reinvent political participation?

Posted: May 22nd, 2012 ˑ Filled under: Why Can't We? ˑ  10 Comments

The Nixon-Kennedy televised debate changed politics forever. Can we do it again?

I recently read a good interpretation of “Web 2.0″:

Politics is the ultimate culmination of ‘meaningful participatory culture’. But, as we all know, politics today is a broken system. Is there any possibility to fix it, to reinvent it somehow? Is there a possibility of harnessing today’s technology to create meaningful participatory politics, or is technology ultimately the problem?

Germany weighs in on the question: New York Times columnist David Brooks writes about the German “Pirate” party, which has created a new way of engaging the political system online:

Using a software package they call Liquid Feedback, the Pirates are able to create a continuous, real-time political forum in which every member has equal input on party decisions, 24 hours a day. It’s more than just a gimmicky Web forum, though: complex algorithms track member input and generate instantaneous collective decisions.

Of course, on some level Liquid Feedback is a gimmick, an effort to get young people interested and involved in the humdrum of German politics, outside the campaign season and even off line. Whatever it is, it works: late last month some 1,300 members trekked to the small northern city of Neumünster to elect a new executive board.

But on the other hand, Gregory Ferenstein in TechCrunch argues the exact opposite: technology ultimately undermined the desire for democratic participation:

Democracy used to be a part of everyday American life. Frequent carnivals and parades would accompany political debates, as citizen-revelers would schmooze with local politicians, to discuss issues that they had direct control over. As a result, Americans were not only incredibly engaged, but well-read: a higher proportion of people read Thomas Paine’s political philosophy than watch the Superbowl today. They also patiently listened to presidential debates that last 6 or more hours at a time.

Then, technology crashed the party: “By the 1920′s, radio broadcasts had replaced mass meetings and all-day orations,” writes Kornbluh. “As the role of voters became increasingly passive, it is little wonder that their enthusiasm for electoral politics waned.” Political parties had no incentive to subsidize the good times, given the more efficient ways of mass communication at their disposal.

Ultimately, the motivation to vote has to overcome one very big problem: voting is irrational, since no one person can make a difference. No democracy in history has ever sustained high levels of engagement on the hope that citizens are willing to sacrifice their free time to make a marginal difference. The Gilded Age party machines overcame this dilemma by intermixing politics with fun (albeit in often unethical ways).

While “democracy” has ultimately halted in America in favour of political machines, I think the general American sentiment is that things shouldn’t be this way. Can we harness the power of technology, especially today’s Web 2.0 participatory culture, to change politics?

So here’s the debate: how do we go about fixing our political system? Is it technology versus analog participation? Is it about city-states versus federal governing, the problem of scaling? Or does fixing politics involve undermining politics altogether?

Weigh in below. And like in a functioning democracy, your voice makes this debate count.

Roman Kudryashov
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Roman Kudryashov

is the Editor-in-Chief at What Are These Ideas
Roman Kudryashov is the founding editor of What Are These Ideas. He has previously worked for M.I.T. CogNet and for the Council on Foreign Relations. He writes about politics and the intersection of technology and society. He currently lives in New York.
Roman Kudryashov

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  • kraz

    ok here’s the problem. as the second guy said, there is no way for people right now to directly interact with candidates.
    in a broad sense, to do this via contact by mail or internet is difficult and blocked by walls of secretaries and mailing lists. via protest, it’s virtually illegal.
    it’s enough to discourage 90% of people.

    whether you like it or not, the basis of fixing political participate is to make the candidates invested in participating. right now there is little reason for a politician to be in touch with people. so whatever platform is made for that, it has to influence the candidate or party MORE than it does the users. users will use whatever feeds back consistently.
    so like if you could sell the Democrats the magic platform and make sure that they RESPOND TO IT like the pirate party does, THEN you have changed the landscape of politics forever.
    but there has to be incentive for the candidate to participate. that’s the key

  • krazborough

    responsiveness will be the
    key metric, as i think i’ve mentioned. here’s how Super Special Awesome
    Political Platform might work:
    1) candidates and elected officials provide a basic party line
    2) through a sensible upvote/downvote or petition system, users provide requests to the candidates and officials. 3) politicians post their responses, and a separate body run by the platform verifies their actions within the next few weeks. 4) the responses are given a rating by users: EFFECTIVE, NEUTRAL, NOT EFFECTIVE, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.
    the ratings show up on the candidate’s pages, and users are encouraged
    to vote out candidates and officials with low or unfavorable ratings.
    this will give candidates a fairly brutal incentive to respond to the
    internets effectively. this will quickly weed out the old geezers and
    give us new cool people to wrok with!

    • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

      How would an upvoting/downvoting system work since it is very difficult to get people to participate on social media sites (exception is facebook).  Something like 1% of people who visit this site will comment.  How do you get them to get skin the game so they feel obligated for the sake of our mystery polis to participate?

  • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

    Short answer: Of course, the technology is there
    Long Answer: The way we run politics right now is that we are each are unequally weighed data points.  It can lead you to feeling useless.  In a networked based political system, how will you bring people on if they already feel like they don’t have a voice…

    • http://twitter.com/sharedphysics Roman Kudryashov

      David Runciman, writing in the London Review of Books (06.07.2012), contrasts democracy and oligarchy: to paraphrase, democracy is confusing (this, that, and the third-to-hundredth thing all interact in a cauldron of compromise), while oligarchy is pretty straightforward (money buys power, power buys money).

      He argues that globalization actually offers a cop-out for decision making in a democracy: too many forces independent of our own already-messy internal politics breeds uncertainty, fear, and by corollary, indecision. Is it then that the way out of this ‘crisis’ is acting stronger, more like an oligarch? Or is the virtue of democracy that it can fail? Democracy, in itself, is an apolitical open vessel for different ideologies to do what they will, while being given a time limit and eventual reversion back to some form of public participation. 

      Your point on unequally weighed data points is well taken, and I wanted to push it to decision-making in general. Is the answer to your question then, that we need to scale democracy back down, make it more local (as opposed to federal)?– that would give participants a greater voice & a greater chance to make their say & not get lost. A revert to pub-politics and coffeehouses? In a sense, the house of representatives is supposed to be that sort of aggregated voice. But can technology offer a better method of accomplishing that sort of local-goes-national voice, or do we need to rethink the entire deal?

  • http://engag.io/ William Mougayar

    Absolutely yes. What countries, states or cities are doing a good job at it and serving as lighthouses?

    • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

      I wish I knew myself.

    • http://twitter.com/sharedphysics Roman Kudryashov

      I think that’s a good point. The pirate model I mentioned is around in Germany, and I wouldn’t be surprised if either Norway or Scandinavia has something similar re: their Pirate parties. Iceland recently crowdsourced its constitution via facebook. Meanwhile, America has two national populist movements, Occupy & the Tea Party, both of which had different models of political participation that what’s been going on recently. I’d have to do some more research for what it going on elsewhere, but that’s my off-the-cuff answer. But, of course, the comments here serve as a crowdsourcing of sorts for opinions and research for a in-depth feature article & a follow-up workshop, so post what you guys know!

    • http://twitter.com/sharedphysics Roman Kudryashov

      To follow up, Congressman Issa is launching a “Direct Democracy Technology Lab” to crowd-source commentary and ideas into legislature. Interesting to say the least, and they are also looking for developers! 
      http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/11/congressman-issa-opengov-foundatio/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

  • http://www.engineperformancechip.com/ sam carson

    I have studies many political science book and on the basis of that I think politics is the most important building block of any nation’s development. But nowadays, it has become a source of income and power which you can get by fooling people. It is more like a Fish market.