By Navraj Singh Ghaleigh.
E-democracy, like all parts of the democratic process, should be judged against high standards. And no measure is more demanding than its capacity to combat that most troubling feature of contemporary democracy – the process of mutual withdrawal that looms over modern politics.
Whether we consider voter turnout, party membership, identification with political parties or other traditional measures, citizens in almost all established democracies are – despite the odd blip of hope – steadily withdrawing from participating in politics. Academics have also identified a corollary of this trend: the withdrawal of political elites from citizens.
As the Irish political scientist Peter Mair wrote in the New Left Review (issue 46, 2006): “Citizens retreat into private life or more specialised and often ad hoc forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being evacuated…Citizens turn from being participants into spectators, while the elites gain more space in which to pursue their own shared interests.”
One practical instance of this trend can be seen in our system of funding political parties. Whereas mass member political parties might once have drawn on their large memberships (or their proxies such as trade unions or companies) to raise funds, nowadays fewer of our citizens are due-paying party members and hence reluctant to donate to parties. Similarly, political elites wonder why they should trouble 5,000 Average Joes for £10, when a single plutocratic friend can provide £50,000 (or much more) in one go, on the basis of a simple, private, chat.
Can e-democracy alter this? Does it challenge or perhaps even reinforce these trends?
The Scottish picture is instructive. The ‘new’ institutions of Scottish devolution are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. Among the Holyrood Parliament’s most distinct achievements has been its commitment to e-democracy, understood as the use of ICTs to enable citizens to hold politicians to account for their actions.
The Parliament has from the first had a website that offers text and video content covering all aspects of its process, committees and floor activities. Most notably, it has a much-praised system of petitions which, unlike the Downing Street version, gives due consideration to all petitions submitted by a Public Petitions Committee ( http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/petitions/ ). The Governance of Britain White Paper of May 2008 suggests that this crucial institutional back-up should now be replicated in Westminster – praise indeed.
But how do we judge the system? According to the Petition Committee’s own data, the overwhelming majority of its users are 55-year-old, university-educated white men. Nothing wrong with that. But this is exactly the demographic that engages heavily in the electoral and political process already. Is the petitions systems effectively doubling their representation? (And that is without getting into the merits of the system itself – what are its substantive, legislative achievements and outputs?) Further, the Petitions system, like the Scottish Parliament’s website, is a creature of the early 2000s. The latter is looking increasingly creaky, and rather web 1.0. The former, even at its highest, is no more than a modest, if innovative, addition to a new institution. How has this early success been built on, or followed? The suspicion is that, having scored a major global success early on, Scottish e-dem has become rather complacent.
In 2007, with colleagues at the e-Democracy Centre at the University of Zurich, I ran a project ( http://www.c2d.ch/holyrood2007/Scotlandnew/ ) that sought to provide and measure the use of e-democracy tools in the Holyrood elections of that year.
The platform provided a series of tools, allowing both candidates and citizens to campaign, participate in debates and seek information about policy and process.
Tools on offer included a ‘Virtual Ballot Paper’ that allowed users to enter their postcode and be presented with a mock ballot paper that showed them all their candidates in the two races (constituency and region). This was the most visited page on the site, with around 20,000 hits. Given the debacle over the elections – including an unprecedently high rate of spoiled ballot papers – this seems to indicate that there is an appetite for online information to help citizens navigate the political system.
All candidates were invited to upload their own YouTube videos to the site. To say that politicians ‘don’t get it’ is to understate the point somewhat. Almost all efforts had the feel of traditional party election broadcasts, poorly done. The ingenuity and wit of Web 2.0 had not hit Scottish politics by May 2007 – and judging by the Prime Minister’s recent near-suicidal YouTube appearances, this continues to be true nationally.
Tellingly, survey data (with a sample of 1,200) revealed that 20 per cent of users of the Holyrood2007 website had an educational level of no higher than secondary school, which is a very different profile from typical users of political websites, and indeed, the general online community in Scotland. Furthermore, 17 per cent of users stated that they had no or very little interest in politics. Both these findings seem to suggest that new technologies can reach ‘homo apoliticus’ in ways that traditional techniques cannot.
In the event, the Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 saw a breakthrough victory for the pro-independence Scottish National Party. Key among the SNP government’s policies is independence, to which end it initiated a ‘National Conversation’, a process to engage the Scottish public in a public debate about Scottish Independence, in the lead up to a referendum in 2010. The online part of this project is at:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/topics/a-national-conversation .
With colleagues at Edinburgh University, negotiations to allow access to website usage data for the National Conversation took place with senior government officials in June 2008. To date however, no access has been granted and the National Conversation itself seems to have stalled somewhat. A new minister, Michael Russell, became responsible for the National Conversation in spring 2009 and the indications are that the process will be re-energised this summer.
In the absence of any usage data it is notable that there has been some attempt to mix plain, informational features with interactive ones (video, forums, ministerial blogs and so on). Interestingly, parts of the site are available in eight or more languages, an attempt at cultural inclusiveness in what might have been essentially an ethnic/nationalist project. One might note that the Quebec referendums of 1990s made no such attempts, and succeeded in alienating the non-Franco/Anglo portions of that province’s community.
Overall, a notable feature of Scottish e-democracy is that the Nationalists – ‘or Nats’ – have, up to now, dominated the field. They arrived in cyberspace first, and in numbers. All the other parties remain marginal in the Scottish blogosphere. However, there is a very notable absence of civility between the so-called CyberNats and their online opponents. Any suggestion that the ideals of deliberative democracy are being played out are pretty far off the mark.
We seem to be largely in the realm of echo chambers – people hear people like themselves, and think that that’s the sound of the world agreeing with them. A real challenge now for Scottish e-democracy in general, and the National Conversation in particular, will be to overcome this tendency.
So can Scotland’s ‘lead’ in e-democracy be sustained in the years to come, and generate the sort of popular re-engagement that many technological determinists assume it can? The National Conversation provides an occasion to observe whether or not this will happen, and whether the passionate issue of independence can combine with interactive technologies to undermine long-established social and political trends.
The alternative – that the mutual disengagement of the people and politicians will grow inexorably greater – is depressing to contemplate.
NOTE: Navraj Singh Ghaleigh is Lecturer in Public Law, University of Edinburgh.
