Engaging the Public

On July 6th we organised an event which attracted around 35 people. The premise was that politics should be about engaging the public, informing them, interesting them, exciting them and involving them. Yet there is widespread disinterest, disengagement and distrust in our political system. This one-day event is designed for sharing ideas about why the public show disinterest and distrust and how we might consider re-engaging the public, encouraging people to get involved in politics. Our research focuses at the local and national level of politics. We will introduce ideas ranging from understanding the political consumer to how to engage and mobilise members of the public using the latest technologies and how to audit communication. This is how the day went:

The Promise and Problems of Online Deliberation

There is a fascinating report by Laura Black available free here which assesses the deliberative prospects offered by different forum design choices. The report includes a great schematic which gives an accessible overview of the implications design choices have for designing and hosting spaces that facilitate deliberative decision making. The question that is perhaps not answered is how to make people want to have a conversation in the first place, and then how to start that conversation - but for those with an audience that want to talk this gives some invaluable insights.

Research shows government departments do not use social media properly

Mark Pack highlights that government departments are in broadcast mode only and have reasonably few followers. See this video from PR Week. My own work (presented at the ECPR and currently being revised for publication) suggests there is a correlation here, that the more interactive you are, and the more personalised, the more people engage with your message.

Celebritisation too far?

Many of the great kings and emperors (and other important notables) has their portrait painted for posterity. The picture would be full of symbolism to demonstrate their power. One wonders how many leaders would want this sort of portrait to be done of them and what impact this has from an impression management perspective.

This is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it is unofficial and satirical and sold for $5,000. The cup looks like a Tim Horton's cup, which is the Canadian coffee house brand that politicians must be seen in to be seen to be 'normal'. The artist has gone on record saying that apart from the head the body is not a representation of Harper.

All politics is social (great infographic by Jarred Romley)

Great Spoof (http://www.cash4access.com/)

Where there is a good story, there is a good way to satirise the situation and create a good spoof. Doubtless this will go viral quickly, it is very much in the vein of www.mydavidcameron.com and those create your own slogan posters from the 2010 UK General Election. This is the power of the Internet, anyone who wants to can contribute, they just need the skills, resources and the will.

Fine words from a member of the government

The main story for the Daily Mail is that Chancellor swore in a confrontation over the budget. It is not surprising that there are heated discussions over politics, it is a feature of coalitions. More appalling is the quote in the article from Tory MP David Ruffley (Pictured) who said: ‘Pensioners are going to be bellyaching about this for a while. The grey vote is powerful and [Osborne] could have thought better of it and found the money elsewhere.’

Is this the sort of comment that is appropriate from a representative of the people? It suggests that Ruffley is concerned only about votes and treats a large proportion of the population with disdain. It is hard not to treat anyone with contempt who dismisses the concerns of people who may be worried about affording their bills as bellyaching. The fact that the journalists ignore this is worrying, they focus only on the story of disagreements. Will this be picked up by Labour? It is not the words of someone representing a compassionate Conservative party and certainly does not fit with the ethos Cameron seems to want to project but plays to those notions of the Conservatives as the nasty party, out of touch and elitist. If more MPs share this view and are allowed to express them it could be very damaging for the brand.

Book Review: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen - Ground Wars

The book Ground Wars focuses on a area of political communication that is largely ignore by academic study. As the subtitle states, the focus is on 'personalised political communication' or individuals as media. While much is written about the air war, the mass media campaign, advertising, television debates et cetera, we find that the ground war is seldom documented. Yet we can find evidence that, aside from the currency earned by a good incumbent, being contacted by the campaign can be crucial. The figure Nielsen references is the mobilisation of one in fourteen contacts, similar evidence can be found in work by Gerber & Green as well as myself in a micro-study of marginal seat campaigns in the UK.

The value of Nielsen's book is that it offers an in-depth account of the various players that participate. He describes any campaign unit as an assemblage, a tapestry of permanent and part-time staffers, volunteers and part-timers, all of whom draw together for the purpose of pursuing a goal. However, these goals may not always be identical. They may all want a Democratic victory, but some are there for the candidate, some for the party and some for the president. There may also be various competing forces working together but with their own objectives and motivations. Nielsen also charts how voters respond to be canvassed, by telephone or on the doorstep, or being 'knocked-up', encouraged to go out and vote, and the complex but often dubiously accurate walk sheets, voter lists and accompanying scripts that are employed. It is a rich story that questions the extent to which all political campaigning is professionalised but highlights how these personal interactions are a core part of the campaign experience for some voters in the US.

Of course the US is not alone in having a ground war. Nielsen hints at the fact that this is part of campaigning, and not just US campaigning, but there is no comparative aspect to the work itself. However, the parallels with campaigns I have experienced are many. In the UK local campaigning has perhaps even less of a professional edge, but the same characters appear (though there are few if any paid part-time canvassers on the whole). The same forces, also, are at work. Thus Nielsen's work offers much scope for future research agendas, both in tracking the evolution of these campaigns, how they work across different systems and what commonalities and differences appear across ground wars. For this reason, as well as shedding much light into a hidden aspect of campaigning, this book and the research it builds upon, is very important for the understanding of how both party staff and volunteers as well as voters, experience elections.

Nielsen's work is also useful for another reason. The appendix offers a personal and academic overview of the research method. The work is ethnographic in style, taking a participant observation approach. Nielsen details the difficulties in gaining trust, the challenges faced by trying to be removed while also being useful to have around, the misunderstanding of his work as the 'office anthropologist' and the array of challenges met through the course of his study. As such this offers both guidance and caution to any researcher embarking on similar work.

Overall it is, to those fascinated in campaigning, a gripping read. Well researched, insightful and full of wonderful snapshots drawn from observations made during the research. If you really want to understand campaigning, this is the book to read.

BOOK REVIEW: I'll have what she's having

Bentley et al, (Alex Bentley, Mark Earls and Michael O’Brien (2011) I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping social behaviour, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 146, $22.95/£15.95) in this short and accessible text, explore the phenomena surrounding social interaction and influence. Their question is how do we understand copying. More specifically, how do individuals learn from one another, influence one another and to what extent is man a rational independent actor or simply a follower. The discussion begins in the Pleistocene era, when man had to learn how to survive. Here not only do we observe social learning but understand how it was written into the human genes. The authors argue that the same mechanisms within human cognition exist; they have simply evolved from learning how to survive to how to survive within modern society. Therefore the rules of copying no longer simply follow a ‘copy if better’ norm, although this may help us to understand how technological innovations spread [think of the touch screen], but now relate to the creation of social norms. Social norms are often created through marketing communication, promoting a product as the ‘must have’ item, as well as political communication. The so-called ‘movement for change’ around Obama was a form of group think inculcated through the power of the campaign messages.

The power of a social cascade is thus highlighted as the way in which individuals believe they are acting independently but are actually being influenced. Influence in the 21^st Century is likely to be from many sources simultaneously, those who are our friends or whom we follow on social media, the media we read but also the people we spend time with during our day to day lives. Our lives can be described as a rich collage of influences, each being processed and weighed in our minds prior to acceptance or rejection. What is less clear is how cascades start and, in particular, how unintended cascades occur across a society. Why, for example, might parents choose to give their child a name that ends up shared with a third of other children born at the same time? Surely this is not intentional, and may well be innovative in each particular case, or copying someone famous without realising that others would do the same, but why do people independently choose the same innovation? The authors explain four cognitive conditions. When there are few options and few sources of influence a process or rational choice occurs, possibly because the choice is actually a no-brainer. Where there are many options but few sources of influence, so everyone is behaving differently, the decision amounts to nothing but a random guess. If there are few options but many sources of influence this results in directed copying, individuals looking to those who they respect and copying their choice. It is when there are many options and many sources of influence, but yet copying is evidenced and a behaviour appears as the choice of the majority, that we have undirected copying. The challenge is identifying the reasons for the copying, something the authors cannot fully explain.

Political choice is often described as a rational choice, and perhaps following Bentley et al’s schematic there is a reason. Choices tend to be limited, in particular realistic choices for who would be president or party of government, and sources of influence tend to be polarised. However, does this always result in a rational and deliberative choice outcome? Those who are reliant on media with particular partisan biases, or adopt one during a contest, may well fall into directed copying. The choir of voices supporting one party, the UK Sun newspaper’s reporters’ backing of the Conservatives perhaps, can lead to a predisposition to adopt the ideas as your own. There may also be a range of random guesses taking place. While there may not be many similar options, the options may seem very similar and even overwhelming to those who have little political knowledge. Unless there is a clear direction from the media, peers or other respected sources of information, voter choices may amount to little but a random guess once in the ballot box. It is more difficult to consider how undirected copying takes place within a political environment. There may often be many sources of influence, given that most campaigns are dominated by marketing communication. Equally there may be the perception that there are many similar options, or at least an overwhelming choice may exist. Can a combination of influences, from peers, the media, opinion polls, lead to undirected copying? Can we explain the bandwagons that brought Tony Blair or Barack Obama to power in this way? The challenge here is would anyone admit to copying and if not how could we detect such behaviour?

The book is aimed at the expert, though accessible due to its brevity it would be a challenge to newcomers to the topic and offers few signposts to further reading. However, the role of the book is to raise some important and interesting questions about individuality and its limitations. No human would want to think of themselves as having similar thought processes to those associated with sheep or lemmings. Few would ever admit to blind following. Yet we can see in the cases of suicide bombers, rioters on the streets of London, or participants in protests that escalate from peaceful marches to public insurrection, that blind following happens. If Bentley et al explain a significant percentage of human behaviour within their schematic then they demonstrate the amount of power that is held by social influentials. These influentials may be benign figures, or the creators of marketing communication or political propaganda; if it is the latter who predominate in our society we may not like what we find when we map social behaviour.

No cracks in the consensus ...yet

The recent party conferences by the Conservative, Liberal-Democrats and Labour parties underscore what unites rather than divides the major political parties. All have now subscribed to the austerity agenda in response to the global financial and economic crisis, although there is some disagreement on the pace of cuts. All the parties have also completely abandoned any aspiration towards a return to the free higher education most of our MPs once enjoyed. Ed Miliband effectively (and probably prematurely) conceded the principle of the debate over tuition fees to the coalition government by arguing in his conference speech that Labour would lower the cap of tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000.

Perhaps more significantly there still appears to be no serious public discussion of the reduction in corporation tax proposed by George Osborne last year from 28% to 24% over four years, although Miliband did suggest he would claw this back from the banks and private equity firms which were the whipping boys for much of the speech. By 2014 corporation tax in the UK will have more than halved since its highpoint in the post-war era of 50% in 1949 when Britain really was in an economic crisis. The 24% corporation tax will put us well below the US (at 39%) or Germany (at 33%) and closer to the tax rates of Saudi Arabia and Russia (20%). This reduction is of course being paid for by students and others at the sharp end of the various austerity measures, yet the opposition has failed to campaign on this slashing of corporation tax and so the mainstream media have maintained a polite silence on the topic.

From across the Atlantic however, comes a potential source of trouble for the major parties. The Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to 25 cities in the US and has had an unusual degree of support and understanding from a broad coalition of disgruntled voters and even sympathy from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and mainstream political figures like Nancy Pelosi. Should the success of the movement continue, building on an awareness of record rates of inequality, there is a chance it could spread to Britain. The possibility of copy-cat demonstrations gaining mass support in London as winter approaches seems remote, but much depends on the public mood of those sections of the population most affected by the cuts, including the 100,000 public sector employees expected to lose their jobs by early in the new year.

The mass protests in Greece and riots in England over the summer are further reminders that civil unrest is a real possibility. Demonstrations of the type seen in the US or Athens may not take place, but if the planned occupation of the London Stock Exchange for the 15th October or similar future protests gained significant support it could put all three parties on the back foot. Each has been accused of ‘collusion’ in enacting a corporate-sponsored political agenda (be it Labour’s promotion of costly PFI projects including hospitals); deregulation of banks and financial services (Labour and Conservative); rolling back planning restrictions in the interests of property developers (LibDem/Conservative) and so on.

The extent to which the three major parties are seen to be ‘in the pocket’ of big business and pushing a discredited neo-liberal agenda may in the end do real damage to British democracy and could lead to even higher levels of voter disengagement.

Reconnecting with voters might be regarded by political observers as essential for all three parties. However, the perception that powerful lobbyists, private and corporate donors and multinational threats to relocate production (and accompanying beggar-thy-neighbour tax policies) are the real drivers of party policy may yet produce a coalition of citizens who are disillusioned with this politics as usual. Should this coalition find a sustained collective voice (either on the streets of Wall Street, Athens or London) and if a coherent set of demands emerges there may be the first cracks in the current political consensus. When 20,000 veterans of the First World War marched on Washington in the spring and summer of 1932 and set up a tent city opposite the Capitol - President Herbert Hoover (whose austerity measures were so unpopular) sent in four troops of cavalry and four companies of infantry to clear the encampment, which was torched. The failure of Hoover’s austerity measures led to the massive election victory of Roosevelt in November 1932 on the promise of a programme of employment through the New Deal. The lessons of history seem blindingly clear as the satirical magazine the Onion recently noted.

Should a similar movement of civil disobedience provoke public sympathy either here or in the US there is a chance for the kind of movement that could make real demands on a system that has appeared deaf to alternative strategies for dealing with the current economic crisis. At that point real political differences between the parties could make a comeback and our democracy would be all the healthier for that.