Informing and engaging citizens
Why facilitators are necessary to ensure high-quality public deliberation in citizens’ assemblies
Democratic Audit has recently published several articles on the potential for citizens’ assemblies to resolve entrenched political problems, in particular for power-sharing in Northern Ireland, but what is required to make such initiatives work? Keisha Gani argues that facilitators are vital to encourage deliberation and inclusion, which are both necessary for well-designed participatory democracy
Why mass email campaigns are failing to connect MPs, charities and the people they represent
Mass email campaigns and online petitions have become a ubiquitous part of modern political campaigning. However, writes Jinan Younis, there is an increasing disconnect between those who organise such campaigns and the people whose lives are affected by the issues they raise. Charities and other campaigning organisations need to rethink how they structure digital campaigns.
Why do our feelings about politics matter – and do they matter more now?
It is too simplistic to argue that current heated debates about politics, especially in the context of Brexit and Trump, are due to the fact that our emotions about politics matter more now than before. Laura Jenkins argues that our feelings about politics have always mattered. In fact, these recent unexpected political outcomes could prove to be an example of what happens when people’s feelings about politics are neglected for too long.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: let this be the high-water mark for impunity
The problems we see at social media companies today are the by-product of a laissez-faire approach to regulation, writes MacKenzie F. Common.
Digital technology is changing party politics, the interesting question is how
It is evident from the 2017 general election, writes Kate Dommett, that digital technology has been fully embraced by political parties and incorporated into campaigning strategies. It is also creating opportunities for satellite campaigns to mobilise citizens. Longer term, digital innovations have the potential to reshape the nature of engagement between citizens and parties, though these more fundamental changes are not yet being implemented.
Citizen-centred democratic theory is dead. Long live citizen-centred theory! It’s time we designed a politics for citizens as they really are, not how we’d like them to be
Forms of democracy that depend on high levels of public participation and civic deliberation are unrealistic, argues Phil Parvin. Instead, political reform should focus less on increased participation and more on representation, in particular to counter the effects of elite lobbying by economically powerful interest groups.
The UK and Canada: democratic legitimacy could matter more than geographic representation in the upper chamber
Upper chambers have the potential to represent different geographic groups within a multinational state, and so accommodate minority identities. However, research by Mike Medeiros, Damien Bol and Richard Nadeau indicates that, though there is support for democratic reform of the House of Lords and Senate in Scotland and Quebec respectively, there is, in fact, greater support for central democratic reform than for subnational representation.
Populism may well be inevitable in democracies, but it is also the cause of democratic disenchantment
Much has been written about populism and its move to the mainstream. Stephane Wolton and Carlo Prato argue that it has arisen, not so much from democratic dissatisfaction but from voters’ demands for reform, which leads politicians to engage opportunistically in a form of populism by campaigning on reformist agendas regardless of their ability to successfully carry them out.
A citizens’ convention for UK democracy is more necessary with every passing day
Many democratic societies have benefited from establishing conventions of citizens chosen at random to deliberate on major constitutional questions. Now is the time for the UK to have its own citizens’ convention, argue Graham Allen and Andrew Blick, to rebuild and renew our fractured representative democracy.
A new definition of economic democracy – and what it means for inequality
How democratic is an economy? And which countries are best at engaging the population in economic decision making? To answer these questions, writes Andrew Cumbers (University of Glasgow), the Democratising the Economy project has developed a new index of economic democracy, which incorporates a broad range of measures and reassess its relationship with inequality. The index shows that, though there is no single model for increasing economic democracy, Scandinavian countries perform particularly well in terms of economic participation, inequality and productivity.
Democratic Audit's core funding is provided by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Additional funding is provided by the London School of Economics.