Greater Democracy: Ballot Initiatives in a post broadcast world

December 29, 2003

Ballot Initiatives in a post broadcast world

In some recent emails, particularly with Jock Gill, we have been discussing the role of ballot initiatives and plebiscites in politics today. Many people seem to think of ballot initiatives as a great example true democracy where everyone has their say in making a law.

However, I think that ballot initiatives are perhaps one of the last gasps of the broadcast era politics. Issues, like candidates get reduced to sound bytes that get a yes or no vote. The electorate isn't truly involved, whether it be in finding the best solution to an issue, or making an informed choice about an issue. From a psychological perspective it promotes black and white thinking, the view that there are two possible solutions to a problem, and nothing in between. In terms of community, it does nothing to promote people working together for the good of the community.

Hopefully, 2000 was the last gasp of broadcast era politics and we are moving into a new age of post-broadcast politics, where people are fully involved again in new communities.

At the Association of Internet Researchers 2003 conference in Toronto, there were several themes that in my mind interweaved quite nicely to illustrate where the problems are and some of the things that could be done to help get these problems addressed.

One of the first themes was that of the role of blogs in the media today. One speaker commented about agent theory, if I recall properly. The salient comment to me, which seemed to be the center of his paper, was that the media can’t tell us what to think; they can only tell us what to think about. The question that arose was, where do blogs fit into this equation? By keeping stories alive in the blogs, by stories gaining legs in blogs, do blogs change this equation? Do blogs start telling the media what should be thought about? Do issues return to being emergent from the grassroots instead of driven by large media conglomerates?

Another theme was eCampaigns. I presented on the use of the Internet by the Howard Dean campaign. There was another panel concerning archiving of online campaign materials. I spoke with the two of the panel speakers about my paper. In particular, I mentioned Joe Trippi’s Perfect Storm blog entry from last May.

every political campaign I have ever been in is built on a top-down military structure -- there is a general at the top of the campaign -- and all orders flow down -- with almost no interaction. This is a disaster. This kind of structure will suffocate the storm not fuel it. Campaigns abhor chaos -- and to most campaigns built on the old top-down model -- that is what the net represents -- chaos. And the more the campaign tries to control the "chaos" the more it stiffles its growth

This particular quote resonated strongly with the presenters at this panel. In my mind, it fits well with the shift taking place in the media, as blogs, as well as other changes in the media, are leading to a larger distribution of power, at the same time as media outlets try to consolidate power.

This leads to the third theme; the failure of eGovernance efforts so far. With a few exceptions, they have been failures. As I reflected on this at the time, I wondered the relationship between eCampaigns and eGovernance. Perhaps we cannot have eGovernance until we have leaders that have been elected through eCampaigns. As I think more about this, it makes sense in terms of what has been discussed above. What needs to happen for eGovernance to success is for people to find and become comfortable with tools that restore their voice in politics; that move from the world of broadcast politics where a central command sends out information that does not engage to the public to a world of emergent democracy where individual voices join together one at a time until they make up a strong loud chorus that cannot be ignored.

This brings me back to my discussions with Jock. What are the tools that will help people find their voice again? Jock suggested a few. Meetup.com is a very important starting point. It is about taking conversations that are occurring online and moving them to the diners and bars across our country and across the world. Social software, like Deanlink, and even sites that lead to its creation, like Friendster or The Tribe are crucial in helping people find others with shared interests. Other tools to improve communication, like Skype are also important. I must admit, I haven’t played with Skype yet, but I do use Vonage to get Voice over IP in an easy to use manner that connects with the PSTN. Additional synchronous tools, perhaps even including video, will help in getting people better connected.

Jock also spoke about visualization and modeling tools. It seems as if these have great potential to assist people as they discuss ideas either on blogs, at Meetups, or over synchronous tools.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with ballot initiatives per se. Perhaps the problem is that right now they are being created in the old broadcast top down manner. Perhaps what is necessary is to use tools like Meetup, Friendster, Skye, and modeling and visualization tools to make ballot initiatives a truly engaging process where an optimal solution can emerge through many people working together in community.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at December 29, 2003 7:42 AM | TrackBack

Comments

The question isn't how to create an alternative to the ballot initiative. Rather, how do you make the ballot initiative obsolete through an engaged and active citizenry that exercises ongoing influence that makes direct democracy more relevant than the representative system the initiative was designed to interdict when it is thought to be failing.

That means the tools for organizing, understanding compromises and making them, need to be available as widely as possible, designed for individuals to use to initiate movements, whether they are small or large. The mistake made when talking about political organization today is that we emphasize the national--this is understandable enough, since national changes are the most visible and easily covered. However, the empowerment of the individual begins with a pothole filled or a city council seat won, not the making of foreign policy.

The emphasis on the national has produced a campaign-centrism, rather than a voter-centric model of politics. We need to amplify the individual's power to organize, so that organization can break out from many points on the political map, rather than from the top down. Everett Ehrlich's recent article, What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?, is completely off the mark, as well as fallacious. A political machine cannot fit on a laptop, because it is made up of many people. Ehrlich's question is like asking "What will happen when the Internet fits on a laptop?" You may have all the information in the world available to you locally, but the ability to organize and analyze that information, to put it into context, depends on all the other nodes in the network--no man is an island and no man in a democracy, no mattter how much data they have, can dictate what the rest of society shall do. A political machine exists in many pieces and, while it can be coordinated through a single point on a network, should not be thought to be friction-free, since it is encounters with friction that make politics possible. We meet, debate, compromise and act as a society, not in response to the commands typed into a keyboard. If it comes to that, we'll no longer be living in a democracy.

Ehrlich's assumption that Ronald Coase's economic insights make Howard Dean a third-party unto himself who will displace one of the major parties is remarkable because it assumes that out of all the complexity Coase says we can master through large-scale cooperation, only two parties can thrive and a third rise in response to them at intervals. This is like saying there is a market for only three computers in the world, as IBM's Thomas Watson famously speculated. In fact, there is room in an information-rich society for thousand, or tens of thousands of parties. The power comes in knitting these myriad interest groups into coalitions by guiding their discovery of one another and the compromises that allow them to work together.

Information, in Ronald Coase's formulation of economics of scale, is important, but it is not sufficient to enact world-shaking democratic change. It is sufficient for totalitarian change, as evidenced by the rise of revolutionary vanguards in Russia, Germany, China and Cambodia, but if we value our freedoms we should not be hoping too hard for the kind of frictionless transactions that powered the mythology of the Internet bubble, because a crash in this realm of social action will result in a collapse of representativeness and the rise of an elite.

Initiatives are one tool, elections another. What is the tool of the middle, that prevents a society from fracturing into warring camps that strive to govern unquestioned, to crush their competition rather than coexist with them? That tool is conversation enabled by information, which comes in three important flavors in a democracy:

1.) Participant data -- who is speaking, who is affected and should speak and how does one reach them?

2.) Consequences -- tools for analyzing the consequences of decisions, whether financial, social or macro-economic.

3.) Feedback -- In a republic, we rely on representatives to act for us, in their best judgment. This divorces the voter from input with many representatives who, having been elected, do not feel it is important to listen to voters until the next election -- they believe they have a free pass. Recall is destructive to the system in many cases since it voids previous votes in seemingly arbitrary ways (a whole belief system can be voided over a few major mistakes) so what do we do to enable feedback that is considered relevant by elected officials? That is as powerful as the lobbies conducted by special interests?

The most effective tool is ongoing engagement at each level of society: local; state; national, and; international. People need to be able to find one another, to redefine the geographical scope of their interests and engagements in order to find more opportunities for compromise and collective action. This will force many more people into situations where they can learn that compromise is not a failure but a lever for gaining support for other issues. We've forgotten the simple mathematics of society, in which one sacrifice is paid back through another, where we can give up our support of better roads in exchange for lower taxes, where we can see that the cost may be more axles replaced or accidents on the highways. It also lets us see that when we give up one priority for someone else's issue, we can expect their support in the future--the very calculations that are condemned as base politics today, but which are eminently practical for the active and engaged citizen, who will recognize the same compromises in their work, their church or synagogue, their neighborhoods and families.

The problem is scale, but the factor that matters is not the transaction cost but the level of sophistication about compromise among citizens. We've reduced compromise to winning and losing, at the cost of a citizenry that is familiar with and confident about the process of compromise in society. A vast middle way opens when the people can see fit to give up ideological absolutes in favor of social harmony that increases the opportunity for future political, economic and social success.

So, Jock, what I would add to your list are the following:

1.) We need institutions dedicated to modeling complex social and political questions in ideologically neutral tools that can be used by citizens to make judgments about the questions of the day. Not just a budgetary tool, which is an excellent idea, but also macro- and micro-economic models for determining the long-term consequences of social investment and disinvestment.

2.) Myriad "local" groups in communication because of their shared interests. We need a system for finding others who are interested in the same issues and supporting the research and other work that will provide groups with meaningful information on which they can base their actions. This transcends the simple meetings facilitated by MeetUp and the mass mailings provided by MoveOn or one of its conservative counterparts.

3.) We need a political accounting system that tracks promises made and kept. It should not be a binding system, since there are other ways to deal with the making of promises and contracts, but we do need to be able to assess others' ability to make and keep their promises.

Posted by: Mitch Ratcliffe at January 1, 2004 2:59 PM

There is an interesting new open source technology and politics site over at the Clark campaign and I have invited them to join this conversation. Welcome Clark TechCorps members.

http://www.clark04.com/techcorps/

How we use open source technology tools to strengthen our political process is an issue that transcends individual candidates. �As Americans, I hope we can all work together to create the best process we can for inventing tools that breathe new life into our democracy.

So the sooner we start experimenting, the better.

Posted by: Jock Gill at January 3, 2004 10:35 AM

Two quick comments:

1) I really like some of what Mitch has to say. I would like to spend time to think about it and reply in full, so I won't make a detailed comment here.

Despite my reputation on a few lists, I am not as revolutionary as I might seem. While I laud the ultimate goal that Mitch proposes of making the ballot initiative obsolete through an engaged and active citizenry, I view this in part as an evolutionary process. The United States may have a history of an engaged and active citizenry, but it seems as if over the past fourty years that has degraded. I believe it will be a long slow process to re-engage the citizens in the democratic process. As such, evolving the ballot initiative process so that people become more engaged seems like a necessary step.

This harkens back to criticisms that people have placed at the efforts to impose democracy in Iraq presently, or criticisms that people had about the serfs not being ready for the Russian Revolution. I believe we need to help citizens rediscover democracy before they will be engaged to the point that ballot initiatives can be done away with.

2) Jock's comment about techcorp: I recently proposed on a couple mailing lists that I am on that DeanSpace and TechCorp should start collaborating now so that our tools will interoperate as well as possible once the Democratic nominee is determined. In addition, we need to be thinking about how we interoperate with groups like the DNC, and who knows what other groups. Needless to say, I was fairly seriously flamed by some for this proposal. It is my intention to write up details about this in a coming blog entry.

I am especially grateful that Jock invited TechCorp people to join the discussion here. I think the discussion could be really fruitful.

Posted by: aldon at January 3, 2004 10:51 AM

Here is a description of some work that was done in the first Clinton administration. �This was coded in LISP.

The Open Meeting:
A Web-Based System for Conferencing and Collaboration
Roger Hurwitz and John C. Mallery
Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

November 7, 1995

Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on The World Wide Web, Boston: MIT, December 12, 1995.

Abstract: An asynchronous collaboration system was developed for Vice President AL Gore's Open Meeting on the National Performance Review. The system supported a large online meeting with over 4000 participants and successfully achieved all its design goals. A theory for managing wide-area collaboration guided the implementation as it extended an earlier system developed to publish electronic documents. It provided users access over SMTP and HTTP to hypertext synthesized from an object database and structured with knowledge representation techniques, including a light-weight semantics based on argument connectives. The users participated in policy planning as they discussed, evaluated, and critiqued recommendations by linking their comments to points in the evolving policy hypertext. These policy conversations were structured according to a link grammar that constrained the types of comments which could be attached in specific discourse contexts. Persistent actions enforced constraints on man-machine tasks, such as moderation workflow. Timely delivery of newly moderated comments kept the conversation gain at a level comparable to tightly-focused mailing lists threading out from specific points in the hypertext. After reviewing the architecture and performance of the system in this Open Meeting, the paper closes with discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for future research.

Keywords: Collaboration, Form Processing, HTTP, Information Access, Link Grammar, National Performance Review, Organization Theory, Persistent Actions, Semantic Network, SMTP, Surveys, Typed Links, URN, White House, World Wide Web.
Hypertext: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/open-meeting/paper.html
Postscript: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/open-meeting/paper.ps.Z

Posted by: Jock Gill at January 3, 2004 1:38 PM

I hope it's not too late to send this comment but Senator Kerry does not have a single piece of legislation on medicare which has his name on it. I think voters should know this.

Posted by: kamrul naser at January 26, 2004 4:03 PM