1. Political Theory 2.0: Issues

• Can create social capital in the deliberative process or can damage it

Can make it easier or harder to act as an elected representative

Can counteract pre-existing centralising tendancies or support them

Can improve the quality of policy thinking or damage it

Can improve the quality of evidence or taint it

Can make the public feel more included or less

Can improve the 'republican' two-way relationship between governed and governors or reinforce a more citizen =consumer viewpoint

Can transfer power from pressure groups / media or take it away from them

Can transfer power from elected officials to permanent ones

2. Quotes

Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin? - Archbishop of York, John Hapgood

(Quality of deliberation and decisionmaking)

Machiavelli also had all sorts of warnings about the pragmatic dangers of making decisions in advance of being in a position where you have to make them.

3. Representative government

it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living

Edmund Burke

Parliament 'an auction house of interests'?

4. Transparency and decisionmaking

The most successful negotiations, between ministers and his civil servants, between departments or between a department and an outside body, can very often start with an informal discussion that, technically, didnt actually happen. No more, apparently. Openness and transparency counts more than successful delivery of policy, I suppose.

Tom Harris MP (Lab)

5. Ability to sift interpret information

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. Theres always more than you can cope with.

Marshall McLuhan

(Q: Can we as a crowd - assist policymakers by helping them to interpret data more effectively?)

6. Centralisation - causes

It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labour unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers themselves. It would be a waste of time to attempt to prove to them that extreme centralization may be injurious to the state, since they are centralizing it for their own benefit.

De Tocqueville

(How far do we by demanding transparency and consistency in policymaking reinforce the already huge pro-centralisation tendency within the British state?)

7. The public are wrong

Here are ten examples:

The populace do not believe in free speech.

They do not believe in freedom of movement.

They do not believe in adversarial politics.

They do not believe in an adversarial legal system.

They do not believe a man is innocent until proved guilty.

They do not believe the market should determine prices.

They do not believe the market should determine wages.

They do not believe anyone should profit from scarcity.

They think increased productivity will increase unemployment.

They do not believe an immigrant should take a job for which there is already willing indigenous labour.

Many of these arguments are perfectly absurd; others are superficially attractive but dangerous; others are workable but only in a fascist state. But if you believe that you could persuade a town hall full of ordinary voters to reject any one of the contentions I have summarised above, then try it. I have.

Matthew Parris (former MP)

8. Public / Gov comms

'The ordinary citizen as a supplier of public sector information?' (Norwegian Gov report on web2.0)

Republican means of making government more 'human'and conversational in the way itcommunicates