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Participatory democracy for the citizen - Part 2
Jack Straw and Gordon Brown have announced some constitutional changes which they think will help "involve" the people of Britain in the democratic process. These changes involve the relative powers of the executive and Parliament as well as participatory methods such as citizens juries.
These are also matters addressed in the recent work, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom - Our unfinished journey...", published by HPC (Hambrook Publishing Company). Agence Presse Européenne (APE) asked the author of this work, Hector McNeill, to respond to some specific questions on this topic and his replies make up a two part article on this topic.
The first article was concerned with the issue of the relative powers of Parliament and the executive. This article, Part 2, covers how best to enhance inclusion through the involvement of the electorate in policy development and legislative processes.
The second question APE presented was:
"What are the best means to involve the people of Britain in their governance?"
Hector McNeill's reply is given below:
In the first part of this article I explained how political parties neither discover nor do they measure electorate preferences through general elections. The electorate is also barred by political party representatives in Parliament (MPs) from having any influence on the final form of any legislation. As a result the legislative process fails to reflect electorate preferences.
In Britain, political parties are so tiny and unrepresentative, with a total membership is less than 1% of the electorate, that they lack the intellectual critical mass to undertake comprehensive reviews of electorate preferences. They have always had a tendency to focus their attention to options their members think are important but which are, in fact, unrepresentative predefined preferences. In excluding the participation of the people of the country in the decision-making to mould policies, political parties serve their own restricted interests; the people of Britain are treated in a patronising fashion.
There is a strict relationship between individual free expression, individual and social preferences. Individual and social preferences arise from people's individual experience and expectations and reflect free individual expression. Free individual expression is communicating one's views free from prompting or impositions of those who seek other preferences. Unless political parties assess, with precision, people's personal and social preferences they are, by the same score, preventing a freer individual expression of the people of the country.
Consumerism & identity politics
With recent changes in strategies initiated in the 1980s 1 , all main British political parties now concentrate on "platforms" based on consumerism and identity approaches to politics. Consumerism is a mix between income promotion and trying to offer a range of policy options the electorate might "buy". Identity politics assciates a party with the current big issues such as the Green agenda and climate change. By way of analogy, on the consumerism front, each political party tries to get the electorate to opt for just one flavour of ice cream rather than working to find out which other flavours might in fact be preferred and then building on this knowledge to create yet better options. When is comes to the defence of people's freedom and individual freedom of expression, the effort should be to ascertain electorate preferences rather than limit the focus to trying to encourage people to accept predetermined preferences of the extreme minority making up the membership of a political party. Such a top down system restricts options and is precarious because it is unlikely to offer the best options.
Citizens' Juries
Mention has been made in the Government's proposals on constitution to the likely adoption of citizens' juries at the local level. Citizens' juries developed from participatory forums which were used by some policy groups and nongovernmental organizations in their work in developing policies in the early 1970s. These involved a process of involving those to be affected by a decision or policy being exposed to the arguments and proposed options for addressing some basic issue. The forum members assessed arguments, asked questions and then amongst themselves, usually with a facilitator, developing their own views on the best solutions. But this activity indirectly or directly constituted a commentary on preferences expressed by governments, state or local authorities. The outcome was that some nongovernmental organizations ended up advocating policies genuinely developed by members of the public and which were sometimes superior options to those being drawn up by political parties or government. Typical fields of application were human rights, poverty alleviation and the environment. The edge which some nongovernmental organizations have over government in terms of expertise and participative policy development was sometimes perceived by politicians as being threatening. They would often resist such logic by insisting that they had a more "realistic grasp" of the reality and of what was best for the people. In Central Europe, governments were, and are, particularly resistant to such "alternative" forms of representation. This is because such activities constitute a genuine form of representation whereas the political party system does not 2 . Good examples of this sort of work can be found in Brazil, as far back as the 1960-1970s 3 and such work was pioneered at the European Commission at the Information Technology & Telecommunications Task Force in the early mid 1980s 4 , which involved several "panels" of potential systems users in assisting in the development of policies and programmes to promote a more productive application of information technology. In Central Europe in the 1990-2000s such work has been undertaken in the area of rural minorities. 5 .
Stealing the initiative through citizens' juries
The movement towards citizens' juries appears to have emerged as an intentional move to politicize NGO activities and citizen initiatives on the part of some large organizations and governments. Their objective was to take the initiative and ownership of the participatory processes involving participatory forums largely through the vehicle of funding. Thus the World Bank under Wolfensohn began to buy in the NGO processes by integrating them into Bank practice whilst not changing their own agendas. Some political parties, at local authority level, attempted to strengthen their own legitimacy through popularity, especially in cases of difficult or marginal constituencies, by introducing participatoty forums but under a new name, citizens' juries. One of the better known examples was the PT, Workers party, efforts in Porto Alegre in Brazil as far back as 1989. When the PT started the city was bankrupt so citizens' juries was a deft way to "share responsibility" with the people. But the experiment was reasonably successful and popular with some segments of the population and it has continued to this day permitting the electorate, through forums, to decide on priorities for budget allocations. The Porto Alegre example serves to demonstrate that when basic services, such a potable water and good sanitation, are lacking there is a convergence of preferences and so priorities are easier to define. As the basic issues are solved the process begins to involve the public in less basic issues such as allocating funds to recycling schemes and play parks. In reality, such processes are encouraged and survive because they create a local perception of the people "being involved" and there is a certain "feel good" factor on the part of those who participate.
Comments on Citizens juries
After some 30 years organizing, managing and observing the outcomes of systems groups and participatory forums (citizens' juries) I would say that there are problems in trying to apply citizens' juries at local levels in the political domain and even more so at the national level. At the local level they are very enlightening and, indeed, enjoyable for those who participate in them but their potential is limited because their structure is such that to apply the process across society as a whole would be prohibitively expensive. There are also, in a political environment, the question of how one selects participants. On policy questions there is the question of the legitimacy, as far as those not involved are concerned, of the outcomes. One consistent problem is the question of sponsorship of citizens' juries by interested parties who also provide biased information. This sort of thing is common where a large commercial enterprise has an interest in promoting its own products are services by trying to create a favourable policy environment for the acceptance of such products and services. A further danger with citizens' juries is the intentional placing of specific individuals within the jury whose function is to orientate a jury's decisions in a given direction. Such "placement" can be influenced by political parties, institutions or commercial companies. To have a highly reduced number of non-elected citizens deciding on financial allocations made on behalf of a whole local community is a process which is potentially corrupt. Such corruption emanates from the political interference in the process in terms of the issuance of biased information or in the peddling of influence through specific subgroups within a jury favouring their own interests through allocations and political parties knowingly looking the other way when these actions favour the interests of their supporters.
Citizens' juries are not democracy
But such processes are not processes which define policy and are therefore not democratic in that sense but only represent a participative process which ends up popularizing given policies. At the national level, that is, in the setting of national policy, political parties continue to resist any such genuine levels of direct participation. Indeed, political parties tend to be happy with "participatory" processes as long as they do not affect their power base, that is control over centralized policies and resources, or as long as they have no influence on policy identification. This strategy prevents such open processes ever casting doubts on the rationality of the predefined centralised policies favoured by the political parties in power. As a result prevention of general participation avoids questions being raised as to legitimacy of political parties gaining power on the basis of predefined policies not supported by the majority. In other words, as far as political parties are concerned, participation is not a free commodity but it is something they wish to subject to strict terms set by the political parties.
There is a direct conflict between policies which promote the freedom of access to information and the behaviour of political parties preventing people using such information to contribute to policy formulation.
Participation in policy definition
Participarory forums and citizens' juries do have a role in involving people in reviewing decisions. But the challenges of the modern world have increased the technical, economic, financial and social risks associated with small political parties predefining policies and the electorate being kept at arms length by limiting their participation to citizens' juries. Good participatory methods, even involving decisions on compex matters, are organic. Thus, analysis of the development of mass produced products, such as aircraft frames during the second world war, demonstrated how shared experience and "learning" resulted in an increasing efficiency in airframe production. The major gains in efficiency were not derived from imposed top down policies but they were derived from from bottom up learning how to do and to manage on the basis of common sense. Indeed, right across human endeavour each person is involved in a personal evolution developing perceptions and capabilities in applying technique through informed logic based upon trying to achieve clear objectives by applying common sense. During the 1960s, university systems groups 6 introduced this systems engineering approach to decision analysis to the resolution of problems in the social and political spheres. These approaches ensured that all essential information and options were reviewed before decisions were taken. These approaches demonstrated the extraodinary gains in efficiency of bottom up systems design over top down instructions or "management" imposition. A very significant finding of such an approach to the identification of policy options was the recognition of the importance of "non-experts" in contributing quite unique solutions to problems which the "experts" were failing to solve.
Polls & focus groups
It is remarkable that British political parties did not seem to be aware nor recognise the significance of these developments at the time since no policies ever appeared which were developed making use of these methods to formulate policy. British political parties seemed to opt for quite lightweight approaches and avoided objective decision analysis. This is probably a result of lack of awareness and a lack of confidence to undertake such independent decision analysis arising from their tiny size and therefore lack of intellectual critical mass. Formal decision analysis is relatively risk-free in that policy options identified are more rational and cost-effective. Naturally, decision analyis is something which is in the public interest but in place of such objectivity political parties have concentrated on polls to assess public views of their own preferences or have worked with so-called focus groups which review issues of interest to the political parties at a very superficial level. However, such approaches are not participatory in the democratic sense. The move to citizens' juries, whilst a major leap for British political parties, does not in fact represent anything other than a palliative since it will not alter their habit of imposing predetermined preferences on the majority. The fundamental advances in the theory and practice of best practice decision-making methods continues to allude British poltiical parties simply because they jealously guard their right, as minority factions, to define their policies without any input from the general population.
Freedom of expression, the facts & preferences
Political parties refuse to compensate for the lack of legitimate popular support for their centralised predefined policies through a more participatory democracy. However, the only way to improve the quality of policy development and to enact sound legislation is through the collection of high quality and relevant information and making this freely availble and then organizing a process whereby the people of the country can participate is reviewing options to identify the best policy option.
National development
The essential contribution of participatory democracy is its role in advancing the evolution of social and economci development. This, contrary to what politicians might think, can only take place if the people of a country shape policy. This can only become a reality if Parliamentary representation has the specific legally based duty to review policies with their constituencies before these are finalised in Parliament. Rather than waste our universal suffrage on attempting to vote on confusing and misleading manifestos the electorate should be provided with the opportunity to elect competent community representatives. This system should replace the default system of MP selection based on their association with a specific political party which happens to gain most votes cast on the day.
With a separate Government and Parliament and with legislative proposals being set in factual evidence it could then be possible for the electorate, through independent representatives, to assess the facts and to vote in Parliament based upon an objective view on the real content of a legislative proposal. This would be a marked improvement over the current absurdity of casting people's votes in stone at the time of the general election based upon incomplete information and pre-decisions (see Part 1 of this article). By making this a normal legislative process, coordinated by constituency representatives, and making use of independent and complete information the process of participation becomes universal. By making the moulding of policy a universal participatory issue and making independent constituency representatives central to this process, the costs of identifying good quality and efficient policies would be significantly reduced. As can be readily appreciated citizens' juries simply have no effective role in such an open system. Participatory methods outlined, and especially decision analysis 7 , tends to come up with proposals around which most will agree simply because the information is more complete and the best solutions more evident 8 .
As things stand, the more practical and potentially beneficial aspects of constitutional change are denied the British people because of the partisan and confrontational environment in British politics. Our political system continues to generate poor quality information, it avoids impartial and objective analysis and in ignoring individual and social preferences the system severely constrains individual freedom. Upholding and defending individual freedom should be the focus of any rational constitution and yet British political parties and the governments they form continue to frustrate this basic right of the people of these Isles.
1 The Power Strategy, pp125, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007.
2 Proof of concept acted out in Central Europe, pp134, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007.
3 "Inventario", IBC, Rio de Janeiro, 1971; "Mogi-Guacu", CRN, Sao Paulo, 1976;
4 "Project Tempo", ITTTF, European Commission, Brussels, 1984; "Project Delta", ITTTF, European Commission, Brussels, 1985.
5 "Education & Employment Initiatives", ECRE, 1999-2006
6 University Systems Groups, pp217, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007.
7 Minimum standards for legislative processes, pp292, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007.
8 Decision analysis, pp393, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007.
9 Knowlewdge & Real Preferences, pp229 and Real preferences, pp389, "The Briton's Quest for Freedom", HPC, July 2007
Posted: 9th July, 2007
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