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Flog of the Prokonsul

Internet fluency, digital governance and Wikipedia propaganda. You have been warned.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Political parties, Part 2

The key point of this article is that political parties need and could benefit enormously from e-democracy strategies that would deepen the relationships between party organizers and rank-of-file members.

Article argues that Internet is the tool that parties should use to boost the dwindling numbers of their supporters, preferably by duplicating the daring leaps taken by the business world (hence the authors coin an intereseting phrase, the 'Citizen Relationship Managers' - the software for politicians).

It is interesting to note that most political parties seem to lag behind even governments. This is a bit suprising - I'd have thought that government is alwyas the proverbial 'latecomer'. Alas, it seems like political parties are even worse in adopting new technologies. Authros give the number of Canadian politicans not aware (or caring?) about net possibilities as around 80%. Even if this correlates with age and thus means those are the 'dying breed' oldtimers, neither of this increases my confidence in the very institution of a political party.

Unfortunately, our article seems to skip over the important issue of ethics in politics, concentrating soley on the question how to give more power to the parties. While I will come back to it, let's consider for a moment what lies behind one of the pillars of today's political system: the political parties and why we need them.

Max Weber wrote that organizations tend to degenerate in time, and I think we can see this when we look at almost any political parties. What was invented in the early days of modern democracy as a helpful organisation uniting people with commons political goals, have over the next century or so degenerated into a set of 'mutual help' lobby sponsored organisations, dumbing down information and encouraging pointless (if colorful) party partisanship. In the end, as any student of the organisation theory can vouch for, parties are just a type of ogranisation - and all organisation have two primary goals: survive and grow. In terms of political parites, it means that they want votes and donations, and for them are willing to do almost anything that public will support, and a few things they probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that parties are inherently evil, or that politicans are spineless liers - but neither are they the force for good. Bottom line is, they are just organisations formed by men with access to much power (and you know the proverb about power, do you?).

As you can see, I am not a great fan of any political party. Still, until we invent a better system, representation-based democracy is the system we have to live with, and instead of ranting (as pleasant as it is, from time to time), trying to fix it is a good alternative. Authors, as far as I can tell, advocate that funding for political parties should be increased and/or diverted to building online communities of party supporters and increasing the public awarness of party's goals. And while I am definelty opposed to any tax payer money going to the parties, I think that some legislation forcing parties to invest in online infrastructure would be a good thing. Authors are correct in pointing out that many online projects are long term, and long term planning is something that our governments (and parties) are definetly in need of. As our previous articles have shown, it is hard to be certain that any online community would be more civil and wise then the offline one, but there is definetly an advantage for everybody in forcing parties to go online and share information. A politician (or a party) that is more in touch with its voters will get more votes, and in exchange, people (us) get to have a little bit more control (information = power) over the people we elect.

Let me end this with links to some interesting sites I googled out when I looked for interesting sides dealing with political parties, funding and online communities:
* Opensecrets.org - formerly Disinfopedia, describes itself as "a collaborative project that aims to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." Oh, and it's wiki-based :)
* Center for Public Integrity - is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, organization in the United States which is concerned with monitoring campaign finance laws in the U.S. and works for campaign finance reform. In pursuit of these goals, it sends out press releases and produces analysis of campaign finance issues.
* LobbyingInfo.org - A Public Citizen project with a motto 'Tracing the activities of special interests' :).

It is worth noting that those NGOs have much better sites then those of political parties (in terms of information content). My hope is that the pressure from such organisations will lead to increased competition between politicians and parties in terms of 'I am more honest then you and I am proving this online', with a complete transparency in the flow of money and in decision making process. Utopian? Maybe. But one can hope...

1 Comments:

At 10:29 PM, Blogger Piotr Konieczny said...

The wiki project I mentioned in class was not opensecrets but sourcewatch.

 

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