Toward a theory of IT mediated politics
From:
Michael Allan
Date:
Jul 31 12:47 UTC
Short link
James Gilmour wrote, in reply to Michael Allan, in
<email obscured>:
> Quite apart from having to make the decisions with which significant
> numbers of electors will disagree, there is another expectation of
> government, namely that it will pursue a coherent set of policies
> and actions across the whole of the political sphere. (Of course,
> governments often fail in this - for a variety of very different
> reasons - but that does not affect the expectation.) As
> individuals, not subject to the practical constraints of having to
> make and implement the decisions, we may well support policies that
> are mutually incompatible - though we would probably not campaign
> for both at the same time! So the extra-governmental discussion
> framework needs to be able to draw in the wider considerations, many
> of which will not have occurred to the single-issue campaigners or
> will have been deliberately ignored by them.
It's all there in scenario S, though it wasn't fleshed out in detail.
There are many places where coordination occurs. Some of the
coordination is mostly local (safety concerns, coordinated by H) and
some is more central. Here are some of the central ones:
1) When M first hears of the plan to improve the park, she may have
doubts about its ultimate approval. So she asks her
super-delegate (whom she is voting for), "What's the approval
chain for this kind of plan?"
In dialogue with her super-delegate, perhaps including a
bureaucrat or two, she learns what the criteria are. She gets a
rough sense that the chances are good.
2) When the planners are nearing consensus, M decides to request
formal approval for the preliminary stages of the plan (mostly
the first safety inspection). She passes the request to her
super-delegate, who passes to her own super-delegate, and so
on... With each pass, it comes into the hands of someone who is
a) carrying a great many more votes, and b) closer to the
bureaucracy. Soon it is passed to the Planning Coordinator for
the Parks Department (perhaps a super-delegate herself).
3) The request finds its way back to M, via the Comptroller in the
Parks Department.
So here is coordination for both policy (2) and budget (3). Notice
how the voting lines of the delegates are the communication lines
between the planners in the periphery, and the bureaucracy at the
center. Notice how every link has a strong incentive to keep the
lines open and efficient.
If word comes back to M that the request was denied, then there will
have to be reasons attached to that decision. Every link in the
communication chain is going to be disappointed by this result, and is
going to be asking for those reasons. Hanging in the balance are are
a good number of votes (ultimately for the Mayor), which can shift at
any time. No bureaucrat will say "No" without providing good reasons.
It is then M's responsibility, to explain those reasons either to the
planners (if plan changes are needed), or to the rest of the
neighbourhood (if it was rejected outright). Votes are hanging in the
balance for M too.