I think we can, but to see how, first we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I want to describe four ways that traditional politics is changing and then say what this means for reform and renewal.
1. A Post-Partisan Culture
In the last federal election, the NDP surge in Quebec took the country by surprise. Why did Quebeckers abandon the Bloc Québécois and flock to the NDP?
Only a couple of months ago, pundits were musing about the imminent death of the Liberals. Now Justin Trudeau is the most popular politician in the country.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper allegedly hopes to make the Conservatives the new natural governing party. Why would Canadians’ loyalties shift?
There is a common theme running through these stories: voter volatility. It is now a defining part of our political culture, but it wasn’t always so. Most adults used to identify themselves with a particular party, usually for life.
Today, more and more of them have no long-term affiliation; they will change parties as casually as a brand of beer or shampoo. Why?
In her forthcoming book, Shopping for Votes, Susan Delacourt offers an answer. Democratic citizenship is based on a belief in the common good and a duty to contribute to it.
Over the last 40 years, however, this has been replaced by a view of citizens as consumers, who use their votes like money to buy the policies that please them.
In this view, political parties have slowly turned themselves into retailers, and elections into marketing campaigns. But there’s a hitch.
Consumerism is about satisfying personal wants, not meeting collective needs. As a result, over time the sense of public duty and the common good has been eroded to the point where citizens no longer see political parties as a vehicle to help them fulfill their duty.
Instead, they view them more like big-box stores that offer things they may want. The relationship has become largely transactional, which means citizens’ support for a party now tends to be highly conditional and must be earned day by day.
2. Wicked Issues
Over the last few decades, globalization and the telecommunications revolution have shrunk the world, making events highly interdependent. This, in turn, has given rise to a whole new class of policy issues: so-called “wicked” issues.
Wicked issues are actually complex clusters of issues. Thus the growth of gangs in cities such as Toronto and Vancouver is not a single issue with a single cause, but a constellation of diverse issues with diverse causes, such as poverty, lack of education, broken families and failed immigration settlement, to name a few.
Wicked issues are transforming how we think about policy-making because they are unresponsive to the kind of simple solutions proposed and aired in traditional policy debate — ‘cracking down on crime,’ for example. Wicked issues call for a multi-faceted response, usually involving a range of actors.
This, in turn, requires a collaborative, multi-stakeholder process that can enlist and coordinate a range of organizations and strategies. That is the only way to make real progress on complex issues. The future, then, will require lots more bottom-up policy-making.
3. Social Media
President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign may have been the first real social media election. It gave us a glimpse into how these new tools are affecting political fundraising, communications, recruitment (especially youth) and the mobilization of citizens. Other important examples include the Arab Spring and the Quebec protests over university tuition hikes.
Although social media is still very new and its long-term impact on politics is uncertain, this much is clear: It closes the gap between ordinary people on one hand, and political elites and mainstream media on the other.
In other words, it gives citizens a permanent, immediate and highly influential voice in public debate — albeit one that often lacks cohesion and clarity. And this is only the beginning. We can expect to see an increasingly vocal, impatient and demanding public as the use of these new tools evolves.
4. Big Data
Big data is the fourth and most impressive of these new forces. So far, its impact on politics has been felt mainly through the creation of party databases for such things as direct-marketing and robocalls. The real promise, however, lies elsewhere.
Over the last decade, every major government in Canada — and most around the world — has changed how it plans, evaluates and reports on the work it does. The goal of this “results-based governance” is to strengthen the relationship between decisions and outcomes.
The hope is that if ministers really know how their choices affect the community, they’ll make better decisions. The new system is supposed to tell them how different options will play out; in other words, it predicts the future.
To succeed, the system must be supported by high-quality data and analytical tools. Without these, it produces little more than complicated guesswork. Until now, both have been lacking. That’s about to change.
Every day, massive amounts of new data are becoming available, along with new technologies and tools for using it. As a result, for the first time in history evidence-based decision-making is emerging as a genuine option, rather than just a good idea.
To grasp the implications, let’s compare this to the Green Revolution. Between 1950 and 1984 it doubled global crop production, greatly reducing world hunger. Now imagine multiplying this technical skill a hundredfold and extending it to virtually every major policy field. This gives us some idea what results-based governance promises.
The lesson is that big data is bringing us to a watershed moment — perhaps the watershed moment — in modern governance. It could usher in a new era in modern politics.
And here’s where the problem lies.
We’ve seen how new forces are transforming all major aspects of our politics: the party system, the complexity of policy issues, the nature of the policy process, how public debate is conducted, and (still to come), our technical skill at using policy to get the outcomes we want.
Nevertheless, we remain locked in a political paradigm that was designed for a very different world — one defined by winner-take-all debates, simplistic policy solutions, a passive public, and ideologically-driven decision-making.
The political question of the next decade is stark and simple: Can we capitalize on the momentum these forces are creating and fashion a new system of governance — one more in keeping with our needs and aspirations — or will we let the opportunity slip through our fingers?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Don Lenihan
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