Web 2.0 to Replace Political Parties?

E-Gov Bulletin from the UK suggests that social networks could sweep away political parties. Dr. Ian Kearns, former Head of the e-Government Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research, tells the House of Commons' Parliamentary IT Committee that Web 2.0 is giving people the tools to recognize and use their power to organize and campaign.

Dr. Kearns is speaking in the British parliamentary context where third parties have a reasonable shot at making a difference. I'm not sure social networks would have as easy of a time upending one of our two dominant parties. However, his point that parties can (and must!) take advantage of the technology is proven by the Howard Dean and Barack Obama presidential campaigns. The Internet and social apps (plus a good spreadsheet) put as much organizing power in the hands of two local advocates in a back office as could have been mustered by a national campaign office a couple decades ago.

While the technology is powerful, Dr. Kearns emphasizes that the big shift is in how we use the technology, how we expect to be involved in the information process. Yes, it's the consumer-producer-conducer paradigm shift! Politicans need to get out of "broadcast" mode and recognize that politics is much more a two-way, participatory endeavor. The new politics is all about openness and engagement. If you're running for office, you can't just put up a website; you have to invite your voters in to build that website—to build its content—for you.

Here's Your Speeding Ticket -- How's That for Customer Service?

Larry Grant, "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Regulatory Policy Comes Home," Government Reinventors, 2008.06.17:

• "customer" doesn't make sense in regulatory situation
• suppose cops gives you a speeding ticket; you aren't exactly a customer
• note that Grant still looks for a "customer" in the relationship; he suggests in regulatory situations, the regulated are "compliers," while the general public is the "customer" receiving the benefit of government protection

Anthony Williams on Government 2.0

Paula Klein, "How Web 2.0 Can Reinvent Government," CIO Insight Weekly Report, 2008.04.01. URL: http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Web-20-Reinventing-Democracy/

Anthony Williams co-wrote Wikinomics with Donald Tapscott. He says collaborative tech is changing business; gov't needs to catch up!

Q: Are there many differences between Web 2.0 use in the public and private sectors?

Williams: Perhaps the obvious difference is that businesses have customers and employees, but the public sector also has citizens, who are much like shareholders. Citizens and shareholders are similar, but the citizen relationship is arguably deeper: It implies a set of rights and freedoms, as well as a set of obligations and responsibilities to the state. [emph mine]

--government moves more slowly, more cautiously: always an opposition party waiting to pounce; less tolerance for risk than in business
--government "silo" structure like old (in Friedman terms) business structure: time to flatten the world, horizontally integrate

Spectacular list of "G-Webs":

1. Intellipedia: Wikipedia for spooks!
2. Politicopia: Utah Rep. Steve Urquhart's experiment in a do-it-yourself CLDS
3. Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (and statewide counterpart NKCA): big data portal for community improvement activists -- lots of public data and maps intended to help people get info about their communities without sifting through tons of docs at the courthouse. Sure, it's more the government service provider model, but it's providing information with the idea that "consumers" are going to use the info for their own political decision-making and action. It's not G2C; it's G2G!
   

Top-down management mindset may hold back Govt 2.0 -- those guys don't want to give up their authority. Plus...

[Williams]: There’s considerable skepticism about the role citizens should play in policy-making. Do they have the time and expertise to make meaningful contributions to complex policy deliberations? This debate goes back centuries. In the early 20th century, journalist Walter Lippmann questioned the competency of average citizens, comparing them to a deaf spectator in the back row. By contrast, [philosopher] John Dewey argued against “an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few” and was a proponent of greater citizen participation and democratic education. That debate continues.

What’s different is that citizens now have unprecedented tools to inform themselves, to reach out to others with like interests and to organize as never before. Politicians have tools, too. There’s no excuse not to use them. The infrastructure is there. It’s about political will and a willingness to be open and to incorporate feedback and put it into practice. At the same time, digital communications make geography less relevant and reinforce the need to open up the policy-making process to global participation.

On legitimacy: go 2.0 or die! Seriously!

[Williams]: Governments that choose not to open up or those that fail to foster active participation in governance will eventually lose legitimacy and authority. Citizens increasingly self-organize to provide their own entertainment, media and services. Is it a stretch to imagine a self-organized open-source approach to government? Governments can either be active participants in this process or unwilling bystanders.

But is Govt 2.0 practical? Can we actually involve all of us South Dakotans in a policy debate?

[Williams]: Software developers have already figured out how to scale up collaboration technologies to support global business enterprises, so I see no reason why Web 2.0 could not support hundreds of thousands of people in a real-time policy debate. [emph mine]

ACSI, E-Gov Performance, and Customer Loyalty

Stowers, Genie N.L. (2004). "Measuring the Performance of E-Government," E-Government Series, IBM Center for the Business of Government. March 2004.

ACSI (2006). "ACSI Methodology," About ACSI. American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

A quibble I'm not sure will stick, but interesting: Stowers (2004) points to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) as a good tool for evaluating the effectiveness of e-Government. But check out the ACSI methodology:


See that little bubble at the end: "Customer Loyalty"? ACSI says this about that:

Customer loyalty is a combination of the customer's professed likelihood to repurchase from the same supplier in the future, and the likelihood to purchase a company’s products or services at various price points (price tolerance). Customer loyalty is the critical component of the model as it stands as a proxy for profitability.

"The critical component" -- so how do we apply "customer loyalty" to e-Government? How many customers dissatisfied with their e-Government experience are going to move to another country? How many people dissatisfied with the Department of State website will get their passports from France instead? The ACSI appears to measure consumer satisfaction in the context of a competitive market, a condition that simply doesn't apply for most of what we turn to the government (and e-government) for.

Now Stower (2004) suggests an out (p. 25): in e-govt, "customer loyalty" may simply refer to the user's willingness to use the site again, not move to Canada. Still, there's a difference. There's only one agency I can get my driver's license from. Whether I go online or to the courthouse, my loyalty doesn't have much room to roam. I'm still dealing with the government. That's very different from the private sector situation, where I can stop buying books from Barnes and Noble's website and from their stores and do all my book shopping through Amazon.com.

American Consumer Satisfaction Index -- E-Gov Improves Service

Stowers, Genie N.L. (2004). "Measuring the Performance of E-Government," E-Government Series, IBM Center for the Business of Government. March 2004.

Fornell, Claes (2007). "Government Satisfaction Scores," ACSI Scores and Commentary, 2007.12.17.

Stowers (2004) directs me toward the application of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index to e-Gov. In a way, this tool just feeds the "citizen as consumer" paradigm.

But if we accept the paradigm, we could conclude that e-Government is achieving its goals of improving customer service. Fornell (2007) finds that while the federal government overall scores 67.8 on the 100-pt ACSI, federal e-Gov scores 8% better at 73.4, almost as good as the private sector services rating of 74.0. (Fornell also notes the only private sector services scoring worse than the USFG are newspapers, airlines, and cable/satellite TV.)

New Public Management vs New Public Service

Cornell website points to New Public Service as a response to New Public Management. Note that the discussion takes place under the heading of "Restructuring Local Government."

NPS is a direct reaction to NPM from authors Janet and Robert Denhardt, who "offer a synthesis of the ideas that are opposed to the New Public Management" in their 2002 book The New Public Service (Cornell says 2003; see also 2007 edition)

Seven principles of NPS (quoted from Cornell web):

1. Serve citizens, not customers
2. Seek the public interest
3. Value citizenship over entrepreneurship
4. Think strategically, act democratically (In comparison to Osborne and Gaebler, Denhardt and Denhardt assert that there is a difference between “thinking strategically” and “entrepreneurial government.”)
5. Recognize that accountability is not simple
6. Serve rather than steer (This involves listening to the real needs of the people and the community, not just responding in the manner that a business would to a customer.)
7. Value people, not just productivity

The Denhardts see public administrators as more than managers doing cost-benefit analysis. Administrators are participants, just like citizens:

The public manager’s job is not only, or simply, to make policy choices and implement them. It is also to participate in a system of democratic governance in which public values are continuously rearticulated and recreated (Reich 1988, 123-24, quoted in D&D 96).

Note that NPS sounds less well developed than NPM; shorter bib, at least, on Cornell site.

Keating (1995): technocratic approach 1960s & 1970s

Keating, Michael (1995). "Size, Efficiency, and Democracy: Consolidation, Fragmentation, and Public Choice." In David Judge, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wolman (Eds.). Theories of Urban Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publications, 117-134.

• technocratic, "service-delivery" perspective frequent in 1960s and 1970s, too, "leaving democratic participation as an afterthought" (128)
  

Livingstone et al. (2007): "Citizen-consumer" in UK discourse, problems remain

Livingstone, Sonia, Lunt, Peter, and Miller, Laura (2007). "Citizens and Consumers: Discursive Debate During and After the Communications Act 2003," Media, Culture & Society (29:4) 613-638. Abstract only -- not Mundt-avail! Rats!

The regulation of media and communications in the UK has recently been subject to reform resulting in the creation of the Office of Communications (Ofcom). This statutory body, established by an Act of Parliament, is a new, sector-wide regulator, protecting the interests of what has been termed the ‘citizen-consumer’. This article charts the discursive shifts that occurred during the passage of the Communications Act through Parliament and in the initial stages of its implementation to understand how and why the term ‘citizen-consumer’ came to lie at the heart of the new regulator’s mission. By critically analysing the various alignments of ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ interests within the debates, the underlying struggles over the formulation of power, responsibility and duties for the new regulator and for other stakeholders – industry, government and public – are identified. The article concludes that the legacy of these debates is that regulatory provisions designed to further the ‘citizen interest’ contain significant and unresolved dilemmas.

Butler & Collins 2004: Citizen as consumer -- Ireland

Butler, Patrick, and Collins, Neil (2004). "Citizen as Consumer." In Neil Collins and Terry Cradden (Eds.), Political Issues in Ireland Today. Manchester University Press, 135-148.

Citizen as consumer has advantages for improving efficiency, but also threatens democracy (135) -- very much as Ryan (2001) says.

1. "Citizen as consumer" comes from New Public Management (NPM): movement across Western democracies
1. big role for marketing
2. "focus on market operations and management of customer service" (135)
3. see Osborne and Gaebler (1993), "the American NPM gurus" (146)
   
2. "The ultimate paradox is that better utilisation of managment technologies may damage political processes and institutions, because treating citizens as consumers involves both positive and negative outcomes.... Problems associated with the separation of politics and administration are raised in this context. Initiatives relating to the provision of government services by electronic means (often called 'eGovernment') that primarily emphasize customer service delivery will also be vulnerable to such difficulties" (emphasis mine, 135-136).
3. NPM-CAC perspective appealing -- "How could anyone not want better service?" (140) and "We should run government like a business" (143) -- but weakens sense of corresponding rights and social responsibilities/duties/obligations. Govt must be "guided by objective policies aimed at meeting social rather than personal needs" (142, quoting Humphreys, 1998:19).
   
4. Elaborates on Ryan (2001), notes that consumer mindset lessens sense of collective responsibility: we can't have a system where only the direct "consumers" of higher education get a say on higher ed policy; the whole community gets to take part
5. Again summarizing Ryan (2001): "...the market model implies that the production of public services is a technical rather than political process..." (143)
6. "Market-driven managerialism is primarily based on happy customers rather than involved citizens" (144).
7. Market research (focus groups, surveys, etc.) may actually keep the public at a distance (145)
1. Well, that's problematic for my methodology....
8. They include "principles guiding Civil Service Customer Action Plans" which refer to "customers"
   

Ryan 2001: Citizens as Consumers = Bad Perpsective

Ryan, Neal 2001 Reconstructing Citizens as Consumers: Implications for New Modes of Governance Australian Journal of Public Administration 60:3 104-109

Nail on the head: the market model of citizens as consumers is bad. Great advocate for CLDS.

• 1980s-1990s: emphasis on improving service by creating markets: privatize, make government compete
• inadequate model for regime of partnerships and cooperation
• inadequate there isn't real competition for services
• "citizen as consumer" hurts citizen-govt relationship
• redefines relationship as "passive commercial transaction rather than an interactive political engagement" (105)
• emphasizes "sovereignty of the individual over the public good" (105)
• market mindset breaks down if market forces (competition, consumer knowledge, etc.) don't apply
• oversimplifies relationship: often not voluntary; not simple reciprocation of services for taxes/payment; ignores mutual commitment" (107)
• Implications
• "public confidence in government is likely to be higher in circumstances in which there are high levels of participations, engagement and knowledge" (107)
• surveys great, do more, but don't allow them to replace real political engagement: ranking preferences on a filtered list of choices created by a pollster still isn't as good as taking the floor and presenting your own original idea
• "focus on individual satsifaction diminishes the contribution of public services to building the social capital that may result from a focus on collective relationships" (107)
  
• "the language of producers and consumers contributes to notions of elitist government"!!! (107) contributes to impression of govt as "high value producers of services" filled with experts whom the rest of us mere mortals have to sit back and trust and not presume to bother with our humble opinions