Political lessons online

It’s always interesting to me to see the reactions of the British media and now the British blogosphere to the American electoral process.  As an American expat – and a voting one at that – I often have to explain the electoral college system on a four year cycle.  And for many months before that I’m usually asked to pontificate on the chances of this or that candidate during our complicated and long-running primaries.   And while I love to play pundit, I’m probably not the best person to ask given how surprised I was that McCain secured the Republican nomination so handily.

It’s also interesting to me to watch British political parties try to learn lessons from the American experience.  There’s certainly a lot about our process that’s difficult, complicated and expensive. But, of course, we do get some things right.  And some of those things have been harnessing grass roots power over the Internet.

Dave Briggs highlights folks looking to extract the lessons from the online successes of Democratic presumptive nominee Barack Obama.    And to be certain there are many.   Before him, Democratic primary candidate Howard Dean really pioneered the use of the Internet to build grass roots support – and I believe successfully managed to bridge the divide between social media online and social action offline through meet-up groups which built networks that in some case survive over four years later.  Under Dean’s stewardship as head of the Democratic National Committee ( the ruling body for the party), the Democratic party has worked consistently to improve online facilities – including for expats like me.

But as Dave points out:

 Politicians need to connect with people through conversation, conversation that can be messy and result in a loss of control.

Yep.  As you may have picked up, the Democratic primary season has ended in a substantial amount of bitterness between supporters in rival camps.  I believe some of that was signalled by the candidates themselves, but much of the hard feeling and heartache was whipped up over the net.   The Democratic party has always been a fairly broad tent and from my own observation (I’m kinda giving away my political leanings here) has been fairly prone to internal squabbling.   Naturally, that gets played out over the Internet, too.  And the Internet – with it’s distance and potential for anonymity – can potentially cultivate less than courteous discourse.   That’s pretty much what’s happened between once allied bloggers and liberals online (to heavily employ understatement). 

Dave also says…

It means that the politicians go on a journey themselves through their campaigns, learning from their electorate rather than lecturing them – and they need to tell the story of that journey so that others may connect with them.

 

I guess the candidates have been listening to the discontent and the disconnect, or else there wouldn’t be such a big push for party Unity.  The most explicit push for unity that I can ever remember.   And I think that’s partly because the supporters of the candidates (and their behaviour) have been more publicly and more explicitly linked to the personal profile of the candidates.

As community empowerment becomes a bigger push in the UK (what with a forthcoming White Paper and all), it’s worth capturing lessons from whereever they may be found in terms of using relatively inexpensive and easy to use social media tools.   The net can be a powerful force for good in terms of engaging communities in self-directed social and political action, but it can also publicly expose fractures and lack of cohesion.