Interview with Stephen Coleman

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, Honorary Professor in Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Sciencewise asks him about his work on the adaptation of representative institutions in the digital age, and the development of spaces for public democratic deliberation.

There are a lot of claims about the way that the internet is shaping and changing the public sphere, and part of your work is to question the evidence for these. Looking particularly at online deliberation, what’s your analysis of how it has changed the relationship between citizens and the state?

I think we assumed in the late 1990s and early part of this century that the most likely way that the internet would be used was as a direct channel between state decision-makers at various levels and citizens. Instead, many forms of conversation emerged online, some of which are deliberative or quasi-deliberative, and which inform public debate in a couple of ways. Firstly, there are what I’d call mood setting discussions going on - they demonstrate where there should be flexibility in thinking on public issues. Secondly, online deliberations are informing NGOs and third sector organisations who are in turn able to take those conversations to government. What has not happened very much, to my knowledge, is formal, direct, standardised use of the internet as a deliberation platform between decision-makers and the public. There have been pilots, and some have worked better than others. But in terms of standardising online democratic deliberation and making it part of the routine of public discussion, the results have so far been rather disappointing.

Why do you think online dialogue between decision-makers and citizens hasn’t really taken off? Is it that people don’t yet understand the technology?

The problem isn’t so much that they don’t understand the technology, but that they don’t yet know how they should be using it. It’s easy to focus on technology as hardware, software and circuits of electricity of one kind or another. But running a democracy because you understand how the technology works is a bit like trying to run a television channel on the basis that you know how a camera works.

At the moment government is under a lot of pressure to change. These pressures come from a less deferential public, a more informed public, and an abundance of public information, but at the same time a greater competition for peoples’ attention in relation to that information. In turn, governments are less authoritative. The problem is not that the government doesn’t understand the internet, but that they don’t understand themselves; they haven’t yet worked out how to respond to these new pressures. The internet is just one element within the reconfiguration of what it means to govern.

Do we know yet what the long-term impact of the internet will be on democracy? Or is it still impossible to tell?

As the years have gone on I’ve got more and more modest in my predictions. But I am still convinced that we cannot go on doing governance the way that we are and the internet will be deeply implicated in the process of change. The best scenario is a transformative one where the internet plays a deliberative role. Alternatively, however, the internet could play a replication role. By this I mean that it becomes institutionalised into existing bad processes of campaigning and policy formation without fundamentally changing them. There’s a lot of evidence of that happening at the moment. We don’t yet know which scenario will become most prevalent.

You’ve proposed the idea of a Civic Commons online. Could you explain this?

Yes - I’ll begin by explaining the rationale behind the idea. It seemed to me that one cannot just hope that the internet is going to naturally create socially-useful public spaces. We therefore suggested an institution whose job would be to promote public deliberation around policy issues, particularly those initiated or taking place within local councils, national government, and supranational governments like the EU. Wherever policy is being discussed, a proposal should be put out and for public discussion. That space would not only try to bring people together but also to connect those conversations to the policy process. That was the proposal we put forward in 2001, although it was more of a general argument that a space needed to emerge, rather than a blueprint for just how it should be done.

A lot has changed since you proposed the idea in 2001. Is it still valid?

When Jay Blumler and I started to write a recent book on the internet and democratic citizenship, we found that the way that social and political networks that have developed online are far less centralised than people thought they might be. They’re fragmented and porous. Networks build upon other networks and the internet is in fact an internetwork. We therefore adapted our proposal to suggest that the civic commons would not be a single space where everything happens like a kind of debating hall, but rather a space to integrate all of those discussions that are already taking place which wouldn’t otherwise know about each other. It seems to me that this is a really crucial area for imaginative policy-making. We have Google to find things if we know about them, but what we need is something like a democratic Google which says ‘if you’re talking about this you also ought to be talking to these people’ and then linking those conversations to the institutions which make the decisions. There are all sorts of interesting criticisms of the proposal we put forward, but I think that it still stands at a useful and principled argument for what is in fact the most tantalising problem of contemporary democracy: How do you bring things together? Otherwise, however good we are at the techniques of good discussion, we end up with islands of very high quality deliberation which become so separated from what is representative that they cease to have democratic value. The idea of a civic commons is to bring people together while maintaining the quality of discussion, though it’s certainly not the only proposal out there.

So, part of the idea is that these online deliberations need to have an influence on policy. What needs to happen to make this a reality?

I think two kinds of changes need to take place, one is cultural and the other constitutional. Neither will work without the other. Changes in democratic culture entail the development of techniques and technologies of public listening; the opening up of closed conversations, so that those affected by decisions can participate; and a much more expansive notion of what constitutes political argument. People need to understand that these changes won’t happen overnight. But we also need a constitutional change. We have not updated our constitution in response to the internet. We’ve had updates to laws about what you can do online and about copyright and privacy, but no country has yet tackled the problem that the old principle of representation, which is that you speak for other people because geography means they can’t talk for themselves, is no longer valid. Where does this leave us constitutionally? If the government are really prepared to listen to people in the way that they say they are then they need to work out how to create constitutional provisions, to change the very foundational arrangements within government, which can embed that listening into the way that governing takes place. I don’t think that other efforts to bring online deliberation to bear on democracy are really going to work until that’s in place.

What would these constitutional changes mean for representative democracy?

Well, my preference would be to draw from two notions of democratic theory, i) direct democracy, which, for various reasons, most people aren’t ready for, and may not actually be feasible and ii) indirect representation. I’d argue for direct representation which seems to me to take all of the benefits of direct democracy and apply them to the kind of representative system that most of us want to live in. That is to say, it assumes that, while continuing to elect representatives to do the full-time work of making decisions, these decisions can now be informed by a direct and ongoing communicative relationship between representative and represented. ‘You weren’t there to ask’ would no longer be an excuse for bad policy decisions.

The issues you’ve raised seem strongly related to what people call the democratic deficit. Do you think there’s potential for online deliberation to tackle this deficit, and in particular the lack of trust, or is it largely a constitutional issue?

I think online deliberation has a big role to play. You’ve got to look at the root of distrust. Distrust is often seen as a judgement about peoples’ honesty. But on one level it’s actually a judgement about what is comprehensible to people. I’ve done a lot of work on trust in both the media and the government, and when you really push people they say, ‘well, we don’t know what they’re talking about, and actually they don’t know what we’re talking about either.’ Imagine if you had that relationship with your GP - it would break down immediately, as it would with a supermarket or a school. So why on earth should a democratic government be able to survive on that basis? This I think is at the centre of the crisis in trust. You can introduce citizenship education and try to hammer into peoples’ heads what government means, but it isn’t working. The only real way of making governments comprehensible is by giving people a stake in the arguments around governance and allowing them to formulate their own sense of what it is that is being discussed. And the best way of doing this is through deliberation.

Science and technology is moving further and faster, particularly within areas such as nanotech or synthetic biology. Do you think that online deliberation can help specifically in these areas to tackle this mutual incomprehension?

Yes, absolutely. When I was at the Hansard Society I ran a consultation into stem cell research. One of the interesting things was that the discussions which took place were arguments about definition - in this case the really fundamental definition about what life is. If they are going to be useful, these things shouldn’t be about getting people to understand what scientists mean, they should be about trying to create a common language. There may be some areas of science that the public don’t particularly need to be involved in. However, the areas where public dialogue is really important are also the areas where concepts are disputed. Not only do scientists need to be transparent about what they mean but scientists need to be able to understand what other people might mean by the same concept and why they might want to dispute their definition. And online deliberation is a very useful place for this to happen.

Is it possible to pull out an example where online deliberation is really working for democracy?

I’m slightly nervous about giving examples because if something has worked a bit then people tend to jump on it as the answer to everything, which of course it never is. Crowdsourcing is a perfect example. Here, there is an epistemological undercurrent suggesting that every question has a single answer and if you employ the wisdom of the crowd, they will find that answer. People like Cass R. Sunstein have suggested that this is almost demonstrable by the way in which groups can guess the number of beans in a jar. But the difficulty is that we don’t need deliberations about the number of beans in a jar because it’s a matter of either guessing or counting. For most of the things that we do deliberate about, there is no conceptual equivalent. A better parallel would be what we want the jar to look like, what colour the beans should be or whether we want it half empty or half full. But there are lots of hyperbolic claims about how the internet is changing everything or is ruinous to social life. That just comes with most technologies that people are unfamiliar with.

Having said all that, I think that organisations in the third sector are doing some interesting things, particularly where government policy has prompted them to consider their own governance and remit, entering into an interesting deliberative introspection. That will be an interesting area to watch as it develops.