What is the bare minimum a citizen needs to know in order to have a reasonable, informed opinion on a major public issue? This is not a trick question. Boiled down to the basics, a citizen needs to know what the issue is, the basic facts, and the key arguments for and against.

Consider negative gearing of real estate investments. Perhaps you think it is wise economic policy, or perhaps you think it an expensive rort. Either way, you really ought to know what negative gearing is (not everybody does.)  You should know critical facts such as how much it costs the government each year, who gets the benefits, and what other effects it might have, such as making rental housing more available and affordable. You’d need to be aware of the best arguments for keeping it on one hand, and the best arguments for abolishing it on the other.

Of course, having the bare minimum knowledge does not automatically lead to a reasonable opinion, and ideally a citizen would know much more than the bare minimum about the merits of negative gearing as one component of an efficient, equitable and sustainable taxation system.  My point is just that unless you have at least the bare minimum then your opinion is seriously ill-founded.

The trouble is, citizens often don’t have this kind of minimum knowledge. Choose an Australian adult and a major public issue at random and chances are that if they understand the issue at all they will be ignorant of key facts,  or misinformed and unaware of major arguments.

For example, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of negative gearing; indeed I’d even negatively geared the occasional investment. But when I sat down to draft a succinct summary of the pros and cons of negative gearing as a tax policy, I immediately discovered how incomplete and uncertain my knowledge was. It took the better part of a day of reading online, filtering, digesting, sorting and drafting to come up with a short written summary of what I needed to know. Only then did I really appreciate how half-baked my previous views had been.

Now, I will not rehearse here the reasons why this kind of ignorance is a problem for democracy. Nor will I heap blame on the usual suspects. Nor will I hand wave about how the schools, or the government, or the media, or someone should be doing something about it. Finally, I will not indulge any utopian fantasy of a fully informed citizenry.

Rather, I’ll make a simple suggestion.

It is not too hard for someone with suitable expertise to assemble the bare minimum information on a given issue in a short article with a fairly standard structure. You could call this a “backgrounder,” or an “explainer”. I like the phrase “issue clarifier”.

The suggestion is that for all major public issues, these clarifiers be produced and made easily accessible. Then, any interested citizen could rapidly obtain the most essential information on any issue whenever they wanted it. This alone wouldn’t solve the ignorance problem, but it would surely help.

An issue clarifier is a journalistic product. Writing issue clarifiers is a kind of journalism. Doing it well requires broad awareness of the political landscape, the ability to research, analyse and synthesize, and to write succinctly and clearly for a wide audience.  In our democratic system, we usually regard journalism as having a special responsibility for keeping the citizenry informed. Since issue clarifiers would obviously be useful in this regard, they should already be a mundane feature of the media landscape.

In short, my suggestion should be redundant. But it is not. Nowhere in the major media can you easily find such clarifiers. Very occasionally, something along these lines appears, but it is quickly lost under the torrents of news, the deluges of opinion, and the tsunamis of mass distraction such as sport, cooking, fashion, celebrity gossip, and so forth.

Why? Partly because issue clarifiers can be a bit  dull. They aren’t breaking news; they don’t exploit our appetite for the latest, freshest and most titillating.  Unlike opinion pieces, they don’t incite our tribal instincts. Being even-handed, they don’t comfort by stroking our prejudices, or enrage by challenging our convictions. The media survive by attracting attention, and issue clarifiers will generally struggle to compete.

It might also be argued that issue clarifiers are superfluous. The media already provide far more information and debate about major public issues than could ever be conveyed in a short issue clarifiers. Why add to this abundance?

It was once said that there are two ways to keep decision makers in the dark. One way is providing too little information; the other is providing too much. Similarly, the vast quantity of fast-changing news and vigorous debate in the media may actually be counterproductive, with respect to the goal of helping the public be basically well-informed on most major issues. Rather than educating, the net effect may be to bewilder and alienate; or to leave people under the illusion that they have much better knowledge than they do.

This can be seen as a market failure. There’s an obvious public good, the provision of issue clarifiers, not being addressed by “business as usual” in the Australian media. So, following the adage that a problem is merely a situation which has not yet been turned to your advantage, there is also here an opportunity. Can a new media player t this empty niche?

This is one way of looking at the YourView project…

Also posted on Tim van Gelder’s blog.

Further, a clear majority of Republicans rejected the plan put forward by their own leadership in House.

These results indicate a kind of mis-alignment.  On this issue at least, a substantial portion of the US population supports the Republican party even though their own views conflict with the party position.   Crudely put, they support the wrong party, given their views on the issue.

What about alignment more generally?  To what extent to voters support – and vote for – the parties whose platforms are the best fit to their actual views?

I’ve been searching for data on alignment in the Australian context.   For example, how many Liberal voters have sets of views which are in fact more similar to the positions of Labor or the Greens?  Or would have, if they had a chance to systematically consider what their views were, independently of how the parties stand on those issues?

This being the real world, where nothing is perfect, we can assume that there is at least some degree of mis-alignment.   At least some people, probably unknowingly, vote for the “wrong” party.

But how many?  And in what direction, if any, does mis-alignment tend?

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any data on this.  However I did find something which provides at least a clue.

The survey described above uncovered another kind of mis-alignment.   The Balancing Act plan had received the least attention in mainstream media’s coverage of the sequestration issue.  So the national public debate was framing issues in a way which tended to exclude the option which was most popular among the voters.

What about Australia?  How well do the political debates in the national mainstream media  accommodate the range of views held by the public?

On his Pollytics blog, Scott Steel wrote a very revealing post about this, called “What Australians Believe.”  After a lengthy and nuanced discussion of polling results, he concludes:

What comes out from this broad snapshot is that what Australians believe about the role of government in our society and economy isn’t necessarily what our institutions believe or practice, and probably hasn’t been for a while. Our beliefs as a country are certainly far removed from many participants in the national debate that pretend to speak on behalf of our population and on behalf of our interests.

Whatever the faults, foibles or otherwise of these national beliefs – and this isn’t an exercise in either support of, or opposition to them – our national debates on the role of government in our society and economy are becoming increasingly isolated from what the majority of the country actually believes.

Our public debates assume that the benefits of privatisation have reached a conclusion – the public believes that privatisation was and is a catastrophe and that government should own a larger sector of the economy because we trust government more than large private sector corporations.

Our public debates assume that smaller government and less regulation is universally beneficial – the public supports substantially higher levels of regulation on just about any topic you care to name and struggles to find something they’d like the government to become smaller in.

Our public debates assume that economic reform has been such an obviously beneficial thing to ordinary Australians that it no longer needs explaining – the public believes that corporations took all benefits of that reform, leaving them with little more than a casualised workforce and reduced job security.

In short, Steel seems to have revealed a quite dramatic mis-alignment between the actual views of Australians and the national public debates.   If true, this strikes at the heart of our democratic system.   Steel pessimistically concludes:

If we keep having our national debates like this – excluding larger and larger sections of our population and ignoring what they believe – they won’t be national debates, we’ll just be talking among ourselves generating ever increasing quantities of public opprobrium, contempt and general unhinging. If you haven’t noticed – this is where we are at right now.

Indeed.  Recent years have seen a chorus of complaints about the quality of public debate, and at the same time increasing disengagement by citizens from political parties and from politics more generally.

The mis-alignment between public debates and what Australians believe is not of course the same as mis-alignment in party support and in the polling booth.  But it surely strongly suggests a significant such mis-alignment.  It would surely be strange if people ended up always supporting the parties which best represent their views, when those views tend to be sidelined in public debates which frequently reference party positions.

But this is just speculation.  What I’d like to see is real data.  Does anybody know of any?

Also posted on the Tim van Gelder’s blog.

From Politics, trans. E. Barker.  Quoted in Sunstein, Infotopia, p.49

Having made a number of fixes, we became increasingly aware that the credibility scores acquired in the first few months of YourView’s existence weren’t really what they would have been had our improved algorithms been in place from outset.

So, we’ve done a “reset” – a re-run of history on YourView from time zero when the first Issue was posted, in the exact order everything happened, and recalculating credibility scores.   (One of our tech stars, Chris, built a tool for this so we can run a reset whenever we need to just by clicking a button.)

So you might notice that your credibility score has suddenly changed a bit – and you may even have changed position on the credibility ladder.

But we believe, of course, that the current credibility scores are a more “true and fair” representation of what people have earned to date.

Resets will happen occasionally in the future.  Of course we want to do this as rarely as possible, but over time, YourView will increase in sophistication and so resets will be inevitable.

If you have any thoughts about this of course please let us know.

Back in the day, it was the obvious approach to take give that we couldn’t all fit inside Parliament House and vote on every matter before it. Now of course we “virtually” can. Sooner or later we’ll drift intentionally or unintentionally into an online form of democracy in which everyone votes independently (an egomocracy?) making it impossible for special interest groups to skew the will of the people to their own ends. In a sense it has already started, as this and other debate forums demonstrate. All that’s missing is the voting mechanism (and the commitment, of course). Possibly even in our lifetimes. What do you think?

Frank is correct – it has already started.  And YourView is providing a voting mechanism.  Indeed, not just “a” voting mechanism but two: the raw vote (like other online polling) and the “collective wisdom”.  It is the latter, of course, which – when properly identified – ought to be what guides and constrains government in a true democracy.

Hey Abbé Boulah, I’m glad to see you here — I have  a question for you.

And a good evening to you too, Bog-Hubert. What’s such an urgent question that won’t even let you order a drink to start with?

Ah, Vodçek knows what I need.  Well, I ran into that candidate for the Senate I told you about,  who is thinking about running on a platform of legalizing illicit drugs, so we had a little exchange about that over at the dock.  And then I remembered you’d talked about this group in Australia that held a big discussion on the internet about that same question –  whether the country should legalize drugs. Asked people on the internet to vote on it, based on the arguments they posted. So what’s you opinion about that issue?…

For more see A curious discussion about legalizing explicit drugs on Abbe Boulah’s Weblog (really by Thorbjoern Mann).

Second, there was an overview article in the German magazine Technology Review, Software bestraft Schwätzer.  The author, Ralf Grötker, created an “Übersichtsmap” (“over view map”) of various concerns about YourView and its credibility ratings raised in the comments:

Boyer’s address to the Radio in Education Conference, January 1946:

THERE seem to me to be two types of mind in any community. The first and the most numerous are those who are frankly indifferent to any knowledge which does not directly bear upon their income or their pleasure. For these the radio dial is twirled automatically and persistently to the lightest of light sessions, and the country’s interests are shrugged off as of no interest or concern. The second type of mind, however, is perhaps more difficult to serve and even more of a threat to our democratic health. I refer to the closed mind, the one-track thinker, the zealot who is impervious to fact, to argument, to anything and everything which does not accord with his pre-conceived point of view. Such minds are to be found in every profession and in every political party as well as on the lunatic fringe of outright obsession. It is their boast that nothing will ever induce them to change their minds. They draw enormous personal satisfaction from the illusion that all their opponents in political faith, religious belief and international attitude are evil and sinister. To such, life is not the gradual unfolding of new facets of truth and perception, it is a pitched battle between right thinkers and wrong thinkers, with themselves on the side of the angels.

There is little, I am afraid, that either radio or the written world can do for folk who have wilfully quenched the light of enquiry within them. But between these two extremes lie the great bulk of our people, instinct with a native and kindly tolerance and with a readiness to change their minds in the face of new evidence, new ideas and more complete information.

YourView of course aims to attract and engage what Boyer regards as “the great bulk of our people,” those at least somewhat open to thinking and rational persuasion on major public issues.

Of course we don’t know just what proportion of the population that is.  ”The great bulk” is a very vague phrase, and may be somewhat optimistic.

However YourView also aims to engage the “zealots,” on the grounds that even if they’re unlikely to change their mind, there may still be something of value in what they say, and that where there is, those perspectives ought to be integrated into the collective wisdom.

“However strongly people in power might resent the right, citizens should not be denied free expression. Democracy is healthiest when contending views are exposed to debate and rebuttal. A politically constrained and uninformed ”debate” is a step towards authoritarian rule.”

We agree, but wonder: how do you tell when a view has in fact been rebutted?  What we need to know is the considered collective view – the “collective wisdom”.  

If we never find out the collective wisdom, what we mostly have is just the cacaphony and rancour of “debate”.  Opposing camps can maintain their positions and “debate” the issues as nauseum.   

YourView is leading the way in trying to go beyond “mere” debate and get to the point of it all – the collective rational view on what’s true or right. 

On 12 May, in the Saturday paper, there were four letters in response. They took issue with different things the piece had said, or that they thought it had said. Here is a brief response, which, I hope, does justice to the concerns expressed by each of the four:

Spencer Leighton asserted that “the Western world is being brought to its knees by globalization” and that this means we will “need more than consultative processes” if we are to save Western democracies.

Tracey Bjorksten asserted that “Web-based algorithms to sift and aggregate the thoughts of the citizenry are utterly pointless if no one is listening to the result.”

John Topla argued that we should go back to the Greek notion of direct democracy, because representative democracy is fit only for barbarians and shows that the citizens are not taking responsibility for their own lives but are leaving this task to others.

And John Legge declared that, contrary to what I had argued in the piece, the voters of Europe have got it right and the “experts” have got it wrong. In other words, if I understand him, there is no problem with democracy; only with the elite makers of policy.

This is all interesting feedback on the proposition that we can revitalize our democracy by using new web-based tools to make it possible for citizens to participate in actual policy debates on an informed basis that enables us to discern the public mind better than mere elections or standard opinion polls. It would require considerable space to address the underlying concerns of each of these individuals, but the thrust of my response in each case is that I think they have charged in to criticize the proposed Yourview project without appreciating that, in fact, it is something that ought to serve their underlying concerns well, if only it can be set up to work robustly.

To begin with Leighton Spencer. The claim that globalization is bringing the Western world to its knees is highly contentious; but whatever the source of the current dilemmas facing the Western world, is it not likely that better consultative processes might enable us to build a more soundly based consensus for action? Tracey’s anxiety that such initiatives are pointless if no-one is listening is curious. Opinion polls currently make a very real, demonstrable difference to public policy and election outcomes. So, clearly, someone is listening. But don’t we want better outcomes and more engaged debate? Don’t we want a better kind of listening – and voicing of opinion? John’s bold notion that we should be going back to direct democracy, in the Athenian sense, is plainly impossible, given the scale of modern society. However, the idea of a web-based forum for direct participation is to try to recapture precisely some of the virtues of direct democracy in our large and complex kind of society.

Finally, there plainly is anxiety and confusion in Europe. Would John Legge assert that the extremist parties in Greece got it right merely because they are opposed to austerity? Does he seriously believe that Francoise Hollande’s platform is a prescription for growth and recovery in France? It could be that better policies than the austerity measures are called for, but it’s far from clear what they should be. A web-based tool of the kind we are developing is intended to sort out the pros and cons of policy proposals through the participation of citizens and the sifting of claims for clarity, credibility and informed consent. Why would he reject such an experiment in the name of the people?

You have to love these pontificating journalists standing atop the mountain espousing their views in their papal robes as if what they say is coming straight out of the bible,
Nothing but self appointed experts who have reached a stage where they are no longer interested in reporting information , rather they prefer to deliver us THEIR OPINION, well i have to say as far as opinion goes I would rather read the various posts which provide a much deeper analysis of what the facts really are , ( apart from a couple of the boofheads) at least the forum provides some discussion and different points of view , which are argued back and forth in a democratic form , i suggest we do away with the journalist and instead just provide one topic preferably policy based for posters to debate. – stevec

Sounds like stevec is looking for something like YourView!