• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1694 0

engage even through online means; and besides governments have to use the information they get for anything to change. It is easy to overhype the scope for online technologies to change government. There is obviously some potential but much more thought will need to be given to how to use the technologies to improve engagement and accountability. Different media have in the past had different impacts on democratic engagement: the evidence for the United States is that radio and print enhanced political knowledge but that TV has reduced both knowledge and interest on the part of voters.17 Online activity and social networks will have a bigger impact in the short term in the way they supplement and substitute for the traditional broadcast and print media. The media are part of the political system, an essential feature of democratic government.18 The Internet has had a massively disruptive impact on existing news media, and perhaps offers a more direct channel through which politicians can engage with citizens, but it’s still not clear what the impact will turn out to be on the politics of the future.19

Public sector reform is a huge subject with a huge academic literature, and a couple of decade’s worth of failure pretty much everywhere in putting it into practice. We do not have governments engaging their citizens in an informed debate in order to take hard decisions about cutting pension entitlements, or raising taxes to pay for green energy investment incentives, or slicing 10 percent off total public spending every year for five years to keep the country from going bankrupt. I predict we will not get them. People don’t really want to face hard choices. Instead, it’s likely they will start to work around governments. In a transition from the old, twentieth-century traditional party politics to whatever new form politics will take, we’re likely to see much experimentation—including using the online technologies—in creating new processes or institutions to tackle collective problems. Some of this will eventually change the way governments operate.

For example, deliberative processes in which groups of citizens take time to understand the complexities of an issue and debate it could become more widespread. Groups of individuals who are interested in a specific issue are already connecting via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, debating the choices, and either acting directly or lobbying the officials or politicians involved in decisions. New media are taking shape and engaging the citizens who are most interested. Pretty much every issue can become a focus for this kind of active, informed citizenry; perhaps the official policy world could engage with it. Equally, though, it will require more of citizens—there is an onus on those who want to engage more directly with policymaking to ensure they are well-informed and motivated themselves by the public service ethos. So the technologies offer promising scope for political reform but not the certainty of improvement. We will need to see plenty of experimentation.

INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

One of the themes of this book has been the failure of the institutions and rules governing the economy to keep pace with the underlying technological and structural changes. This has been a constant theme of capitalism, given the driving role technological innovation plays in economic growth. So, for example, capturing the fruits of the innovation that we describe as the Industrial Revolution required social and institutional innovations ranging from limited liability legislation to enable the necessary accumulation and investment of financial capital via large businesses to the urbanization of the rural population to create the industrial workforce.20

One easy way to see what this means in today’s context is to think about the traditional corporation of the 1960s and 1970s. These important social institutions were typically long-lived, certainly enough so for them to be made an important channel for collecting taxes, for running and delivering pensions and other welfare