The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
With elections taking place throughout the UK this week, we thought we’d stick to the theme of democracy with an Engagement Hub that focuses on political engagement. Who knew though that with half of the election results still to be announced (at time of writing), that we’d already be reeling from the shock of the Conservatives losing their three flagship London councils.
Thank goodness then for light relief from Charlie’s Attic, our Friday oasis for the engaged and the apathetic.
By drilling into data public opinion (which comes courtesy of an engagement audit by The Hansard Society a couple of years ago), Akehurst identifies worrying tendencies in democratic engagement. Graduates, the middle and upper-middle classes, and those who are already members of political parties are by far the most engaged with politics (see chart below, taken from the piece).
This potentially skews our democracy towards the interests of the privileged and the dogmatic. As the author puts it, “the ‘theatre’ of day-to-day public opinion in Britain is dominated by the highly engaged, the highly educated and the partisan.”
The results here may give pause for thought to those who argue in favour of direct democracy. Such utopian notions can, in practice, be far from representative and can even cause outcomes that are inegalitarian, further silencing the least educated and the poorest. (One is reminded here of research into psychology studies conducted on campuses, which has found that by surveying those who are WEIRD – i.e. from parts the world that are “western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic” – academics were getting a wholly unrepresentative picture).
But Steve Akehurst‘s piece, which ends with a call for greater use of methods like citizen juries, is also important from an engagement perspective. One of the most difficult elements of consultation and engagement is working out whether highly engaged stakeholders are representative of the community at large – and, if they are not, how decision-makers can reach beyond the loudest voices and the usual suspects, to find out what people really think?
Page 76 of our New Conversations guidance identifies six steps for doing this, and is worth a read, although we say so ourselves. (While we have you here it’s worth flagging that we are currently doing a refresh of New Conversations, which will be out soon – watch this space!)
But the really important thing, with analyses like Akehurst’s, is that they remind us of just how unrepresentative the public debate can sometimes be – and of how important it is to engage with the least engaged.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the newsletter which votes early and often:
