Posts filed under 'politics'
Inequality and public services
Rebecca Nash writes:
‘Public facing’ and ‘academic’ are two personal attributes that often don’t go together. But the IIPS was fortunate to host this rare breed at a breakfast briefing this week. Professor Danny Dorling both conducts groundbreaking research on patterns of place and social change, and makes sure it gets covered by the media (here and here and here.)
Danny’s presentation at the IIPS was on the evidence of the strong links between poor public services and local inequalities – part of the IIPS’s ongoing conversation about what role research and public services play in improving people’s lives. Worrying as much of his evidence is, his talk was also a hopeful call to action. Despite the correlation between local deprivation and poor services he argued two points: First, if we take a look at recent data from The Futures Company, there is public will for social change and social action - and permission for radical change. Second, government has the tools to improve things on local levels and to stop inequalities from continuing to spread on a national scale.
BMRB Social Research’s Head of Methods Joel Williams argued that research can support the policy and service delivery changes that Danny urges – and looked at some different research methods. He identified new research strategies for the places that most need them: for example, opening up administrative data bases in their original forms, targeting surveys in areas with the greatest variety of life outcomes, local authorities working together on common policy interventions, and more facilitation of local area modelling by those conducting national surveys.
Danny’s assumption that government could provide most of the solutions was challenged by Professor Paul Wiles, Head of Government Social Research. He raised questions about the persistence of long-term, local inequalities, and the way in which these shaped long-term social and cultural perceptions of poorer areas. In short, there are limits to government power and policy making, especially in the face of other powerful agents of change (communities, families, the housing market, and more).
Big questions about government, community, and public and social capital at 8.30 in the morning. But as we only begin to see the effects of economic crash, these issues are only going to get sharper over the coming year - or more.
The picture shows Diego Rivera’s mural, ‘Contradictions between Rich and Poor 01″. Sheffield University’s ‘Changing UK’ report, co-authored by Danny Dorling, can be downloaded as a pdf from here. The IIPS is a co-venture between The Futures Company and BMRB which develops and promotes the use of citizen insight to support the transformation of public service delivery in the UK.
Add comment 4 December 2008
Grant Park’s tipping points
Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.
Walker Smith writes:
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.
Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.
1 comment 7 November 2008
Recession and sustainability
Courtesy of the Transition Island Blog
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the impact of recession on consumer behaviour, and I was asked by Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster to join a panel discussion about this, which is broadcast tomorrow (Saturday 9th - if you missed it, you can hear it on the website for another week).
The other panellists were Chris Leslie, of the New Local Government Network (and a former Labour MP), and Jeremy Leggett, who runs one of Britain’s largest solar energy companies, solarcentury, and also wrote a fine book, Half Gone, about the end of the oil economy.
It’s difficult to summarise the flavour of a fifteen minute discussion in a few lines, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the programme, but some themes seemed to emerge:
- The upwards shift in oil and energy prices is a step change not a blip (a Dutch energy consultancy recently estimated that the floor price for oil had reached $110/barrel).
- In the short term this is reducing car use, but hurting the poorest hardest, mostly through the cost of their domestic energy bills (the poorest tend not to own cars).
- In the longer term, however, the government has to make a choice between orchestrating a full-scale shift to renewable energy sources, or trying to muddle through with conventional energy (Leggett is a member of the group which wrote the recently published The Green New Deal, which linked energy innovation, climate change response, and financial reform).
- Shifting to renewables will take investment, which probably isn’t going to come from taxation but could - without going into the economic theory here - come from market incentives and from encouraging people to save more, which would be good for the long-term stability of the economy.
Some of the evidence suggests that people are ahead of the politicians here. But it will still take some political courage to act on this - a quality which seems sadly lacking from British politics at the moment.
Add comment 8 August 2008
Campaigning in ‘the Big Sort’
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I’ve been interested to see the noise generated by Barack Obama’s decision to deploy and maintain staff in every US state during the current US presidential election campaign. Leaving aside the politics of such a decision (there’s a useful overview of this here) what’s most intriguing is how this decision will play out within each state, in light of reading Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, recommended to me by the Yankelovich CEO J Walker Smith.
Bishop writes about the growing clustering of like-minded individuals in small neighbourhoods across the US. His crunching of the data shows that over the last 30 years Americans have sorted themselves into homogenous neighbourhoods, where culture, economics and politics are alike. Individuals look to move to and settle in neighbourhoods of ‘people like me’, and so the political clustering has followed.
The big sort helps to explain the wonderful quote from the playwright Arthur Miller on the 2004 presidential race: “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter?” It’s about the company one keeps, locally.
The fact that people are less likely to have their views challenged or questioned, because they are less likely to come across individuals who disagree is a serious political (and indeed democratic) concern. Where we shop, who we meet at the school gates, and those we socialise with (physically and virtually) are all likely to share our views, rather than challenge them. And by reinforcing each other’s views our collective position becomes more extreme and more certain over time – thus shrinking the middle ground where political decisions tend to (have to?) be made.
In light of this ‘clustering of like-minded Americans’, it seems sensible decision for Obama and his campaign team to contest every state. For while one might think that California is a ‘blue state’ and Texas a ‘red state’ this simplification hides some real pockets of electorally significant dark red in the blue states, and dark blue in the red states (such as the liberal Austin in Texas, where Bill Bishop lives). So Obama has substantial pockets of support in some strongly red states.
But it’s not enough to know these supporters are there, deep in ‘enemy’ territory, and expect them to vote after getting a bit of attention from the campaign. Obama will need to work very hard to get such individuals to actually vote. That’s because, as Bishop illustrates, individuals are less confident about making their voice heard when their view is in the minority. Bishop quotes survey research on past presidential voting data by a fellow researcher, and concludes:
“rather than buck the majority and risk social sanction, citizens in the minority simply stayed away from the polls. They didn’t vote. In communities with large political majorities, people tend to give up battling over ideas…”
So, from Obama’s point of view, making such people feel that they are not alone and that his ideas are worth fighting for, should increase the likelihood that they will vote come November. If he succeeds, by Bishop’s account, Obama would have the significant challenge of trying to govern a country of ever more extreme groups, each of which is increasingly sure of its own extremist views.
Add comment 2 July 2008
The power of ‘we’
Becky Rowe writes:
I’ve been in Australia for a few days for a client project and one of things I have noticed (aside from the jetlag and great weather) is the constant reference across all kinds of public communications to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘together’, ‘you’, and ‘community’.
New building projects mention ‘helping our communities grow stronger’, while ‘no alcohol’ signs on the beaches explain why it is beneficial to everyone if you don’t drink your beers on the beach. The taxi rank at the airport had a large sign which communicated clearly and simply what you could ask of your taxi driver, and what he could expect of you (you are entitled to ask your driver to turn on or off the radio or aircon, and to take a different route, but you aren’t allowed to be drink or eat in the cab).
The prevalence of these signs, the explicit wording, and clear reference to shared responsibilities, all communicated in a friendly and understandable way, somehow surprised me. In some ways I found them a bit patronising, but I also found it refreshing to have ‘the rules’ of ‘good citizenship’ made clear.
Knowing the rationale behind an apparently bureacratic or even irrational rule can make all the difference to compliance. I think the UK has something to learn from the Australians about how to behave - and how to get people to behave.
1 comment 15 May 2008
Sharing data with the government
Michelle Singer writes:
People in the UK feel far more comfortable about sharing their personal data with government if they are also allowed to share in the benefits. This was the conclusion drawn from new survey research presented at last week’s IIPS briefing: ‘How concerned are citizens about data and privacy in the public services?’ (The Institute for Insight in the Public Services is a joint initiative between Henley Centre HeadlightVision and its sister company, BMRB Social Research, which provides a thought-leading insight forum for those working across government.)
The chart at the top of this post shows that, firstly, citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds of citizens are then happy to provide their details to government departments.
Amongst those who remain sceptical, a significant barrier is that they do not understand why government would want to gather their data, let alone to share it with other government departments. The policy concept of ‘joined up government’ has evidently not yet been sufficiently well explained to its public stakeholders.
While these findings have direct relevance for the government’s public service transformation agenda, they also reinforce a broader insight about shifting power relationships: consumers nowadays are far more likely to recognise the value that companies and organisations derive from their personal data and information (as well as the risks entailed in handing over control); as a result, they are demanding both justification and recompense, as well as reassurance that their information will be stored securely.
Add comment 9 May 2008
Flying the flag (post 1 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
As a closet vexillologist, I have always had an inexplicable fascination with flags. Flags are brands with armies and navies. Just like brands, they can be relaunched, repositioned and stretched. They can suffer from all the hazards facing any consumer good: lack of differentiation, poor on-shelf standout, out of step with current values, and so on.
Indeed they are probably the most powerful expressions of graphic design and branding anywhere. Try to imagine the brief to a flag designer: “Zac, mate, we want you to unite a people - or at least try to foster cohesion. Can you also try to convey a sense of mission, reference history and national allegiances? And differentiate us. Make it visible from a distance too? Is Monday morning okay? We’re presenting on Tuesday morning”.
There’s no better recent example of a wholesale brand relaunch than the new flag of semi-recognised Kosovo (top left). The use of blue and yellow - to say nothing of the stars - intentionally references the EU flag (top right), with EU membership being something of a national mission for Kosovo. Meanwhile, the new branding has wholeheartedly dispensed with ethnic Albanian symbols and colourways - the black eagle on a red background. The hope - the optimist might say - might be to engage (or at least pacify) new target markets: the Serb population, along with EU opinion. This is one to watch, and the most recent off the catwalk.
Kosovo wasn’t however the first to adopt those go-faster-stars. The flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina (top centre), adopted in 1998, also donned an ‘EU’ colour scheme, reflecting similar aspirations to membership, and also a similar brief to avoid favouring any of B&H’s constituent ‘nationalities’. The result is not very Serb, nor Croat, nor Bosnian. Looking at it another way, both these new flags might be seen as EU brand stretch.
1 comment 4 April 2008
Can the arts cure cancer?
Rachel Kelnar writes:
While teaching part of a module on “Planning for the Future”, part of City University’s Cultural Leadership programme, I was struck by a provocative comment from one of the participants, which led to an energetic discussion.
We were exploring future challenges for the arts sector, and someone said, “Soon, the arts will be expected to cure cancer.” While there was clearly some irony intended, it highlighted that we might have reached a critical point in the debate about instrumentalism in the arts. There’s been quite a long policy trend about developing the arts on the basis of how they can advance particular social or policy aims, but Brian McMaster’s recent report, Supporting Excellence might be a sign that this is coming to an end.
McMaster’s report was commissioned by the previous Culture Secretary, James Purnell, and it has certainly injected energy into this debate - but we’ll have to wait to see whether his replacement has the same appetite for his argument.
Add comment 6 March 2008
The future of civil society in Britain and Ireland
Andrew Curry writes:
I mentioned this large scale scenarios project in a post a few weeks ago - carried out for Carnegie UK’s Commission of Inquiry Into The Future of Civil Society.
The project reports are now on the Carnegie website: a drivers’ report, The Shape of Civil Society To Come; a scenarios report, Scenarios For Civil Society, a project summary, and finally a toolkit to help people use the material without needing professional support.
Running workshops across Britain and Ireland gave a broader cultural perspective than many of our projects and most of them were held either side of the May elections, with their nationalist tilt. My favourite workshop, I think, was exploring the implications of the scenarios high up in Croke Park in Dublin. It is the home of the Gaelic Athletic Association, one of the oldest of Irish civil society organisations, with its own history in the Irish struggle for independence from the UK - but also a civil association which has ridden cultural trends around national languages and culture to reinvigorate itself in the pst 20 years.
Picture of Croke Park from TouristR, Dublin.
Add comment 14 November 2007
