Democracy representation and participation

Voter ID – Part 2: How poisoned, how curative?

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Chris Game

In the Electoral Reform Society’s recent review of the King’s Speech the first “conspicuous omission” identified, ahead of democratically reconstituting the Lords and electoral reform, was the repeal of Voter ID – “an unnecessary step backwards for our democracy and should be scrapped before it causes any more damage”.  Though I’m an ERS member, that’s not my personal view – as I’ve previously indicated, here and elsewhere – which is partly why I embarked on what has become a two-part blog, of which this is the second and – I promise! – final instalment.

Rationalising post hoc, the first part summarised the key data – published mainly by the Electoral Commission in its June Interim Analysis of the Voter Identification returns from Returning Officers, its September Demographic Analysis Research, plus its specifically Voter ID-related policy-and-practice recommendations. This second instalment covers, or at least references, some of the varying and more eye-catching reactions to all these data.

The first of which – partly for its comprehensiveness, but also because it provided the blog’s chosen title – is the early September review published on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of senior MPs and Peers on Democracy and the Constitution and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Undertaken by a cross-party panel chaired by Jon Nicolson (SNP), its four main conclusions were that:

  1. The voter-ID system, as it stands, is a “poisoned cure”, disenfranchising more electors than it protects. It quotes the well publicised statistic of there having been just eight convictions/cautions for personation in person since 2013, plus that detailed in the earlier blog of more than 14,000 possibly entitled voters having been turned away by ‘greeters’ in May before even entering the polling station – sufficient, arguably, to have swung the result of up to 16 constituencies in the 2019 General Election.
  2. The regime’s inherent ambiguity creates a real risk of injustice and potential discrimination.  Most obvious – “shamelessly obvious” to quote the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee in her coverage of the topic – was the selection of documents acceptable as ID, discriminating particularly, but not only, against young persons: Oyster 60+ passes [requiring proof of name and address] acceptable, but not student IDs, library cards, bank statements, etc.  The panel also noted that “independent observers” had recorded evidence of racial and disability discrimination at polling stations, with “non-white people being turned away even when they had qualifying ID, while some white people were permitted to vote without showing ID at all.”
  3. The regime lacks the flexibility necessary to avoid injustices – being over-reliant on decisions made by polling clerks and presiding officers, against which there is no formal right of appeal.
  4. The problems identified are systemic, but not fundamental – meaning that, with targeted reforms, the voter-ID regime can, as in many other states, be an asset to UK democracy. That was my emphasis, and, for what it’s worth, with all Europe and almost all developed countries requiring in-person voters to use photo ID, the panel give less emphasis to this point than I would have. A corollary of that point, however, is that these countries have polling station staff familiar with the demands of voter ID, and there is growing evidence of the need to address with some urgency the recruitment, training and retention of electoral staff.   

Overall, the panel’s conclusion is that the regime should remain in place, subject to three main structural reforms:

  1. Permit electors to ‘cure’ a failed ID check by utilising an existing mechanism in UK law and signing a declaration attesting to their identity and right to vote (as in Canada).
  2. Broaden the range of accepted identification documents and in doing so set clear criteria for deciding which forms of ID are accepted.
  3. Provide better training for polling station officers.

It’s a lengthy production (well over 100 pages, incl. research appendices) and a recommendable one for anyone new to the topic, not least in reminding us how the VID debate was actually kicked off – by a 2010 BBC Panorama investigation, leading eventually to a 2015 High Court case in which Tower Hamlets’ then Labour (and today Aspire Party) Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of involvement in a string of “corrupt and illegal electoral practices”, one of which was ‘personation’.  

Whereupon the Cameron Government instructed its ‘Anti-Corruption Champion’, Sir Eric Pickles, to prepare a report examining electoral fraud – one of whose 50 recommendations was that it should consider options for electors having to produce personal ID before voting at polling stations. Which led in turn to the 2018/9 trials, which reported a degree of increased public confidence in elections where VID was required – but not, as the All-Party review notes (p.9), that “electoral fraud ranked consistently last in public perception of problems around elections” [and administrators’ perception – see table below], or that they are “far more concerned about political funding and the redrawing of constituency boundaries than about personation”.

If the legislation did eliminate personation, the APPG’s view was that this came at the cost of “disenfranchising” electors: preventing or discouraging certain electors from voting – considerably more than the recorded 14,000 or so without ID who failed to return after being turned away by polling station staff. Excluding those turned away by party political ‘meeters and greeters’, this number was considered for several reasons to be “a significant underestimate”.

The democratic cost, in the name of preventing in person personation – occurring, on average 0.88 times p.a. – was to deny at least 14,000 people the opportunity to cast their ballot, which is “unacceptable and unjustifiable”.

Politically, however, the Panel reckoned that even these probably undercounted numbers of non-returnees could potentially impact on a General Election result – two West Midlands examples being Sandwell and Walsall, where 1,135 and 797 electors (respectively) were turned away.

There is, obviously, a great deal more, but almost simultaneously other contributions were appearing on the scene, perhaps most noteworthy being the Local Government Information Unit’s The Impact of Voter ID: The Views of Administrators. Based mainly on a survey of 171 electoral administrators who helped deliver the May 2023 elections, some of these ‘behind the scenes’ views are almost inevitably predictable: that VID is just the latest of the pressures added to the burden of electoral administrators already contending with resource constraints, complex legislation, tight timetables, temporary staff recruitment, etc.; and that a General Election offers an “opportunity for serious disruptions” (p.5).  

Perhaps most striking, though, appearing on the Introduction page (6), but without a word of direct reference, is the following bar chart. The words follow in the remainder of the report: yes, administratively elections in England have serious weaknesses: staffing pressures caused by “short timetables, convoluted legislation, inefficient processes and inadequate resourcing.” (p.11).  Administrators’ question for this research is how voter ID has impacted on these issues, as well as, of course, on “personation in the polling station”.

And my carefully considered conclusion, following this attempted overview of the welter of reports and evaluations that appeared several weeks ago now?  I should have done what I’ve habitually done for years in comparable situations: relied on the House of Commons Library, whose estimable staff – here Neil Johnston and Elise Uberoi – produced a characteristically thorough (and, unlike mine, unopinionated) 59-page Research Briefing covering pretty well everything I’ve attempted to. And, to quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that!

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Citizen Assets Transfer in Barcelona: the role of the commons in democratising public administration and public service delivery

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Dr Marina Pera from Autonomous University of Barcelona is presenting a critical analysis of the asset transfer policies in Barcelona at our next INLOGOV seminar, which starts at noon on Thursday 30th November at our Edgbaston campus.

Marina will examine opportunities and risks raised by citizen management of municipal assets, taking a community empowerment perspective.

Barcelona is a city with a long tradition of neighbourhood associations, community and cultural centres run by citizens. Since the 1970s, in response to citizens’ demands, a number of municipal assets have been transferred to local non-profit organisations with economic support from the City Council.

The transfer of these assets was decentralised to the administrative districts, which in some cases led to practices of co-option and clientelism. In 2015, the Bases de gestió cívica (civic management legal basis) was collaboratively designed and approved: a local regulation that standardises the allotment of assets, increasing transparency on asset transfers. However, the Bases of gestió cívica did not solve some of the challenges that had emerged from the collaboration between the local state and community actors. One of the main challenges was the insufficient adaptation of regulations and administrative procedures to the idiosyncrasies of grassroots organisations with low levels of professionalisation. These place a huge burden on these community groups, who had to invest time and resources in bureaucratic procedures, hindering their original mission and accelerating their de-politicisation. 

In 2016, with the rise of a progressive government in the city of Barcelona, an ambitious policy was approved, the Citizen Assets Programme (CAP). This policy aimed to recognise, support, and consolidate urban commons: spaces and facilities rooted in the community that were apt to be transferred to non-profit organisations in order to be managed democratically. The CAP thus aimed to empower the community and promote citizen participation. This policy entailed greater transparency and legitimacy surrounding the process of asset transfer and the accountability of grassroots and non-profit groups. However, the Citizen Assets Programme has been facing a number of challenges in terms of legal issues, resistance by public officials and scepticism by non-profit organisations.

Despite the difficulties involved in the implementation of the Citizen Assets Programme, it has presented an opportunity for collaboration between the City Council and the commons. The efforts to create an environment of trust and mutual learning among public officials and community groups has allowed the development of innovative administrative instruments that recognise the transformative work of the commons, through innovative public-commons partnerships. This seminar therefore aims to analyse alternative forms of asset management beyond public direct and outsourcing management, engaging in current debates on collaborative culture in public administration, the dismantling of the welfare state and community empowerment.

Seminar details

The re-arranged seminar will run 4-5pm on Thursday 7th December at the University of Birmingham Edgbaston campus in Muirhead room G15. 

Further information, link to attend and registration can be found at the eventbrite. 

Register on Eventbrite

Voter ID – A “Poisoned Cure” and Other Verdicts

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Chris Game

It’s easy to claim, but there are times when I miss not having classes of students to endeavour to entertain – partly because, at least from a distance, it can seem rather easier now than back when I had that responsibility.

One gift I’d certainly have used during this year’s exam revision period was the YouTube rap video made by T-Dawg – aka Broadland and South Norfolk Councils’ Managing Director, Trevor Holden – ‘reminding’ intending voters in the May local elections to take photo ID with them to the polling station. Like the whole topic, the video received a mixed reception, but it certainly got my vote (sorry about that!) as an introduction to this split-blog’s attempted overview of the profusion of recently released Voter ID material. I’ve at least flick-read most of it, so you won’t have to worry about not doing so.

First, though, an additional declaration of personal interest, referring back to that  opening paragraph. My students weren’t, of course, learning directly about ‘political literacy’, but high on my short list of ‘research stats I’ve managed to remember for more than a few weeks’ was the depressing finding in the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Political Literacy’s 2021 report that, of a 3,300 sample of secondary school teachers in England, only 1% [felt] “fully prepared” to teach courses aimed at developing young people’s political literacy.

The ”fully”, omitted in some reports, was in the question and doubtless partly explains the dispiriting response. But anyway the finding was highlighted by the APPG, led directly to the creation of the social enterprise Shout Out UK (SOUK), and these two bodies’ influence is clearly evident in some of the Electoral Commission’s recommendations for more focused information and awareness raising.

There had, of course, been earlier assessments of May’s elections – principally the Electoral Commission’s Interim Analysis in mid-June, reporting the anonymised returns from the Voter Identification Evaluation Forms (VIDEF) that Returning Officers were required to complete (see table below), plus results of three YouGov pre- and post-election public awareness surveys of between 1,700 and 3,700 adults each.

This first, stat-heavy part of the blog will present, in highly summarised form, some of the key data, with the second covering some of the more recent interpretative contributions – including that of the All-Party Parliamentary Group, from which I’ve appropriated the blog’s slightly giveaway title.

First, some scene-setting stats, taken from the final report. The total electorate was 27.3 million, ballot box turnout 32%. For the record, Labour took 33% of the vote and control of 70 councils; Conservatives 28.6% and 33; Lib Dems 37% and 20.  5.2 million postal ballots were initially issued to 19% of the electorate, 3.5 million (67%) of which were returned, of which 89,000 were rejected, mainly for missing or mismatched signatures or dates of birth. OK, it’s only 2.6%, but, after making the effort, it was higher than I might have guessed.

 Key findings from the analysis included that:

  • Immediately post-election, in areas with elections, 92% of people in England were aware they now needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station. They weren’t asked, however, if that awareness extended to knowing that they couldn’t obtain ID – e.g. the Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) – on polling day itself.
  • Awareness was significantly lower (74%) among those who didn’t already have an accepted form of ID – and, unsurprisingly, among youngest age groups (82% for 18-24 year olds), Black and minority communities (82%), etc.   
  • Approximately 89,500 people applied for a VAC before the 25 April deadline, some 28,000 certificates being subsequently used – i.e. under one-third of the 250,000 to 350,000 estimated likely not to have any other acceptable ID.
  • At least 0.25% of people (c.14,000) who had tried to vote at a polling station were not issued with a ballot paper because of the ID requirement, but this excludes those who reacted to the ID reminder before they could be recorded in the data – thereby inevitably underestimating, as do the post-election analyses generally, the actual impact of the voter ID requirement.

This was essentially the ‘headline’ picture we had to content ourselves with over the summer, until quite suddenly, come September, there was a whole lot more – and it seems logical, if not strictly chronological, to start with the Electoral Commission’s full-scale Voter ID Demographic Analysis Research. The analysis aimed to identify patterns in areas where relatively higher or lower proportions of intending voters were turned away from polling stations due to the new ID requirement.

18 authorities with apparently relatively socioeconomically diverse wards were selected, including the West Midlands’ Coventry and Sandwell – the latter being the sampled borough with the nationally highest “initially turned away” percentage of 3%.  The Census-based ‘proxy’ variables measured were unemployment, ethnicity, household deprivation, and social renters.

Hyper-summarising, the analysis suggested there was “a potential linear relationship” between each selected socio-economic variable and the proportion of voters initially turned away and those who didn’t return to vote. These results are obviously tabulated, but also graphed, as illustrated in what is described as the “moderate relationship” between ethnicity and the proportions initially turned away.

Overall, 13 of the 18 authorities showed at least a moderate relationship between the independent variables and the proportion of voters initially turned away, and 6 exhibited “strong relationships between one or more independent variables”. Strongest correlations were with areas having a high proportion of non-white British individuals, higher deprivation, and higher unemployment.   

Following this specifically Voter ID-focussed report, the Electoral Commission had published in June its overall Report on the May 2023 Local Elections in England, which it updated in early September. It made nine main recommendations, including increasing awareness of the support available for disabled voters, and improving data collection at polling stations.  

Four, however, related specifically to voter ID: review the list of accepted ID; improve access to the Voter Authority Certificate (see above); improve options for voters who don’t have or can’t access any accepted form of accepted ID – e.g. allowing ‘attestation’ by a named and verified elector; and polling station staff to continue to collect voter ID impact data at future elections.

Which brings us to about mid-September, already some way over this blog’s preferred length, and quite the wrong time, therefore, to address the “poisoned cure” and other reactions to these primarily statistical analyses – which will follow, with luck, fairly shortly.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Is this fair? – a PhD on fairness in local government

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Clive Stevens

A year’s gone and I’ve been given the OK to start year two of my PhD, but what have I achieved? Three passes in the taught modules on social science research and piles, nay heaps of reading.

And have I learned anything? That fairness is a complex subject. It is one of a number of moral behaviours that humans (and some other animals) have evolved over deep time to improve cooperation within groups. It’s innate, like language ability, and like language ability conceptions of fairness can differ depending on upbringing and life experiences. You can change your notions of it too although the chances of that recede as you grow older.

Does any of this relate to local government? I plan to look at councillors’ views on fairness; to see how they vary within and across persons in reaction to different case examples, ones they might typically come across in their daily interactions; all treated with confidentiality of course.

Opinions on fairness are usually made very quickly, within a second, and in any group of councillors (past and present) you can be sure that some will react one way and some another.

There are many realms on planet fairness: equality, merit, equity, opportunity, process, power and rights to name a few. Each has different sensitivities and opportunities for disagreement. My working model is that people will respond differently to the same situation due to their diverse backgrounds or assumptions; some will immediately fly off to one realm whereas others will jump to another. Some will be talking merit and just deserts whereas others will be thinking equality. This can lead to profound divergence over perceptions of fairness of a proposed policy or decision.

In local government much emphasis is placed on fairness of process. Areas of responsibility like social care, licensing and planning for example will have policy, and a decision based on policy is deemed fair if due-process has been followed; meaning no bias and a right to hear about and state one’s case. Public acceptance relies on a ‘fairness heuristic’, a natural mental shortcut, where one assumes fair treatment as long as the process followed is fair. Most research studies, but not all, show this heuristic. But is this fair? Firstly, local government policy can be set many years earlier, in different economic or political times, long before it is used to guide decisions. And secondly, was the policy making itself fair or was it dominated by large organisations or outdated assumptions.

The academic study of fairness has extra complexities…the term ‘equity’ is understood differently by those working in psychology (and business) to those in education and health. To the former it means merit; with rewards and punishments proportional to effort and input. To the latter it means giving a helping hand to those that need it. As humans we engage with both meanings.

Fairness is a field rich with research opportunity – too much for me to test them all. So in the coming year, once I have finished the readings, I need to discuss which areas might be of interest to councillors and create some examples for discussion in interviews and focus groups.

This is all with an aim to do what? That’s dictated by the results. For example, if it is discovered that there are some fairness situations which are more likely to trigger discord then, perhaps, adding more context and creating opportunity for discussion and reflection before councillors take a view might lead to better, fairer and more efficient decision making; especially when discussing mitigation of harm to affected residents or businesses.

Clive was a Bristol City Councillor and author of the book of his experiences, After The Revolution. He is entering Year 2 of a PhD at the University of Bristol. He blogs at https://sageandonion.substack.com/ and can be contacted at [email protected]

Voter ID – the warning lights are flashing

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Picture credit: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-the-governments-mandatory-voter-id-plans-are-a-terrible-idea/

Jason Lowther

Previous columns have urged a cautious approach to the introduction of photographic voter ID in England.  The May 2023 elections provided the first nationwide test of the system, and early analyses are highlighting some significant issues. 

Elections took place in 230 areas in England and around 27 million people were eligible to vote.  This week, the Association of Electoral Administrators (the people in councils who actually deliver elections) issued their post-match analysis, highlighting ‘the fragility of the system’ and recommending a fundamental review of the country’s electoral arrangements.   

With less than four months between the enactment of the new legislation and polling day, which included new statutory duties on accessibility as well as voter ID, councils faced a huge and risky task to administer the new system effectively.  They also faced significantly more paperwork, with new forms to track electors unable to vote and new data capture requirements.  The AEA report significant impact on polling officials: ‘many of our members reported POs feeling overwhelmed by paperwork and the time it takes to complete throughout polling day and at the close of poll’.

The AEA report reveals that the government’s website to provide free photo ID to those needing Voter Authority Certificates (VACs) failed to work properly from its launch in January and many functions were still not available by the deadline to apply for a VAC for 4 May poll.  Updates were still being issued two weeks before polling day.  Almost 90,000 people applied for VACs by the deadline, well short of the Electoral Commission’s earlier estimate of 250,000 – 350,000 applications based on the proportion of local election voters who did not have suitable ID.  Many didn’t know they would need one – just over half (57%) of the overall population and those who said they did not already have photo ID were aware of VACs in May, according to the Electoral Commission.

The types of photo ID acceptable under the legislation proved rather esoteric.  Passports are accepted, but what about a passport from Zimbabwe or a British format immigration document?  London Oyster 60+ cards are accepted, but not the Merseytravel Over 60s pass which has similar application checks.  Photo IDs issued by councils themselves, such as taxi licences and gun licences, were presented but could not be accepted. Similarly police warrant cards, NHS and other emergency services photo ID were presented but unable to be accepted.

The Electoral Commission’s interim report on the election was issued on 23rd June.  They found that immediately before polling day, 87% of people in England (excluding London, where there were no elections) were aware that they needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station – implying that around 3.5 m potential voters were not aware as the poll approached.  Awareness was lowest amongst young people, BME communities, those who haven’t previously voted in local elections, and people who didn’t have the necessary forms of photo ID.

To avoid voters queuing for a ballot paper and being turned away, in some areas ‘greeters’ were appointed to meet electors as they arrived and check whether they had an accepted form of photo ID with them.  Others provided posters and banners to explain the requirements outside polling stations.  Polling stations with greeters recorded a smaller proportion of people ‘turned away’ inside the polling station compared to those without greeters.  As a result of voters receiving advice outside the polling stations, and because of some other data issues, we should treat statistics on numbers of electors unable to vote with caution. Data collected inside polling stations shows that at least at least 0.7% of people (39,000 voters) who tried to vote at a polling station were initially turned away but around two-thirds of those people (63%) returned later in the day and were able to vote.  In some councils more than 1 in 100 electors were turned away.

More worryingly, the Electoral Commission found that 4% of people who said they did not vote in these elections gave an unprompted reason related to the ID rules, and the proportion of non-voters giving an ID-related reason rose from 4% to 7% when survey respondents were selecting from a list of reasons.

It was not possible to capture reliable demographic data on people who were not able to vote because of the ID requirement because electoral law did not allow polling station staff to collect demographic information about individuals who were turned away.  In the EC survey, disabled people and those who are unemployed were more likely than other groups to give a reason related to ID for not voting.

Voter confidence doesn’t seem to have been massively improved.  In fact, the EC found 68% of people were confident that the May elections were well run, compared to 73% in 2022.  For those who said they were not confident, the most common reason selected (by 46%) was that “some people were unable to vote due to the ID requirement”.

We await the Electoral Commission’s full report in the autumn.

Meanwhile, I close with an interesting comment made at the National Conservatism conference on the 15th May 2023 by former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg:

Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.  We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

Back to square one: Decolonising democratic innovations must start with the normative foundation

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Dr Abena Dadze-Arthur

Originally published on the Agora blog

A slippery foundation

Without a question, decolonisation is a slippery concept already! Decolonising democratic innovations (DI) is even more slippery because of its inherently normative foundation. Here, Temidayo Eseounu’s argument in her blog, which forms part of the Political Studies Association’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group’s blog series on Decolonising Democratic Innovations, could not be more to the point: ‘Eurocentric normative values such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality are intrinsic to the theories of participatory and deliberative democracies, which underpin democratic innovations’. Indeed, the fact that a citizen jury or mini public, where groups of citizens meet to reflect on problems and assess policy proposals, is firmly rooted in a set of Eurocentric norms makes it a productive democratic innovation in a Western context, where people value above all individual rights and personal expression and are used to openly criticizing their leaders. Such an approach to public participation is in harmony with the social contracts found in Western civilizations, which typically construct mankind as free and equal by nature, and base political authority on the individual self-interests of members of society. Typically, under a Western vantage point, a well facilitated citizen jury or mini public would be praised for offering a ‘platform for exchange’, ‘giving a voice to marginalised members of the community’, ‘deepening democracy’ and ‘improving governance’.

‘Equality’ or ‘inclusion’ are not universal concepts

Such normative framing, which indeed constitutes the very foundation of the concept of democratic innovation, disregards the vastly different realities of most non-Western societies, their underpinning Weltanschauung, core values, beliefs, ethics, and their historical social contracts that help to structure the relationship between the people and their government. In many societies, the universalism of normative values and motivations, such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality, is fallacious – they are inherently Eurocentric! Irrespective of how expertly designed a citizen panel or mini public might be, it would not work well in many collectivist societies in non-Western contexts, where people do not prioritise values such as equality, individualism and personal freedom. For example, participatory activities in non-Western governance settings, such as the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, are not aiming to tackle a democratic deficit, accomplish egalitarian objectives or wholly enhance governmental accountability. In those contexts, while the purpose of a mini public might very well be public service improvements for all, however they are not intended to provide a platform for collectively debating political questions behind services and policies, nor to strengthen inclusion, equality or equity beyond particular segments of the population – as it might be in the West.

Different strokes for different folks

Being clear about the normative foundation of participatory and deliberative events in non-Western settings requires a holistic understanding of the respective local context, or life world, which is a state of affairs in which the everyday world is experienced by the people, who simultaneously create social reality while being constrained by it. For instance, the Balinese life world is based on viewing the cosmos as a grand hierarchy, wherein animals and demons are at the bottom, gods and god-kings are at the top, and ordinary mortals are distributed throughout an elaborate assortment of fixed status ranks in between. The often cantankerous nature of Western-type citizen panels that assume every human being is equal and has a right to pursue his or her self-interest could be viewed as an incomprehensible and disrespectful exercise that causes more damage than good to the community and established hierarchies. Similarly, the press in Arabic Bedouin societies often portrays Western-style democratic innovations with their explicit advocacy and public naming and shaming as ‘uncivilized’. The Bedouin culture of ‘saving face’, loyalty to the leader and respect for his ‘God-given’ mandate, safeguarding family honour and tribal traditions is not compatible with the reform-seeking debates and critical tirades that can typify Western-style citizen juries. Under the vantage point of bedoucrats (those who believe in Bedoucracy, which proffers a model of Arab public management that originates in the Bedouin tribal culture and joins traditional bureaucratic design with tribal power culture), many Western-type democratic innovations amount to little more than a ‘narcissist circus’. However, the Bedouin culture of mediating by means of patience and forgiveness and seeking compromise, which signifies some synergy with Western-style citizen juries, has ensured that there are a number of age-old traditional institutions in Arab Bedouin societies that can be built upon for the purpose of engaging members of the public in participatory and deliberative exercises.

This was done in a Taiwan Buddhist village. Aware of the foreign (Eurocentric) norms that underpin the theory and design of democratic innovations, a team of facilitators who were tasked with conceiving and facilitating a citizen assembly to explore public service challenges and policy solutions in a Taiwanese Buddhist village, had no other choice but to construct and formulate from scratch not a democratic but a culturally appropriate innovation by building on traditional institutions. Given that the citizens’ life world was particularly characterised by a collective emphasis on ‘belonging to one large family’ and ‘respecting social hierarchy’, the facilitators knew that those agreeing to participate in the citizen assembly would not be willing to raise problems for fear of being seen as disrespecting the family and its established hierarchy. Hence, the facilitators framed the act of problem exploration as a co-operative endeavour along Buddhist concepts, such as the ‘eightfold noble path’ and ‘cause-condition-effect’ and developed a buddhicratic approach to delivering and facilitating a citizen assembly with a normative foundation that was in harmony with local worldviews, values, ethics and social contracts.

What now?

Having unmasked the Eurocentricity of DI’s normative foundation, how do we then begin the process of radical renewal with a view to construct a new, broader, postcolonial normative foundation that allows for an increasingly pluralistic approach? Is it even possible to reconsider the legitimacy and comprehensiveness of the established knowledge on democratic innovations by applying the hermeneutic resources and referencing the precepts of the very theories we criticise? As with all wicked and intractable issues, we may have to accept that there is no one panacea. Instead, theorists and practitioners will need to undergo a paradigm shift and prepare themselves to accept and engage with a rich variety of truths, and their underpinning values, social contracts and hierarchies of power. Given the current dearth of non-Western theories and practical templates on public participation and deliberation, we will need to work on a case-by-case basis in constructing locally sensitive and culturally appropriate innovations that are not necessarily and inevitably aspiring to be democratic, but depending on the case perhaps buddhicratic, bedoucratic or othercratic. Importantly, by capturing the empirical observations from each case and theorising the insights gained on platforms such as this blog, or in special issues such as the one on ‘Decolonising the Public Administration Curriculum’ (link to Call for Abstracts here), or in journals that explicitly focus on promoting knowledge exchange across vastly different contexts and episteme such as Public Administration & Development, in time, we might be able to consolidate empirical regularities and develop new, postcolonial theoretical models.

Abena Dadze-Arthur is Assistant Professor at the School of Government (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham, and Associate Editor of the Wiley journal Public Administration & Development. Combining the experience of an international policy practitioner with the robust theoretical approach of an academic, Abena’s research and teaching focus on decolonizing and transforming approaches to public management and governance, and contributing to the development of indigenous solutions and sustainable change.