Social Media and UK Politics, Part II: The Lame Chicken and the Apathetic Egg

The low level of online political engagement in the UK cannot solely be the responsibility of UK politicians, disappointing though their attempts to climb aboard the fast-moving social media train may have been.

(Consultants are allowed to use phrases like “fast-moving social media train” once before being fired – Ed.)

It’s certainly more complicated than that.  For all that more could be done to engage the British electorate, one has to wonder whether that electorate wants to be engaged.

I feel a chicken-and-egg situation brewing.

The popularity of any successful Internet initiative has always been determined by the extent to which it gives people what they want.  That is to say, the most tricked-out political campaign website imaginable, or the most shrewdly welcoming online political community on Earth, will fail if no one is willing to invest the time to visit it.

However well thought-through an attempt to politically engage British citizens online, it remains true that we are nowhere near as directly engaged in politics on an ongoing basis as our American cousins.

This is commonly attributed to the fact that the UK has a largely representative democracy, whereas in the US direct democracy is far more prevalent.  At the state, county and city levels of government, American voters are asked every two years to cast a ballot not just for a politician, but for or against policy propositions.  These referenda are fought at huge cost and on any number of issues, from gay marriage to stem-cell research, Indian gaming rights to campaign reform.

While political apathy and voter registration continue their long-term downward trend in both countries — or at least they did in the U.S. before the country entered this rather exciting political cycle — US citizens are called upon to have an overt political opinion far more than the British.

This may explain why, though there are thousands of smaller political blogs in the UK — Guido Fawkes, for example, a moderately amusing and fairly well attended expose of governmental incompetence — none of them could pretend to be opinion formers (or affirmers, in accordance with our view of most Political Places on the Web).

There is, however, reason to believe that all of this is changing and that UK politicians had better get their acts together pronto, and that reason is Comment is Free.

The only place in the UK for raging political debate in the fashion of a Huffington Post, The Guardian’s online comment section is a brutal fist-fight of conflicting opinions and ideologies, and many of those taking part are located in the UK.

It may be that Comment is Free has been successful because people are being driven to the site by traditional news.  So be it.  Once they’re there, they’re venting and interacting on a level comparable with any political site in the world.  This, for me, shows that there is an audience for US-style online political discourse in Britain.  How we satisfy that latent appetite is the question we’ll be focusing on here at RMM for a long time to come.