Best, Nick

P.S. Great blog, btw.

Just discovered your post, so sorry this comment is a couple of days late. A bit harsh I feel – although I suppose I have a vested interest in this… .

For me, the Obama campaign is interesting because it opens a window – only partially, I might add – on new forms of political and social organisation that we are starting to see emerging. These are radically decentralized in comparison with previously existing types of institutions (what has been termed “low systemness”). If we are able to use the example of Obama as an illustrative example to explain these concepts to people, then I am all for it.

To take your general points in turn:

- Politicians are risk adverse both online and offline (on this, read the work of the superb American scholar Jenny Stromer-Galley, who also has a chapter in our book). So when you ask “why will our politicians not take risks?”, my response is because the institutions do not incentivise them to do so. In the US, the primary system creates a highly competative and unpredictable environment perfect for catalysing innovation (This leads to questions of institutional design. In other words, how do we recreate political institutions that are foster innovation? I would add that, to discuss this, we need to go beyond the scope of The Change We Need and look at questions of civic, rather than party, institutional design – but that is another research project for another day!).

- Real optimism in politics has to come from the bottom and not the top. As Ben Brandzel argues “The Obama movement” was actually the product of many years hard work and galvanisation by organisers and ordinary Americans. For many of those years, they had no Obama to gather around. Labour’s recent mistake was to take a top-down approach to online campaigning. With this understanding, the real role of parties turns into providing platforms for activism, not trying to “astroturf” it.

- Completely agree with your final point (on command and control, and particiption), and we offer some quite detailed justification for it in our conclusion.

- Finally on the point of fundraising. I have written on the regulatory differents between the two countries and why we should not expect a replication of “money-bomb fundraising”. But focusing wholly on figures, I think, that misunderstands some of the lessons from the US. This goes back to a big debate in literature on campaign finance in the UK. Two schools of thought exist – first, that people donate money as a form of political activism, and second that they donate it in lieu of political activism. The second school has been highly dominant in recent decades, especially during and after the New Labour years, when many new members just gave their subs and then did nothing else. So the dominant view became that donations were akin to passive participation. But Obama (and other US campaigns) have proved this is not necessarily the case. Through data management, they skillfully construct a relationship with supporters, gradually raising the expectations of their participation and making them shareholders in the campaign. When they donate, they are buying a stake in the outcome of the election. To adopt that approach, even if the resultant amounts were relatively small, would be a big shift in the way we do things.

Best, Nick