Season's Greetings from everyone at IPEG! As another year draws to a close, we felt we should adopt a festive theme and share some of this year's research outputs from IPEG in the form of 'Nine Lessons and Carols'.
1. You can increase voting turnout in elections by up to 7% by getting non-partisan canvassers to encourage people to vote by phone or by door step visits. The University of Manchester 'Get Out The Vote' campaign, for the election of May 2005, shows you do not need large resources to improve turnout. It is Britain 's first voting randomized control trial.
2. To encourage engage beyond the ballot box its clear what you need to do. IPEG, in work with partners, has developed a diagnostic tool drawing on extensive research for assessing official schemes to encourage participation and identifying remedial measures that might be taken to tackle problems. According to the C.L.E.A.R framework, people participate when they can: when they have the resources necessary to make their argument. People participate when they feel part of something: they like to participate because it is central to their sense of identity. They participate when they are enabled to do so by an infrastructure of civic networks and organisations. People participate when they are directly asked for their opinion. Finally, people participate when they experience the system they are seeking to influence as responsive. The tool is currently being trialled in municipalities throughout Europe.
3. The reason why there maybe mass disengagement from politics are complex but one thought that has occurred to us this year is that politics is designed to disappoint...well at least that's the argument that Gerry Stoker made in a presentation at the Australian National University in May 2005.
Gerry Stoker's presentation can be downloaded here.
4. Looking at the 2005 survey of councillors compared to the 2003 survey undertaken by ELG it appears that the initial strong dislike of the new political management arrangements by councillors is beginning to fade. Whereas in 2003 over a third thought the arrangements were a retrograde step, in 2005 only a quarter held that opinion.
For more information visit the ELG web page.
5. Leadership is important in embedding the ethical relationships between members and officers and in mainstreaming these within organisations. In this sense, ethical frameworks can become a transformative and evolving management tool.
6. A study of the 2004 local elections by Peter John and Oliver James shows that an excellent CPA score improves the votes of the party in office. It also suggests that a poor CPA score tells the voters to kick out the party in power.
7. As part of the ESRC's public services programme, Keith Dowding and Peter John have tested Hirschmann's Exit, Voice and Loyalty framework, finding that the possibility of exiting public services causes people to participate in politics less. Choice and voice do not go hand in hand.
8. Two emerging approaches to aid and governance in the 21st century.
The investigation started with a general idea of looking at two distinct approaches to aid and governance- the more conservative White-house led Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and the potentially radical DFID Drivers of Change (DOC) approach. It soon became clear that at the heart of this distinction lay a fundamentally different conception of how donors ought to engage with politics. The MCA adopts a view of extreme selectivity- of not engaging with countries with 'bad politics' interpreted as 'bad/poor governance'. It also internalises the assumption that giving benefits to some countries and denying others would incentivise the latter to catch up. DFID's Drivers of Change ostensibly operates on the contrary hypothesis-that there is no single path to a 'well governed' developmentalist state, and that donors (DFID) have to engage with specific internally led political processes.
This led us to think about the deeper roots of such a contrast. One line of investigation that emerged was to see how different domestic political constituencies in the two countries (USA and UK), with very different approaches to aid, may have influenced these vastly different conceptualisations.
David Hulme and Vasudha Chhotray will be presenting their findings at the Hallsworth Conference on March 16/17 2006.
9. IPEG is keen to develop new methodological tools, and it thinks it came up with a new idea: Design Experiments.