Loss of legitimacy
Economic structures influence a citizen's participation in politics and their relationship with the state.
The rise of post-war consumerism saw the development of retail politics, with its focus groups and emphasis on sellable messages and carefully chosen language.
Politicians and parties, and commentators, have become comfortable with the concept of retail politics, with the main parties competing for votes in the same way that rival supermarkets might do for shoppers.
But that pattern of consumerism is changing, and this will mean change for politics too.
As voters and citizens apply the next stage of economic development (the expression of their niche interests) to politics, the impact on the major political parties will be profound.
Consumers who previously had to purchase an entire CD now buy just the tracks from which they most like; only hard core fans buy the entire album. Similarly with party manifestos, while the most loyal supporters might willingly sign up to the whole document, most voters would prefer to pick and choose the policies they genuinely like.
So the main parties will see their share of the vote decline further, and overall turnout is also likely to drop as people opt out of participating in an increasingly out-of-touch political system that doesn't fit with how they live the rest of their lives.
Indeed, in the UK there is evidence that this has already started happening. Parvin and McHugh noted:
"Between 1931 and 1970, the vote for the two largest parties in every UK general election totalled over 85 per cent; by 2001 it had fallen to 72 per cent. More recently, in the 2004 European elections, the two-party share of the vote fell to below 50 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats and a string of smaller, single-issue parties gaining ground. The disintegration of the old two-party system was evident in the 2004 Hartlepool by-election, in which the Conservative candidate was pushed into fourth place – the first time a candidate from the Official Opposition has finished outside the top three in a parliamentary election since the Second World War. Such has been the decline in traditional party attachments that local and national politics have seen the return of Independent candidates." [i]
The manifestos of the main parties represent compromises that most people have long since stopped making in other spheres of activity. This unwillingness to make compromises can be seen in the rise of more direct forms of political action and single issue campaigning.
And without the 'broad church' compromises of the traditional manifesto, there will be little left to hold together mass political parties in the way they currently exist.
What's more, this process is irreversible. As Lawrence Lessig wrote in the New Republic, "the network is not going away", no matter how much disruption it causes to newspapers or the music industry.
"We are not going to kill the 'darknet' (as Microsoft called it in a fantastic paper about the inevitable survival of peer-to-peer technologies). We are not going to regulate access to news, or ads for free futons. We are not going back to the twentieth century. In a decade, a majority of Americans will not even remember what that century was like."
Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio has concluded that Government 2.0 should not be about how to "leverage technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to better engage constituents".
"The problem is that Government 2.0 is not about organisations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialise knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions."
He adds that this will mean people increasingly putting their trust in non-official sources of information, which means that the "role and clout of some government institutions will be inevitably challenged".
So political parties would be mistaken if they think that they stand apart from this economic upheaval, because these changes are cultural as well as economic.
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