Total Politics website launches…

… including a small contribution from myself:

The Secret Failings of American Politicians on the Internet

In his interview with Total Politics Gordon Brown said British politicians are failing to grasp the internet’s true potential. This is part of the argument put by Robert Colvile in a recent pamphlet from the Centre for Policy Studies.

It is easy to make comparisons which make political activity in the UK seem anaemic especially compared to the US. Take just some of the figures from Barack Obama’s campaign. At the start of March it had: 1,000,000 donors, 12.5 million channel views on YouTube, 655,000 signed up supporters on Facebook. The bulging list of numbers goes on and on.

But wait. The US has a population six times the UK’s. It has higher internet access too (71% to 66% according to the latest figures). It has a political system overwhelmingly dominated by two parties. By contrast, in the UK we have three major political parties – and more in Scotland and Wales. More parties means less support for any one party, and so a smaller pool of people for a party to tap.

When divided by six and then trimmed and trimmed again many of the US figures seem rather less remarkable. Obama’s number of donors, for example, comes out pro rata as fewer than the number of donors to the Liberal Democrats in the last year. Yes – there was another Democrat candidate in the field gathering donations. But they are – unlike the UK – in the midst of an election campaign, and anyway there is a much greater willingness to give money to politics in the US than in the UK, a difference that is a rather mixed blessing.

This is no fluke of numbers. Instead it is consistent with the pattern I have tracked with email list sizes in the run-up to the 2004 and 2000 Presidential elections. After adjusting for the same trio of differences, the size of US presidential campaign email lists have frequently been smaller than the size of Liberal Democrat lists of the same year for most of the campaign, only sometimes overtaking in the last stages.

However, the structure of US politics makes American achievements seem far greater than the actual edge in performance. In the US, campaigns build up their infrastructure in the run up to polling day (or to their candidate pulling out) and then, once that campaign is over, the infrastructure is largely dismantled.

It’s the secret failing of American politics. The way that once attention has moved on from the glorious building up of an organisation, it almost always is allowed to fall apart. Occasionally spin off organisations continue the cause on other stages afterwards, and email lists are sometimes used subsequently. But these are the exceptions.

By contrast, in the UK there is a much higher level of organisation throughout the electoral cycle. Campaigns don’t dismantle after an election in the UK, there is simply not the same scope for a dramatic reconstruction. Far from being a sign of failure, it is a sign of success in maintaining year-round interest from supporters and their involvement in politics.

Figures from the Liberal Democrats indicate the total web traffic to all our sites, national and local, is somewhere around four times bigger than the traffic merely to www.libdems.org.uk and – remembering the internet is more than just the web – more people receive emails from the Liberal Democrats than visit one of our websites.

Whilst there is no room for complacency, it is wise to take with a few pinches of salt some of the analyses that draw particularly bleak pictures.