As I indicated in my last post, we need to find ways of enabling people to participate more in the political process, in particular the European one. Will this be done by throwing public money as a means of encouraging people to vote or will it be done by associations of individuals encouraging them to participate in a two-way process?

In the recent European Elections, three notable points stand out about turnout:

• Estonia, the first European country to introduce i-voting (internet voting), managed to increase its turnout from 26.8%, one of the lowest in the 2004 elections, to 43.9%.
• The Pirate Party in Sweden now has about 50,000 members, which makes it the third largest political party in Sweden.
• Also in Sweden, the country’s Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeld, recently indicated at a meeting I attended that Swedish turnout was up 6% due to the fact that issues were discussed, not institutions. Voters found this more interesting, surprisingly?

Looking at the two maps on my office wall of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, both of which date back to the 18th Century, the kind of political representation we have today was unimaginable then.  Even when I began as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 1984, all I had was a telephone - there was no computer, no fax, no email and no mobile phone. Since the introduction of the browser system in 1995, the digital revolution underway has increasingly empowered individuals to have a greater say in shaping the environments in which they live. 

As for the use of the internet by MEPs today, a recent survey by Fleishman-Hillard indicates that only 24% of MEPs use a blog while 62% of MEPs have either never heard of Twitter or have no plans to use it. Not surprisingly perhaps, but depressing that so little attention is being paid to how to communicate to the electorate and to listen to their views using modern technologies to do so.

Barack Obama’s election campaign showed the power of the internet in enabling people to feel a sense of belonging in the political system. Recent events in Iran are a further example of how the internet is revolutionising politics. The International Herald Tribune reports that Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter to challenge traditional levers of state media control. 

Clearly a technological revolution is required in the way in which MEPs link to their electorates. A forthcoming study by the European Internet Foundation “Towards a Digital World in 2025: What should Europe do?” is likely to indicate that if parliamentarians do not become internet savvy, they will be left behind.

European Parliament