#9 Mark: Absolutely, depth of participation is important, but level of participation is as well. The old Labour Party had great levels of participation: anyone could turn up to a CLP meeting and raise an issue of concern to them. The downside was that the opportunities were so great that only a hardcore (and most often a hard left hardcore) actually did. This in turn put others off. The politics of turning up has a downside.

(Of course, if you happen to be one of the half dozen or so members of Gordon Brown’s kitchen cabinet you have a very deep level of participation indeed!)

Only a minority of states actually employ caucuses, and typically they are the large, sparsely populated ones. The system means that an Iowan has enormously more influence over who becomes the eventual president compared to a New Yorker (accepting of course that a Giuliani/Clinton face off would be a slightly different story).

In the Lib Dems, we sort of have the opposite problem. For the Euro and GLA selections, Kingstonians (large membership, MP, target seat for the GLAs) were feted while Hendonians (zzz…) were ignored, a fact which not only irritates those of us left out in the cold but limits our ability to appeal to Londoners across the city. There I happen to think we’ve got the level of participation/depth of participation wrong. It would be better to have our candidates decided by local party appointed delegates in the same way that we decide policy as it would make for more competitive selections in which the candidates would have a real prospect of meaningfully engaging with the selectorate. On the other hand we might consider going in completely the opposite direction and hold a series of open caucuses around the city. Anything would be better than the damp squib of a system we have now which promotes nothing but apathy.

#10 Mat: I go along with much of what you say, but a few points:

Firstly, the exact rules regarding primaries varies enormously from state to state. In many (possibly most) individuals who register as neither democrat nor republican can vote in the primaries so long as they don’t vote in ones for both parties.

Your point about time is significant though. Those unfashionable souls like myself who thought our recent leadership election had too short a timescale were proposing nothing like the length of time that would be required to hold a primary. Of course, more time means more deliberation and that is often a good thing. But once again, it always boils down to striking the right balance. Holding two primaries in as many years would have been absolutely catastrophic for us; on the other hand, I suspect that if we’d held a primary for leader in 2006 Ming would either have been in a much stronger position and not needed to resign, or he wouldn’t have been elected in the first place (I will leave open which of those two scenarios I think would have been more likely!).

I especially agree with this:
“The fact so few members of, say, Liberty, associate themselves with the Lib Dems is partly our failing. We must also take some responsibility for the fact that someone can even think of setting up a web-based campaign called Liberal Conspiracy without acknowledging that the Lib Dems should form an integral part of it.”

It took a chunk of people (including yourself and PEter Welch) to persuade me to join the party, and a chunk of the people at Lib-Consp are people I instinctively agree with on many issues. That they’re not Lib Dems is a failure on (y)our part as a party. A big time failure.

Primaries aren’t the answer, constitutional reform and especially STV is. And hopefully Labour will have the guts to put up a second candidate alongside Cllr Terry Kelly next time so the good voters of his ward can get rid of the dinosaur…

Besides, we already have primaries—in the US, you register as a party “member” for free, that gives you a vote in selection. We charge a nominal fee to cover costs. Either way, party supporters get to vote for their choice of candidates, and winnable seats even have contested hustings.

@Mark: I thought the leadership hustings I attended were pretty good examples of democracy in action myself, and they were for pretty much the same sort of thing, Nick is our candidate for PM, the USians are selecting their candidates for President. Same difference. Only ours takes a month, not 18.

What impressed me about watching the Iowa caucus wasn’t so much the scale of participation (of course, the TV tries to make it look like every room is full of active undecideds), it was the depth of it.

I’m just a total media junkie here. I’ve never participated in a caucus. But it seems to me that increasing participation isn’t the only thing that matters. I think there is a “depth” question too.

To take an extreme example, I think it would be healthier to have:

(a) turnout of 80% with 40% actively supporting a particular candidate/party

rather than

(b) turnout of 90% with 1% actively supporting a particular candidate/party

I’m not saying an Iowa caucus approach delivers (a), just that it might do a bit better than present British approaches to increasing voter participation in both breadth and depth.

The Lieberman/Lamont experience in 2006 seems to be a case in point. Moveon managed to oust Lieberman as the Democratic nominee but he won the seat in the senate anyway as an independent, suggesting that it was a hardcore that was involved in the primary, not a broad-based popular movement.

It’s very easy to get carried away with the rhetoric; the reality is slightly different.

The only embarrassment should be that Dan Hannan MEP – not a politician usually associated with fundamental and radical democratic constitutional change – has beaten the LibDems to the punch on this.

If you didn’t get the chance to watch the C-Span coverage of the Iowa caucus live, I highly recommend it. Without wanting to forgive the USA its many faults, it looked a lot more like democracy in action than anything the UK as come up with lately.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

Why? Because we are not America and we have a completely different system of government – thank God!