Tobias Escher at the OII

At last week’s eDemocracy’08 I talked about the users of WriteToThem.com and their experience when trying to communicate with their political representatives because this is what WriteToThem is about – making it easy for people to find out their representatives (councillor, members of parliament, etc) and sending them an email.

The truly amazing finding is that people who use the site are not the ones who are already politically engaged and organized. Those are using the site too but many have never before contacted their representative and most are not politically active at all – so here we observe a clear effect of engagement as the site activates people to participate politically who have not done so before.

Another interesting finding is that many citizens make very positive experiences when using the site to contact their representatives. Given a general climate of distrust between represented and representatives many user comments indicate a profound surprise at the respect and help they receive from their politicians. Crucially we can observe that the online experiences do at times translate into political participation offline e.g. in the form of voting as the quote below nicely illustrates:

“Mr [name of representative] went above and beyond what I expected to get, I thought I would just be totally ignored, this experience has made me decide to definitely vote in the next elections”

However, of course it also works exactly the other way around which should be a clear sign of warning for many of those politicians who do rarely reply to their constituents (see for example the MP responsiveness league table) as this participant makes clear:

“What’s the point when your councillor doesn’t reply? He’s not getting my vote in the next election, nor from any of my nuclear and extended families and I’ll tell everyone at work about my lack of a reply as well. 23 of them live in his constituency.“

For more details see the presentation (pdf, 2.6MB).

The results are based on a user survey I set up on behalf of mySociety as part of a bigger project that aims to evaluate the impact of many of their by now well-known eDemocracy websites (e.g. TheyWorkForYou.com or FixMyStreet.com). There is much more to come so keep an eye on this space. Also, if there are certain questions of particular interest to you in relation to mySociety projects that you think could/should/might be answered by this research, do drop me a line or comment below!