Voting is an effort and the Police and Crime Commissioners weren't worth it

Daniel Hannan has a few interesting thoughts on why the Police and Crime Commissioner elections have proven to be such a disaster.

I haven't read his book but I read his blog and Mr Hannan is extremely consistent on a few key themes, one of which is that more democracy is always better. Hannan has been an advocate of open primaries for MPs (of the type that chose Sarah Wollaston) and he was one of the strongest advocates of electing the PCCs. Unfortunately voters didn't exactly embrace them with the first PCC elections producing a turnout of about 15% and the recent West Midlands by-election going as low as 10%.

There were, of course, a number of structural factors that caused this and Hannan points some of them out. Elections are normally held in May, these were in November. They were for a new position so people weren't expecting them and there was relatively little coverage of them in the media, likely influenced by the fact that the UK-wide media is London based and there were no elections happening in London.

The part that I disagreed with though is Hannan's surprise that the elections turned out to involve political parties rather than independent candidates. Independent local champions running local police forces is a fine idea but I don't think it's surprising (or unnatural) that political parties turned out to be a dominant factor in the elections. Most people don't pay attention to politics more than is absolutely necessary. Life is complicated and people have far more to worry about than voting for an obscure election. The great ideal of Athenian democracy with citizens acting as legislators and voting on every important decision was only possible because these citizens had wives, servants and slaves to manage their households while they legislated. In a society when everyone is a citizen such an arrangement is not possible and devoting such time to politics is impractical.

What's far more practical is taking a quick shortcut and basing your voting decision on a party. I think I have the qualifications to call myself a political nerd but in the last local elections I had to force myself to actually find out some information about the Tower Hamlets Mayoral candidates so that I could make an informed decision. Tower Hamlets is a strange case and not all the information was available even then but reading through the documents was additional effort and it would have been far easier to just vote based on which party I supported.

I wrote a few years ago about the "1975 Public Affairs Act", an experiment in which people were asked whether to repeal the Act or keep it in force. Most Americans polled didn't have an opinion, quite sensible considering the Act doesn't actually exist and had been invented for the experiment. However, when told that Barack Obama wanted to keep the Act and Republicans in the US Congress wanted to repeal it, most people developed an opinion that they were confident enough to give to a pollster. This was presented as showing how sheep-like people are in following politicians for their views but I argued that it was just the opposite: people don't have the time or inclination to gather all the information about every single issue so taking a steer based on what politicians you tend to agree or disagree with think makes perfect sense.

Voters don't have enough time to be citizen legislators so they take shortcuts and party labels make that easy. That's how local council elections tend to work and I suspect it's how most other elections such as PCCs would work.

On turnout more generally, democracy is an effort and in not turning out, voters have sent the message that PCC elections are not worth their time or effort. Turnout in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2011 was 50% and in the 2010 UK General Election it was 65%. The message: these are the elections important enough to be worth spending the time to vote. If you want people to vote in other elections, they need to feel it's a better use of their time than whatever else they may have been doing.

Mixed ability audiences

I just got back from watching Guardians of the Galaxy (which is silly fun if you're curious, reviews here) and it reminded me how important it is to watch things with the right audience.

It's something of a cliché but how the audience you're with reacts to a film has an impact on how you enjoy it, especially with comedies. Whatever the reviews say I enjoyed Anchorman 2. I'm reasonably confident that if I'd watched that film in the same circumstances as I'd watched the first (with friends in university, on a tiny laptop with some beers) then I'd have laughed out loud far more often. As it was, in a nearly silent cinema where the rest of the audience was clearly not on the same page as me (with the exception of one other guy and my other half), it felt uncomfortable laughing at something I clearly enjoyed. It was a similar case with the Inbetweeners movie a few years ago, a nearly silent cinema making the film less funny while watching with friends takes it up a level.

Laughter is so often a shared phenomenon, hearing other people laugh makes your brain find things funnier while watching alone makes you chuckle inwardly to yourself at best most of the time. It's why sitcoms used to have laugh tracks, to trigger a similar response. The Simpsons Movie was another good example. Objectively a 6/10 film as far as being funny goes but in the crowded cinema I saw it in you'd easily feel it was an 8 or 9.

At the opposite end, nothing ruins a film like someone laughing out loud during a serious part, especially for films which skirt the line of taking themselves too seriously. Action films are the worst in this respect but Christopher Nolan's Batman ones are also at risk.

Getting back to Guardians of the Galaxy, it's a funny film. Self aware, crackling dialogue but so often it felt like the jokes bombed because nobody in the cinema was out loud laughing.

Maybe my local cinema just attracts the humourless and introverted?

Kurdistan is about getting more bang for your buck

Contrary to what I overheard someone in the office hysterically shouting the other day Barack Obama has not "sent troops into Iraq" but the US military has started doing two things in Iraq.

One is to start dropping food, water and other emergency supplies to the Yazidi refugees who are trapped on the Sinjar mountains with the possibility of a full-scale rescue being considered.

The other is to start carrying out airstrikes on the Islamic State militants attacking Iraqi Kurdistan and who are currently threatening the Kurdish capital of Erbil.

Technically it counts as "going back into Iraq" but nowhere near the scale that the excitable person in my office thinks. What's interesting is why Mr Obama chose to help the Kurds defend Erbil but seems more hesitant when the Islamic State was threatening Baghdad.

Kevin Drum highlights an interesting interpretation of this from Max Fisher at Vox basically saying that Obama has intervened in Iraq only when Iraqi Kurdistan was threatened by the Islamic State and that this amounts to telling the militants that they can do whatever they want in the rest of Iraq as long as they don't touch Kurdistan. The theory is that Kurdistan is a better governed and more dependable US ally than the "volatile, unstable, deeply corrupt, and increasingly authoritarian" government of Nouri al-Malaki in Baghdad (update - Malaki was replaced by Haider al-Abadi as I was writing this but it's relevant).

I think what's actually happening is that the cost/benefit analysis of the likely effectiveness of US airstrikes was significantly more favourable for helping the Kurds than helping the Iraqi national army in Baghdad. Boots on the ground were never going to be an option for a president elected in part by his opposition to the 2003 invasion so drone and airstrikes (as well as non-combat military advisors) were always going to be the military options of choice and they are only effective, in the long term, when there are troops to take and hold territory. In contrast to the Iraqi national army who, despite superior numbers, downed tools and deserted in the face of ISIS, the Kurdish militia - the Peshmerga - has been somewhat more effective and reliable.

Obama's foreign policy has generally been described as "don't do stupid stuff", which is certainly underrated as a principle given the failings of his predecessor, and he's tended to be pragmatic more than anything else, seeking to apply American force where it's able to have the biggest impact. Yes Kurdistan is a more reliable and US-friendly place than Iraq more generally but protecting the Kurds has a far higher probability of success than becoming the unofficial airforce for the Iraqi government and so that's where Obama is putting his resources.