Lobbying for Emergent Democracy

Smart Mobs points to Lobbysmith.com, a marketplace for hiring lobbyists run by a neutral entity: Lobbysmith.com is an unaffiliated, non-partisan e-service designed to facilitate and encourage public participation in political and corporate affairs. Lobbysmith.com is in NO way affiliated with any political party or political interest organization, public or private. There is no mention of who is behind the marketplace, but the policies imply good intent.

This is a key component for making emergent democracy work.

I've written before how emergent pluralism needs to harness institutional (lobbying) and individual (activism) pluralism to allow easily formed constituencies to have influence:

Today the US has an unconstructive balance between Institutional and Individualized Pluralism. Weakened parties reduce longer-term best interest decisions. Lobbying only is effective in highly organized groups on select issues that resonate for deep dedication and financial backing. And where lobbying groups do not achieve critical mass, decision makers rely short term polling of sentiment. The majority of the U.S. doesn't participate in the party system nor special interest groups. This lack of participation results in a disenfranchised public and ineffective government of both long and short-term issues.

If simple tools could decrease the cost of organization as well as enable a transactional norm between organizations, a new form of pluralism could arise. Emergent Pluralism depicts a society whose members who have institutional loyalties to easily form issue groups that have direct interaction their elected representatives and the media.

If emergent democracy is to take hold, its mechanisms for group forming need to leverage how institutional decisions are influenced, not a new form of direct democracy.

Weblogs and other tools increasingly enable group forming, deliberative polling and consensus forming. While adoption of these tools is relatively small, emergent constituencies that use them have proven their ability to influence, largely through the means of individualized pluralism: petitions, shaping media, emailing representatives, activism and facilitating grassroots support.

Loose coupling of constituencies with lobbyists has been just an idea. One notable exception is MoveOn, whose leaders lobby on behalf of its constituency. But having lobbying organizations independent of static constituencies could enable flash constituencies to gain influence on under-represented issues could shift the political landscape. Its already happened with the state-DMCA thanks to the hard work of good people. But if their coordination risks and costs were lower and they could leverage existing relationships with decision makers, democracy would benefit.