John Sergeant.

The retired BBC political editor John Sergeant’s resignation from the popular television programme Strictly Come Dancing was one of the top entertainment stories this week. John Sergeant was by all accounts not a very good dancer and was always rated poorly by the panel of expert judges who help to shape public opinion. By this criteria he should have been voted out but he remained on the show for 9 weeks – winning the popular vote week after week.

His resilience eventually became controversial and he withdrew from the competition on November 19. His resignation has ignited much discussion in the media.

The producers of the programme have supported Sergeant in his decision; contributors to blogs on this issue accuse the judges of forcing Sergeant to leave. They are disappointed at his departure but also at the failure to make the public vote count in shaping who continues forward in the programme. However, in his resignation speech Sergeant suggested that he had quit the programme of his own volition.

He claimed that we live in a democracy and so people will vote as they like, but that his continued presence on the programme was stretching the joke too far. This democratic nature of voting and the rejection of democracy seems to be at the heart of the question on many people’s lips   - did he quit or was he pushed?

The programme Strictly Come Dancing, has a top slot on BBC One on Saturday evenings. Strictly is a game show – competition and elimination of the weaker participant are the tools through which the narrative for the next episode is written. Some people will go on to be part of next week’s programme, others won’t. The basis for the competition is talent, produced with the help of professional dancers, judged by a panel of professional dancers. And the glamour, the sequins, the sets all make Strictly a visual treat for a Saturday night. It brings the glamour of the catwalk into autumn evenings. Hence, the programme advertises itself as offering sparkle, glitz, glamour and of being an extravaganza.

Strictly Come Dancing is also part of the later versions of reality show – a mixture of game show, talent show and glitzy entertainment show. At its heart, Strictly is a reality show - the sixteen contestants who are invited to participate in it are all scripted as ordinary with regard to their dancing skills. The lack of professional dancing skills is part of most people’s everyday reality. The contestants claim ordinariness in comparison to the professional dancers with whom they perform – these contestants could be us! Yet it is the lack of their ordinariness – their high profile (but not too high-profile as to threaten the ordinariness) presence on our screens, in sport, in the news that make them interesting.

It is also through their prominence in these other walks of life that they become part of our reality – we, the ordinary people already know them. They are extraordinary but not that extraordinary that we can not be made to see how they are like us – not professional dancers. This double play on ordinariness is an essential ingredient of Strictly Come Dancing’s appeal. The extraordinary people who participate in the programme are democratised through their lack of professional dancing skills.

This double-edged nature of ordinariness extends to the audience. The panel of judges adjudicates on the performance of each set of competitors. They provide knowledgeable critique of technical aspects of dance. They are clearly experts. Yet, their commentary does not determine the fate of the contestants – that is left to the audience. Moreover, in the age of technology, this is a mediated audience, not just those in the room at the time. The multiple sites where Strictly is debated - blog sites, newspaper articles, the conversations over dinner – means that like all programmes, its effects spill beyond the room in which it is conducted.

People who watch on television or through the Internet make up the bulk of the voters. But the same right to vote also extends to those who don’t watch the programme. As participants in this multiply mediated world, those who don’t watch too may decide to express their views by casting a vote. Moreover, there is no way of distinguishing between the votes of those who watch the programme and those who don’t. It is inherently democratic, giving everyone – indeed anyone – an equal chance to vote contestants off a programme.

Clearly the adjudication of talent is then not necessarily a part of deciding who goes forward from week-to-week. Yet, the choice between contestants is often seen as an act of discernment where ordinary viewers can make judgements on dance. It places members of the lay audience (and the not so-lay, there are bound to be professional dancers who are not part of the adjudicating panel, who too use technical knowledge to vote) in the position of technical judge. It suggests that we, the ordinary people can understand and appreciate dance, and we can even choose between performers. Technical knowledge is democratised and lay people are placed as technical experts.

Most of the time the programme trundles on with some degree of consensus between this form of technical knowledge and lay knowledge, between talent show and entertainment show, between judges and the voting public. The ordinariness of the contestants is slowly removed as the participants acquire technical skills. They become talented and rightful contenders for winning a talent show. They become extra-ordinarily able to dance. Or when that fails to happen there is some consensus between the views of the technical judges and the lay people – the contestants who fail to become extraordinarily talented are criticised by the judges and voted off the programme by the voting public. Judges shape public comment and eventually the two merge in their decisions.

Yet in the sixth episode of Strictly Come Dancing this pact came undone. The ordinary people repeatedly voted to keep John Sergeant on the programme despite his poor dancing skills. They voted for his affability, his entertainment value; they ignored his lack of talent. They voted for his ordinariness but also his extraordinariness. Gaffes seem to be part of John Sergeant’s personality – after all, his most memorable broadcast was a gaffe made at the time of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. He was standing outside the doors of NO. 10 telling the nation that she would not come out to speak to the people and before he had finished, the camera focused on the Prime Minister coming out of the door to do just that.

The judges, on the other hand, performed their role as adjudicators of talent and criticised his performance. The mismatch between Strictly as entertainment show and Strictly as talent show came to the fore. There were questions raised about the nature of the programme as a talent show, given Sergeant’s continued survival, and eventually he resigned despite continuing to win the popular vote.

John Sergeant is right in stating that we live in a democracy but the discursive powers that shape that democracy that influence voting and that make some individuals make the decisions they take are clearly far more complex. The democratic nature of the country, the programme and the role of the voting public in shaping the reality of reality television remains unclear.

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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The advent of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and the explosion in social networking that the web sites and ‘mash ups of technology’ that underpin it have enabled has led to a resurgence of interest in electronic or digital democracy. This is the belief that first emerged in the United States in the 1970s that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to renew democracy. It was argued then, as now, that the interactivity of these new technologies – by which contemporary advocates of digital democracy mean the internet – will deliver new forms of political practice and participation, thereby reinvigorating and reinventing public debate and political accountability.

As with technological development generally much of the literature and debate on the internet and democracy has always been highly technologically determinist and optimistic: it treats technological development as historically inevitable (hence my use of ‘will’ not ‘can’, above), politically neutral, and fully accepts that any drawbacks and risks are outweighed by the benefits. For digital democracy specifically this translates into development, research and policy that is heavily biased towards the input side of democracy. That is, on technologies and their application and operation and not on what impact these have (if any) on outputs such as policy and decision making.

Allied to this entrenched determinism is a long standing tradition that can be traced back to the libertarian beliefs of the early pioneers of the internet: it is an inherently democratic medium. Its decentralised and devolved nature, and the weak forms of control to which it was subject for many years, certainly aided this view, thereby creating a utopian image of the internet as a separate socio technical system. Today we can witness this in much of the discussion of, and activity in, ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and so on. However, the takeover of social networking sites and rapidly growing colonisation of virtual worlds by multi-national enterprises, allied with the widespread surveillance of cyberspace by government agencies must make even those who subscribe to the separate social system thesis question their position.

The potential for digital democracy has suffered the same fate, I believe. As the power and influence of governments and organisations committed to advancing consumerist forms of managed democracy has grown so the potential of the internet to act as a liberation technology has rapidly decreased. Instead we are witnessing the consolidation of a trend that was observable by 2000, when, working with colleagues from Denmark and Holland, we concluded our review of electronic democracy in Western Europe by reporting that:

“The scenario that emerges then, is of a “two-tier democracy”: a “big” democracy, concerned with policy and decision-making at a national and international level…And a “small” democracy where “ordinary” citizens try to make a difference in terms of the quality of everyday life. (Hoff, Horrocks and Tops 2000:187)

Since then the gulf between big and small democracy has grown as more and more people have become disengaged from the terrestrial world via their on-line personas, increasingly losing touch with, and interest in, real world politics and decision making and what they can do to influence and control these. To me, therefore, the main democratic problem of today seems to be how (or if) these two types of democracy can be reconnected.

Further reading

Democratic Governance and New Technology, edited by Ivan Horrocks, Jens Hoff, Pieter Tops, published by Routledge

About the author

Ivan Horrocks is a lecturer and member of the Technology Management Group at The Open University. He has written many publications about the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and government and politics.

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The recent local elections prompted me to reflect on the meaning of the ballot box. When I went to vote last week, a tarnished and rather battered box lay humbly on a chair: how, I thought, could this humble object be both fount and symbol of British democracy? And if it is under threat, which it appears to be, in particular from postal voting, does this subtly change the latent understandings of what our democracy is?

By ‘latent’ I am emphasising a psychological approach to ideas. Namely, the idea of democracy like any idea, has some underlying meanings, which are perhaps not often very explicit or conscious.

On 28^th April, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published a damning report into called Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern. It shows how the mechanics of UK elections have been tampered with to the extent that the UK now has the lowest public confidence in free and fair elections in Western Europe. Voters can now obtain a postal vote by simply requesting one, whereas they used to have to demonstrate they needed one because they would be away from home, or because of work commitments preventing attendance in person. Now, instances of poll rigging are not rare; the Rowntree report refers to 42 convictions for electoral fraud in the last 7 years. Rowntree is not alone in its criticism; the Council of Europe, the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society have all highlighted serious defects. The clearest way to clean up the system is individual registration. But crosses on postal votes for a whole household can easily be made fraudulently by the nominated householder.

So the danger of postal voting is that individual voters are denied their vote. The Rowntree report says that cheating is not exclusive to any one party or group, but that in the cases of some groups, extended family and kinship networks are mobilised to secure support for particular candidates, and patriarchs and ‘community leaders’ find it all too easy to collect the votes of weaker members of their group. Only 46 per cent of British Asians regard postal voting as safe, according to the report. When there was a parallel concern in sectarian Northern Ireland, postal votes were limited to those who could prove genuine inability to get to a polling booth; and each voter registers individually. But, the government says that postal voting is ‘more convenient’.

So, what is the meaning of voting and what part does the ballot box as a technology of democracy play? As Tony Benn has often said, election day is a great day because only then is every one of us equal in power. You can vote or spoil your paper in privacy. Your vote counts no more and no less than anybody else’s. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights stipulates ‘universal and equal suffrage, held by secret vote guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the elector’.

A vote concerns the expression of views on a collective state of affairs and so it follows that these must be collectively addressed. Elections are a modern version for the meeting place in which citizens gathered to decide the issues of the day. In a world of large populations, citizens can no longer gather together in one place, so they elect proxies – representatives – whose legal standing depends on virtual gatherings: periodic collections of votes by the non-present body of citizens. From painted balls in the clay jars of antiquity to the glass, wooden, and then metal boxes of more recent centuries, voting systems have always signified a self evident simplicity and directness. A real, physical piece of paper, the ballot, is dropped into the box. So long as you know your own vote will both be counted and count towards the final outcome of the election, the system is legitimate.

The psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott wrote perceptively some decades ago about democracy, saying that it can be defined as society well adjusted to its healthy individual members. That is, it assumes maturity for its members; but I’d turn this around to say that the very act of voting in a public space is what helps to create maturity. What are the accepted qualities of democratic machinery? he asked. In his view its essence is the free vote by secret ballot. This ensures the freedom of the people to express deep and private feelings, to vote someone in or to vote someone out. The secret ballot provides a space for individuals to take full responsibility for themselves.

One final thing occurred to me when I went to vote: the act of going to a place to vote brings one into an encounter, however brief and perfunctory, with one’s fellow citizens as citizens. The latent meaning of the ballot box is that it makes people gather, however temporarily. Thus it both symbolically and actually constitutes the very idea of a link between how individual people vote (a vote) and the aggregate (the vote). A vote is a gathering. But postal votes are surely part and parcel of the mantra of consumer choice in which the conception of public, shared space where all are equal is unimportant.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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