The constituency project ten years on.

• Author: MacLeod, Peter

Ten years ago an enterprising Ph.D candidate at the London School of Economics spent four months touring nearly 100 of Canada's federal constituency offices--what he calls perhaps "the country's most dramatic if accidental parliamentary reform"--in an attempt to better understand a political culture where voter participation and trust in government were on the decline. In this article Peter MacLeod reflects on some of the subtle insights he picked up during his journey and looks to future innovations. He concludes by asking if in the digital age, new generations of MPs will be more inclined to think of their offices and local budgets in terms of open platforms for community building and learning.

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In 2004, I returned to Canada after two years spent tracking the New Labour experiment from my post as a researcher at the London think tank, Demos. Though post-9/11, these were still heady, pre-recession days where the British government was on a spending tear, London was booming, and Anthony Gidden's call for Third Way politics still felt fresh.

I had, only a short time before, enrolled as a part-time student at the London School of Economics with a plan to get a Ph.D. Though I was what could only generously be called a Canadianist, I had managed to take just enough courses in architecture and urbanism to be admitted to the sociology department's cities program.

Now I needed a research project and though I had enrolled with a plan to leave Canadian politics far behind and make a home in this new discipline, I couldn't entirely shake a fashionable preoccupation with declining voter turnout and trust in government. It's what I knew. And truthfully, it's what I cared about.

Soon after, I came back to Canada to begin my fieldwork, having decided to travel as far as I could from official Ottawa. My plan was to explore the periphery of Parliament and spend four months visiting some of the loneliest outposts in politics, sitting as they do alongside laundromats and video stores. This was the beginning of the Constituency Project.

Ten years later, the absurdity and light-heartedness of the project are possibly what matter most. Over the course of four months, I drove the length and width of the country, visiting nearly 100 offices belonging to local MPs.

The sample size was ridiculous. The same study could have been easily completed with four offices, maybe 10. But as an antidote to London and to theory, there was something honest and...