A new type of politics – is it just a slogan and a political gimmick? Or is one of Gordon Brown's big ideas starting to have more substance?

Some are still cynical about non-politicians being ministers and involving MPs from other parties in leading cross-party projects.  But at the beginning of September, the prime minister started to flesh out more wide-ranging plans for reforming the political system.

Mr Brown wants to strengthen three aspects of how our democracy works by deepening participative democracy, improving our representative democratic systems, and reforming party politics to encourage parties to reach out to new parts of the electorate.

The announcements on participative democracy were not on this occasion – as they had been in the summer Green Paper on the Governance of Britain – aimed at local communities or local government.  This time, the prime minister focused on issues and announced plans for citizens' juries on children, crime and the NHS, together with a nationwide citizens' summit and standing commissions to deal with deep-seated issues, such as the role of carers.

On representative democracy, Mr Brown said he favoured establishing a ‘speaker's conference' to look at reversing the decline in turnout at elections, registration, weekend voting, the representation of women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons and, in parallel with the Youth Citizenship Commission, whether we should lower the voting age to 16.

A speaker's conference is a device that has not been used since 1978 and is like an electoral Royal Commission. It is chaired by the speaker, and its membership is drawn from all political parties in the House of Commons. In the last century, there were five speaker's conferences which examined issues such as reform of the franchise, distribution of parliamentary seats and registration of electors.

Local authorities will be particularly interested in the idea of moving to weekend voting for general and local elections – something which the Government had already flagged up in July. The thinking being that people work long hours or commute long distances, and this can act as a disincentive for going to a polling station.

A weekend would, theoretically, make it more convenient and give more time for people to vote. It would also help turn an election into more of a national event, with lots of razzmatazz – as happens in a number of Continental countries. And countries voting at weekends do have higher turnouts, although the Electoral Reform Society says that countries which have moved their polling day have seen no rise in turnout.

Local government, of course, already has experience of conducting elections at weekends. A number of the electoral pilots pioneered what was termed ‘early voting'.

But owing to poor publicity, and confusion caused by the rest of the country voting on a Thursday, the trials were not particularly helpful. The commission recommended that further trials should take place and one option might be to try out weekend voting in a parliamentary by-election to see what difference that could make.

Of course, weekend voting is only one aspect of boosting electoral turnout.

Some would argue, for instance, that voting systems also need to change and become more proportional, so that every vote counts. Although, there again, the link to higher turnout is not automatic.

Others might say compulsory voting or e-voting is the way forward. 

For myself, I would like to see another idea examined which relates to Mr Brown's third area of concern – opening up party politics. Why not enable all voters as part of the electoral registration process to record whether they are supporters of Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat or any other party? That would enable the political parties to hold primaries and engage local people in choosing their candidates, as they do in the US.  

In part, higher turnout is a product of the intensity of political debate. Where elections are closely and fiercely contested, turnout is often higher. So I would support political parties in trying to invigorate and open up the political process and identify new supporters. Any other ideas out there?

Robert Hill is a former adviser to Tony Blair and now works as an independent consultant on public policy issues.