Ed: There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. For example, less than half of the Finnish electorate under 40 choose to vote. In your article you argue that Finland’s 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act aimed to address this problem by allowing for the crowdsourcing of ideas for new legislation. How common is this idea? (And indeed, how successful?)

Taneli: The idea that digital participation could counter the “legitimacy crisis” is a fairly common one. Digital utopians have nurtured that idea from the early years of the internet, and have often been disappointed. A couple of things stand out in the Finnish experiment that make it worth a closer look.

First, the digital crowdsourcing system with strong digital identification is a reliable and potentially viral campaigning tool. Most civic initiative systems I have encountered rely on manual or otherwise cumbersome, and less reliable, signature collection methods.

Second, in the Finnish model, initiatives that break the threshold of 50,000 names must be treated in the Parliament equally to an initiative from a group of MPs. This gives the initiative constitutional and political weight.

Ed: The Act led to the passage of Finland’s first equal marriage law in 2014. In this case, online platforms were created for collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation. An NGO created a well-used platform, but it subsequently had to shut it down because it couldn’t afford the electronic signature system. Crowds are great, but not a silver bullet if something as prosaic as authentication is impossible. Where should the balance lie between NGOs and centrally funded services, i.e. government?

Taneli: The crucial thing in the success of a civic initiative system is whether it gives the people real power. This question is decided by the legal framework and constitutional basis of the initiative system. So, governments have a very important role in this early stage – designing a law for truly effective citizen initiatives.

When a framework for power-making is in place, service providers will emerge. Should the providers be public, private or third sector entities? I think that is defined by local political culture and history.

In the United States, the civic technology field is heavily funded by philanthropic foundations. There is an urge to make these tools commercially viable, though no one seems to have figured out the business model. In Europe there’s less philanthropic money, and in my experience experiments are more often government funded.

Both models have their pros and cons, but I’d like to see the two continents learning more from each other. American digital civic activists tell me enviously that the radically empowering Finnish model with a government-run service for crowdsourcing for law would be impossible in the US. In Europe, civic technologists say they wish they had the big foundations that Americans have.

Ed: But realistically, how useful is the input of non-lawyers in (technical) legislation drafting? And is there a critical threshold of people necessary to draft legislation?

Taneli: I believe that input is valuable from anyone who cares to invest some time in learning an issue. That said, having lawyers in the campaign team really helps. Writing legislation is a special skill. It’s a pity that the co-creation features in Finland’s Open Ministry website were shut down due to a lack of funding. In that model, help from lawyers could have been made more accessible for all campaign teams.

In terms of numbers, I don’t think the size of the group is an issue either way. A small group of skilled and committed people can do a lot in the drafting phase.

Ed: But can the drafting process become rather burdensome for contributors, given professional legislators will likely heavily rework, or even scrap, the text?

Taneli: Professional legislators will most likely rework the draft, and that is exactly what they are supposed to do. Initiating an idea, working on a draft, and collecting support for it are just phases in a complex process that continues in the parliament after the threshold of 50,000 signatures is reached. A well-written draft will make the legislators’ job easier, but it won’t replace them.

Ed: Do you think there’s a danger that crowdsourcing legislation might just end up reflecting the societal concerns of the web-savvy – or of campaigning and lobbying groups

Taneli: That’s certainly a risk, but so far there is little evidence of it happening. The only initiative passed so far in Finland – the Equal Marriage Act – was supported by the majority of Finns and by the majority of political parties, too. The initiative system was used to bypass a political gridlock. The handful of initiatives that have reached the 50,000 signatures threshold and entered parliamentary proceedings represent a healthy variety of issues in the fields of education, crime and punishment, and health care. Most initiatives seem to echo the viewpoint of the ‘ordinary people’ instead of lobbies or traditional political and business interest groups.

Ed: You state in your article that the real-time nature of digital crowdsourcing appeals to a generation that likes and dislikes quickly; a generation that inhabits “the space of flows”. Is this a potential source of instability or chaos? And how can this rapid turnover of attention be harnessed efficiently so as to usefully contribute to a stable and democratic society?

Taneli: The Citizens’ Initiative Act in Finland is one fairly successful model to look at in terms of balancing stability and disruptive change. It is a radical law in its potential to empower the individual and affect real power-making. But it is by no means a shortcut to ‘legislation by a digital mob’, or anything of that sort. While the digital campaigning phase can be an explosive expression of the power of the people in the ‘time and space of flows’, the elected representatives retain the final say. Passing a law is still a tedious process, and often for good reasons.

Ed: You also write about the emergence of the “mediating citizen” – what do you mean by this?

Taneli: The starting point for developing the idea of the mediating citizen is Lance Bennett’s AC/DC theory, i.e. the dichotomy of the actualising and the dutiful citizen. The dutiful citizen is the traditional form of democratic citizenship – it values voting, following the mass media, and political parties. The actualising citizen, on the other hand, finds voting and parties less appealing, and prefers more flexible and individualised forms of political action, such as ad hoc campaigns and the use of interactive technology.

I find these models accurate but was not able to place in this duality the emerging typologies of civic action I observed in the Finnish case. What we see is understanding and respect for parliamentary institutions and their power, but also strong faith in one’s skills and capability to improve the system in creative, technologically savvy ways. I used the concept of the mediating citizen to describe an actor who is able to move between the previous typologies, mediating between them. In the Finnish example, creative tools were developed to feed initiatives in the traditional power-making system of the parliament.

Ed: Do you think Finland’s Citizens Initiative Act is a model for other governments to follow when addressing concerns about “democratic legitimacy”?

Taneli: It is an interesting model to look at. But unfortunately the ‘legitimacy crisis’ is probably too complex a problem to be solved by a single participation tool. What I’d really like to see is a wave of experimentation, both on-line and off-line, as well as cross-border learning from each other. And is that not what happened when the representative model spread, too?

Read the full article: Heikka, T., (2015) The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation. Policy and Internet 7 (3) 268–291.

Taneli Heikka is a journalist, author, entrepreneur, and PhD student based in Washington.

Taneli Heikka was talking to Blog Editor Pamina Smith.

This may well make Twitter particularly well suited to political debate and activity. Yet important questions emerge in terms of the patterns of conduct and engagement. Chief among them: are users mainly seeking to reinforce their own viewpoints and link with likeminded persons, or is there a basis for widening and thoughtful exposure to a variety of perspectives that may improve the collective intelligence of the citizenry as a result?

Conflict and Polarization

Political polarization often occurs in a so-called ‘echo chamber’ environment, in which individuals are exposed to only information and communities that support their own viewpoints, while ignoring opposing perspectives and insights. In such isolating and self-reinforcing conditions, ideas can become more engrained and extreme due to lack of contact with contradictory views and the exchanges that could ensue as a result.

On the web, political polarization has been found among political blogs, for instance. American researchers have found that liberal and conservative bloggers in the US tend to link to other bloggers who share their political ideology. For Kingwell, a prominent Canadian philosopher, the resulting dynamic is one that can be characterized by a decline in civility and a lessening ability for political compromise to take hold. He laments the emergence of a ‘shout doctrine’ that corrodes the civic and political culture, in the sense that divisions are accentuated and compromise becomes more elusive.

Such a dynamic is not the result of social media alone – but rather it reflects for some the impacts of the Internet generally and the specific manner by which social media can lend itself to broadcasting and sensationalism, rather than reasoned debate and exchange. Traditional media and journalistic organizations have thus become further pressured to act in kind, driven less by a patient and persistent presentation of all sides of an issue and more by near-instantaneous reporting online. In a manner akin to Kingwell’s view, one prominent television news journalist in the US, Ted Koppel, has lamented this new media environment as a danger to the republic.

Nonetheless, the research is far from conclusive as to whether the Internet increases political polarization. Some studies have found that among casual acquaintances (such as those that can typically be observed on Twitter), it is common to observe connections across ideological boundaries. In one such funded by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the National Science Foundation, findings suggest that people who often visit websites that support their ideological orientation also visit web sites that support divergent political views. As a result, greater sensitivity and empathy for alternative viewpoints could potentially ensue, improving the likelihood for political compromise – even on a modest scale that would otherwise not have been achievable without this heightened awareness and debate.

Early Evidence from Canada

The 2011 federal election in Canada was dubbed by some observers in the media as the country’s first ‘social media election’ – as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter became prominent sources of information for growing segments of the citizenry, and evermore strategic tools for political parties in terms of fundraising, messaging, and mobilizing voters. In examining Twitter traffic, our own intention was to ascertain the extent to which polarization or cross-pollinization was occurring across the portion of the electorate making use of this micro-blogging platform.

We gathered nearly 6000 tweets pertaining to the federal election made by just under 1500 people during a three-day period in the week preceding election day (this time period was chosen because it was late enough in the campaign for people to have an informed opinion, but still early enough for them to be persuaded as to how they should vote). Once the tweets were retrieved, we used social network analysis and content analysis to analyze patterns of exchange and messaging content in depth.

We found that overall people do tend to cluster around shared political views on Twitter. Supporters of each of the four major political parties identified in the study were more likely to tweet to other supporters of the same affiliation (this was particularly true of the ruling Conservatives, the most inwardly networked of the four major politically parties). Nevertheless, in a significant number of cases (36% of all interactions) we also observed a cross-ideological discourse, especially among supporters of the two most prominent left-of-centre parties, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC). The cross-ideological interactions among supporters of left-leaning parties tended to be agreeable in nature, but often at the expense of the party in power, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). Members from the NDP and Liberal formations were also more likely to share general information and updates about the election as well as debate various issues around their party platforms with each other.

By contrast, interactions between parties that are ideologically distant seemed to denote a tone of conflict: nearly 40% of tweets between left-leaning parties and the Conservatives tended to be hostile. Such negative interactions between supporters of different parties have shown to reduce enthusiasm about political campaigns in general, potentially widening the cleavage between highly engaged partisans and less affiliated citizens who may view such forms of aggressive and divisive politics as distasteful.

For Twitter sceptics, one concern is that the short length of Twitter messages does not allow for meaningful and in-depth discussions around complex political issues. While it is certainly true that expression within 140 characters is limited, one third of tweets between supporters of different parties included links to external sources such as news stories, blog posts, or YouTube videos. Such indirect sourcing can thereby constitute a means of expanding dialogue and debate.

Accordingly, although it is common to view Twitter as largely a platform for self-expression via short tweets, there may be a wider collective dimension to both users and the population at large as a steady stream of both individual viewpoints and referenced sources drive learning and additional exchange. If these exchanges happen across partisan boundaries, they can contribute to greater collective awareness and learning for the citizenry at large.

As the next federal election approaches in 2015, with younger voters gravitating online – especially via mobile devices, and with traditional polling increasingly under siege as less reliable than in the past, all major parties will undoubtedly devote more energy and resources to social media strategies including, perhaps most prominently, an effective usage of Twitter.

Partisan Politics versus Politics 2.0

In a still-nascent era likely to be shaped by the rise of social media and a more participative Internet on the one hand, and the explosion of ‘big data’ on the other hand, the prominence of Twitter in shaping political discourse seems destined to heighten. Our preliminary analysis suggests an important cleavage between traditional political processes and parties – and wider dynamics of political learning and exchange across a changing society that is more fluid in its political values and affiliations.

Within existing democratic structures, Twitter is viewed by political parties as primarily a platform for messaging and branding, thereby mobilizing members with shared viewpoints and attacking opposing interests. Our own analysis of Canadian electoral tweets both amongst partisans and across party lines underscores this point. The nexus between partisan operatives and new media formations will prove to be an increasingly strategic dimension to campaigning going forward.

More broadly, however, Twitter is a source of information, expression, and mobilization across a myriad of actors and formations that may not align well with traditional partisan organizations and identities. Social movements arising during the Arab Spring, amongst Mexican youth during that country’s most recent federal elections and most recently in Ukraine are cases in point. Across these wider societal dimensions – especially consequential in newly emerging democracies, the tremendous potential of platforms such as Twitter may well lie in facilitating new and much more open forms of democratic engagement that challenge our traditional constructs.

In sum, we are witnessing the inception of new forms of what can be dubbed ‘Politics 2.0’ that denotes a movement of both opportunities and challenges likely to play out differently across democracies at various stages of socio-economic, political, and digital development. Whether Twitter and other likeminded social media platforms enable inclusive and expansionary learning, or instead engrain divisive polarized exchange, has yet to be determined. What is clear however is that on Twitter, in some instances, birds of a feather do flock together as they do on political blogs. But in other instances, Twitter can play an important role to foster cross parties communication in the online political arenas.

Read the full article: Gruzd, A., and Roy, J. (2014) Investigating Political Polarization on Twitter: A Canadian Perspective. Policy and Internet 6 (1) 28-48.

Also read: Gruzd, A. and Tsyganova, K. Information wars and online activism during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine: Examining the social structures of Pro- and Anti-Maidan groups. Policy and Internet. Early View April 2015: DOI: 10.1002/poi3.91

Anatoliy Gruzd is Associate Professor in the Ted Rogers School of Management and Director of the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, Canada. Jeffrey Roy is Professor in the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management. His most recent book was published in 2013 by Springer: From Machinery to Mobility: Government and Democracy in a Participative Age.

The explicit goal of the conference was twofold. On the one hand, we tried to take stock of European achievements in science, engineering, technology and innovation (SETI) during the last 10 years. On the other hand, we looked into potential future opportunities that SETI may bring to Europe, both in economic terms (growth, jobs, new business opportunities) and in terms of wellbeing (individual welfare and higher social standards).

One of the most interesting aspects of the meeting was the presentation of the latest report on “The Future of Europe is Science” by the President’s Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC). The report addresses some very big questions: How will we keep healthy? How will we live, learn, work and interact in the future? How will we produce and consume and how will we manage resources? It also seeks to outline some key challenges that will be faced by Europe over the next 15 years. It is well written, clear, evidence-based and convincing. I recommend reading it. In what follows, I wish to highlight three of its features that I find particularly significant.

First, it is enormously refreshing and reassuring to see that the report treats science and technology as equally important and intertwined. The report takes this for granted, but anyone stuck in some Greek dichotomy between knowledge (episteme, science) and mere technique (techne, technology) will be astonished. While this divorcing of the two has always been a bad idea, it is still popular in contexts where applied science, e.g. applied physics or engineering, is considered a Cinderella. During my talk, I referred to Galileo as a paradigmatic scientist who had to be innovative in terms of both theories and instruments.

Today, technology is the outcome of innovative science and there is almost no science that is independent of technology, in terms of reliance on digital data and processing or (and this is often an inclusive or) in terms of investigations devoted to digital phenomena, e.g. in the social sciences. Of course, some Fields Medallists may not need computers to work, and may not work on computational issues, but they represent an exception. This year, Hiroshi Amano, Shuji Nakamura and Isamu Akasaki won the Nobel in physics “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. Last year, François Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the Nobel in physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. Without the technologically sophisticated work done at CERN, their theoretical discovery would have remained unsupported. The hope is that universities, research institutions, R&D centres as well as national research agencies will follow the approach espoused by STAC and think strategically in terms of technoscience.

The second point concerns some interesting statistics. The report uses several sources—especially the 2014 Eurobarometer survey of “Public perception of science, research and innovation”—to analyse and advise about the top priorities for SETI over the next 15 years, as identified by EU respondents. The picture that emerges is an ageing population worried, first of all, about its health, then about its children’s jobs, and only after that about the environment: 55 % of respondents identified “health and medical care” as among what they thought should be the main priorities for science and technological development over the next 15 years; 49 % opted for “job creation”; 33 % privileged “education and skills”. So we spent most of the meeting in Lisbon discussing these three areas. Other top priorities include “protection of the environment” (30 %), “energy supply” (25 %) and the “fight against climate change” (22 %).

So far so predictable, although it is disappointing to see such a low concern about the environment, a clear sign that even educated Europeans (with the exception of Danish and Swedish respondents) may not be getting the picture: there is no point in being healthy and employed in a desert. Yet this is not what I wish to highlight. Rather, on p. 14 of the report, the authors themselves admit that: “Contrary to our expectations, citizens do not consider the protection of personal data to be a high priority for SET in the next 15 years (11 %)”. This is very interesting. As a priority, data protection ranks as low as quality of housing: nice, but very far from essential. The authors quickly add that “but this might change in the future if citizens are confronted with serious security problems”.

They are right, but the point remains that, at the moment, all the fuss about privacy in the EU is a political rather than a social priority. Recall that this is an ageing population of grown-ups, not a bunch of teenagers in love with pictures of cats and friends online, allegedly unable to appreciate what privacy means (a caricature increasingly unbelievable anyway). Perhaps we “do not get it” when we should (a bit like the environmental issues) and need to be better informed. Or perhaps we are informed and still think that other issues are much more pressing. Either way, our political representatives should take notice.

Finally, and most importantly, the report contains a recommendation that I find extremely wise and justified. On p. 19, the Advisory Council acknowledges that, among the many foresight activities to be developed by the Commission, one in particular “should also be a priority”: ethical foresight. This must be one of the first times that ethical foresight is theorised as a top priority in the development of science and technology. The recommendation is based on the crucial and correct realisation that ethical choices, values, options and constraints influence the world of SETI much more than any other force. The evaluation of what is morally good, right or necessary shapes public opinion, hence the socially acceptable and the politically feasible and so, ultimately, the legally enforceable.

In the long run, business is constrained by law, which is constrained by ethics. This essential triangle means that—in the context of technoscientific research, development and innovation—ethics cannot be a mere add-on, an afterthought, a latecomer or an owl of Minerva that takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering, once bad solutions have been implemented and mistakes have been made. Ethics must sit at the table of policy-making and decision-taking procedures from day one. It must inform our strategies about SETI especially at the beginning, when changing the course of action is easier and less costly, in terms of resources and impact. We must think twice but above all we must think before taking important steps, in order to avoid wandering into what Galileo defined as the dark labyrinth of ignorance.

As I stressed at the end of my keynote, the future of Europe is science, and this is why our priority must be ethics now.

Read the editorial: Floridi, L. (2014) Technoscience and Ethics Foresight. Editorial, Philosophy & Technology 27 (4) 499-501.

Luciano Floridi is the OII’s Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information. His research areas are the philosophy of Information, information and computer ethics, and the philosophy of technology. His most recent book is The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014, Oxford University Press).

The question of how much influence the audience has in these decisions has always been ambiguous. While in theory we might expect journalists to be attentive to readers, journalism has also been characterized as a profession with a “deliberate…ignorance of audience wants” (Anderson, 2011b). This ‘anti-populism’ is still often portrayed as an important journalistic virtue, in the context of telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Recently, however, attention has been turning to the potential impact that online audience metrics are having on journalism’s “deliberate ignorance”. Online publishing provides a huge amount of information to editors about visitor numbers, visit frequency, and what visitors choose to read and how long they spend reading it. Online editors now have detailed information about what articles are popular almost as soon as they are published, with these statistics frequently displayed prominently in the newsroom.

The rise of audience metrics has created concern both within the journalistic profession and academia, as part of a broader set of concerns about the way journalism is changing online. Many have expressed concern about a ‘culture of click’, whereby important but unexciting stories make way for more attention grabbing pieces, and editorial judgments are overridden by traffic statistics. At a time when media business models are under great strain, the incentives to follow the audience are obvious, particularly when business models increasingly rely on revenue from online traffic and advertising. The consequences for the broader agenda-setting function of the news media could be significant: more prolific or earlier readers might play a disproportionate role in helping to select content; particular social classes or groupings that read news online less frequently might find their issues being subtly shifted down the agenda.

The extent to which such a populist influence exists has attracted little empirical research. Many ethnographic studies have shown that audience metrics are being captured in online newsrooms, with anecdotal evidence for the importance of traffic statistics on an article’s lifetime (Anderson 2011b, MacGregor, 2007). However, many editors have emphasised that popularity is not a major determining factor (MacGregor, 2007), and that news values remain significant in terms of placement of news articles.

In order to assess the possible influence of audience metrics on decisions made by political news editors, we undertook a systematic, large-scale study of the relationship between readership statistics and article lifetime. We examined the news cycles of five major UK news outlets (the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror) over a period of six weeks, capturing their front pages every 15 minutes, resulting in over 20,000 front-page captures and more than 40,000 individual articles. We measure article readership by capturing information from the BBC’s “most read” list of news articles (twelve percent of the articles were featured at some point on the ‘most read’ list, with a median time to achieving this status of two hours, and an average article life of 15 hours on the front page). Using the Cox Proportional Hazards model (which allows us to quantify the impact of an article’s appearance on the ‘most read’ list on its chance of survival) we asked whether an article’s being listed in a ‘most read’ column affected the length of time it remained on the front page.

We found that ‘most read’ articles had, on average, a 26% lower chance of being removed from the front page than equivalent articles which were not on the most read list, providing support for the idea that online editors are influenced by readership statistics. In addition to assessing the general impact of readership statistics, we also wanted to see whether this effect differs between ‘political’ and ‘entertainment’ news. Research on participatory journalism has suggested that online editors might be more willing to allow audience participation in areas of soft news such as entertainment, arts, sports, etc. We find a small amount of evidence for this claim, though the difference between the two categories was very slight.

Finally, we wanted to assess whether there is a ‘quality’ / ‘tabloid’ split. Part of the definition of tabloid style journalism lies precisely in its willingness to follow the demands of its audience. However, we found the audience ‘effect’ (surprisingly) to be most obvious in the quality papers. For tabloids, ‘most read’ status actually had a slightly negative effect on article lifetime. We wouldn’t argue that tabloid editors actively reject the wishes of their audience; however we can say that these editors are no more likely to follow their audience than the typical ‘quality’ editor, and in fact may be less so. We do not have a clear explanation for this difference, though we could speculate that, as tabloid publications are already more tuned in to the wishes of their audience, the appearance of readership statistics makes less practical difference to the overall product. However it may also simply be the case that the online environment is slowly producing new journalistic practices for which the tabloid / quality distinction will be of less usefulness.

So on the basis of our study, we can say that high-traffic articles do in fact spend longer in the spotlight than ones that attract less readership: audience readership does have a measurable impact on the lifespan of political news. The audience is no longer the unknown quantity it was in offline journalism: it appears to have a clear impact on journalistic practice. The question that remains, however, is whether this constitutes evidence of a new ‘populism’ in journalism; or whether it represents (as editors themselves have argued) the simple striking of a balance between audience demands and news values.

Read the full article: Bright, J., and Nicholls, T. (2014) The Life and Death of Political News: Measuring the Impact of the Audience Agenda Using Online Data. Social Science Computer Review 32 (2) 170-181.

References

Anderson, C. W. (2011) Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms. Journalism 12 (5) 550-566.

MacGregor, P. (2007) Tracking the Online Audience. Journalism Studies 8 (2) 280-298.

OII Resarch Fellow Jonathan Bright is a political scientist specialising in computational and ‘big data’ approaches to the social sciences. His major interest concerns studying how people get information about the political process, and how this is changing in the internet era.

Tom Nicholls is a doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research interests include the impact of technology on citizen/government relationships, the Internet’s implications for public management and models of electronic public service delivery.

In the journal’s inaugural issue, founding Editor-in-Chief Helen Margetts outlined what are essentially two central premises behind Policy & Internet’s launch. The first is that “we cannot understand, analyze or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet” (Margetts 2009, 1). It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society. The second premise is that the rise of the Internet is associated with shifts in how policy itself is made. In particular, she proposed that impacts of Internet adoption would be felt in the tools through which policies are effected, and the values that policy processes embody.

The purpose of the Policy and Internet journal was to take up these two challenges: the public policy implications of Internet-related social change, and Internet-related changes in policy processes themselves. In recognition of the inherently multi-disciplinary nature of policy research, the journal is designed to act as a meeting place for all kinds of disciplinary and methodological approaches. Helen predicted that methodological approaches based on large-scale transactional data, network analysis, and experimentation would turn out to be particularly important for policy and Internet studies. Driving the advancement of these methods was therefore the journal’s third purpose. Today, the journal has reached a significant milestone: over one hundred high-quality peer-reviewed articles published. This seems an opportune moment to take stock of what kind of research we have published in practice, and see how it stacks up against the original vision.

At the most general level, the journal’s articles fall into three broad categories: the Internet and public policy (48 articles), the Internet and policy processes (51 articles), and discussion of novel methodologies (10 articles). The first of these categories, “the Internet and public policy,” can be further broken down into a number of subcategories. One of the most prominent of these streams is fundamental rights in a mediated society (11 articles), which focuses particularly on privacy and freedom of expression. Related streams are children and child protection (six articles), copyright and piracy (five articles), and general e-commerce regulation (six articles), including taxation. A recently emerged stream in the journal is hate speech and cybersecurity (four articles). Of course, an enduring research stream is Internet governance, or the regulation of technical infrastructures and economic institutions that constitute the material basis of the Internet (seven articles). In recent years, the research agenda in this stream has been influenced by national policy debates around broadband market competition and network neutrality (Hahn and Singer 2013). Another enduring stream deals with the Internet and public health (eight articles).

Looking specifically at “the Internet and policy processes” category, the largest stream is e-participation, or the role of the Internet in engaging citizens in national and local government policy processes, through methods such as online deliberation, petition platforms, and voting advice applications (18 articles). Two other streams are e-government, or the use of Internet technologies for government service provision (seven articles), and e-politics, or the use of the Internet in mainstream politics, such as election campaigning and communications of the political elite (nine articles). Another stream that has gained pace during recent years, is online collective action, or the role of the Internet in activism, ‘clicktivism,’ and protest campaigns (16 articles). Last year the journal published a special issue on online collective action (Calderaro and Kavada 2013), and the next forthcoming issue includes an invited article on digital civics by Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, with commentary from prominent scholars of Internet activism. A trajectory discernible in this stream over the years is a movement from discussing mere potentials towards analyzing real impacts—including critical analyses of the sometimes inflated expectations and “democracy bubbles” created by digital media (Shulman 2009; Karpf 2012; Bryer 2012).

The final category, discussion of novel methodologies, consists of articles that develop, analyze, and reflect critically on methodological innovations in policy and Internet studies. Empirical articles published in the journal have made use of a wide range of conventional and novel research methods, from interviews and surveys to automated content analysis and advanced network analysis methods. But of those articles where methodology is the topic rather than merely the tool, the majority deal with so-called “big data,” or the use of large-scale transactional data sources in research, commerce, and evidence-based public policy (nine articles). The journal recently devoted a special issue to the potentials and pitfalls of big data for public policy (Margetts and Sutcliffe 2013), based on selected contributions to the journal’s 2012 big data conference: Big Data, Big Challenges? In general, the notion of data science and public policy is a growing research theme.

This brief analysis suggests that research published in the journal over the last five years has indeed followed the broad contours of the original vision. The two challenges, namely policy implications of Internet-related social change and Internet-related changes in policy processes, have both been addressed. In particular, research has addressed the implications of the Internet’s increasing role in social and political life. The journal has also furthered the development of new methodologies, especially the use of online network analysis techniques and large-scale transactional data sources (aka ‘big data’).

As expected, authors from a wide range of disciplines have contributed their perspectives to the journal, and engaged with other disciplines, while retaining the rigor of their own specialisms. The geographic scope of the contributions has been truly global, with authors and research contexts from six continents. I am also pleased to note that a characteristic common to all the published articles is polish; this is no doubt in part due to the high level of editorial support that the journal is able to afford to authors, including copyediting. The justifications for the journal’s establishment five years ago have clearly been borne out, so that the journal now performs an important function in fostering and bringing together research on the public policy implications of an increasingly Internet-mediated society.

And what of my own research interests as an editor? In the inaugural editorial, Helen Margetts highlighted work, finance, exchange, and economic themes in general as being among the prominent areas of Internet-related social change that are likely to have significant future policy implications. I think for the most part, these implications remain to be addressed, and this is an area that the journal can encourage authors to tackle better. As an editor, I will work to direct attention to this opportunity, and welcome manuscript submissions on all aspects of Internet-enabled economic change and its policy implications. This work will be kickstarted by the journal’s 2014 conference (26-27 September), which this year focuses on crowdsourcing and online labor.

Our published articles will continue to be highlighted here in the journal’s blog. Launched last year, we believe this blog will help to expand the reach and impact of research published in Policy and Internet to the wider academic and practitioner communities, promote discussion, and increase authors’ citations. After all, publication is only the start of an article’s public life: we want people reading, debating, citing, and offering responses to the research that we, and our excellent reviewers, feel is important, and worth publishing.

Read the full editorial:  Lehdonvirta, V. (2014) Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies. Policy & Internet 6(2): 109-114.

References

Bryer, T.A. (2011) Online Public Engagement in the Obama Administration: Building a Democracy Bubble? Policy & Internet 3 (4).

Calderaro, A. and Kavada, A. (2013) Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change. Policy & Internet (5) 1.

Hahn, R. and Singer, H. (2013) Is the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Broken? Policy & Internet 5 (3) 340-363.

Karpf, D. (2012) Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism. Policy & Internet 2 (4) 7-41.

Margetts, H. (2009) The Internet and Public Policy. Policy and Internet 1 (1).

Margetts, H. and Sutcliffe, D. (2013) Addressing the Policy Challenges and Opportunities of ‘Big Data.’ Policy & Internet 5 (2) 139-146.

Shulman, S.W. (2009) The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in U.S. Federal Rulemaking. Policy & Internet 1 (1) 23-53.

Indeed, the Internet has become the main medium of interaction between government and citizens, and numerous websites offer opportunities for online democratic participation. The Hansard Society, for instance, regularly runs e-consultations on behalf of UK parliamentary select committees. For examples, e-consultations have been run on the Climate Change Bill (2007), the Human Tissue and Embryo Bill (2007), and on domestic violence and forced marriage (2008). Councils and boroughs also regularly invite citizens to take part in online consultations on issues affecting their area. The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, for example, recently asked its residents for thier views on Sex Entertainment Venues and Sex Establishment Licensing policy.

However, citizen participation poses certain challenges for the design and analysis of public policy. In particular, governments and organizations must demonstrate that all opinions expressed through participatory exercises have been duly considered and carefully weighted before decisions are reached. One method for partly automating the interpretation of large quantities of online content typically produced by public consultations is text mining. Software products currently available range from those primarily used in qualitative research (integrating functions like tagging, indexing, and classification), to those integrating more quantitative and statistical tools, such as word frequency and cluster analysis (more information on text mining tools can be found at the National Centre for Text Mining).

While these methods have certainly attracted criticism and skepticism in terms of the interpretability of the output, they offer four important advantages for the analyst: namely categorization, data reduction, visualization, and speed.

1. Categorization. When analyzing the results of consultation exercises, analysts and policymakers must make sense of the high volume of disparate responses they receive; text mining supports the structuring of large amounts of this qualitative, discursive data into predefined or naturally occurring categories by storage and retrieval of sentence segments, indexing, and cross-referencing. Analysis of sentence segments from respondents with similar demographics (eg age) or opinions can itself be valuable, for example in the construction of descriptive typologies of respondents.

2. Data Reduction. Data reduction techniques include stemming (reduction of a word to its root form), combining of synonyms, and removal of non-informative “tool” or stop words. Hierarchical classifications, cluster analysis, and correspondence analysis methods allow the further reduction of texts to their structural components, highlighting the distinctive points of view associated with particular groups of respondents.

3. Visualization. Important points and interrelationships are easy to miss when read by eye, and rapid generation of visual overviews of responses (eg dendrograms, 3D scatter plots, heat maps, etc.) make large and complex datasets easier to comprehend in terms of identifying the main points of view and dimensions of a public debate.

4. Speed. Speed depends on whether a special dictionary or vocabulary needs to be compiled for the analysis, and on the amount of coding required. Coding is usually relatively fast and straightforward, and the succinct overview of responses provided by these methods can reduce the time for consultation responses.

Despite the above advantages of automated approaches to consultation analysis, text mining methods present several limitations. Automatic classification of responses runs the risk of missing or miscategorising distinctive or marginal points of view if sentence segments are too short, or if they rely on a rare vocabulary. Stemming can also generate problems if important semantic variations are overlooked (eg lumping together ‘ill+ness’, ‘ill+defined’, and ‘ill+ustration’). Other issues applicable to public e-consultation analysis include the danger that analysts distance themselves from the data, especially when converting words to numbers. This is quite apart from the issues of inter-coder reliability and data preparation, missing data, and insensitivity to figurative language, meaning and context, which can also result in misclassification when not human-verified.

However, when responding to criticisms of specific tools, we need to remember that different text mining methods are complementary, not mutually exclusive. A single solution to the analysis of qualitative or quantitative data would be very unlikely; and at the very least, exploratory techniques provide a useful first step that could be followed by a theory-testing model, or by triangulation exercises to confirm results obtained by other methods.

Apart from these technical issues, policy makers and analysts employing text mining methods for e-consultation analysis must also consider certain ethical issues in addition to those of informed consent, privacy, and confidentiality. First (of relevance to academics), respondents may not expect to end up as research subjects. They may simply be expecting to participate in a general consultation exercise, interacting exclusively with public officials and not indirectly with an analyst post hoc; much less ending up as a specific, traceable data point.

This has been a particularly delicate issue for healthcare professionals. Sharf (1999, 247) describes various negative experiences of following up online postings: one woman, on being contacted by a researcher seeking consent to gain insights from breast cancer patients about their personal experiences, accused the researcher of behaving voyeuristically and “taking advantage of people in distress.” Statistical interpretation of responses also presents its own issues, particularly if analyses are to be returned or made accessible to respondents.

Respondents might also be confused about or disagree with text mining as a method applied to their answers; indeed, it could be perceived as dehumanizing – reducing personal opinions and arguments to statistical data points. In a public consultation, respondents might feel somewhat betrayed that their views and opinions eventually result in just a dot on a correspondence analysis with no immediate, apparent meaning or import, at least in lay terms. Obviously the consultation organizer needs to outline clearly and precisely how qualitative responses can be collated into a quantifiable account of a sample population’s views.

This is an important point; in order to reduce both technical and ethical risks, researchers should ensure that their methodology combines both qualitative and quantitative analyses. While many text mining techniques provide useful statistical output, the UK Government’s prescribed Code of Practice on public consultation is quite explicit on the topic: “The focus should be on the evidence given by consultees to back up their arguments. Analyzing consultation responses is primarily a qualitative rather than a quantitative exercise” (2008, 12). This suggests that the perennial debate between quantitative and qualitative methodologists needs to be updated and better resolved.

References

Margetts, H. 2009. “The Internet and Public Policy.” Policy & Internet 1 (1).

Sharf, B. 1999. “Beyond Netiquette: The Ethics of Doing Naturalistic Discourse Research on the Internet.” In Doing Internet Research, ed. S. Jones, London: Sage.

Read the full paper: Bicquelet, A., and Weale, A. (2011) Coping with the Cornucopia: Can Text Mining Help Handle the Data Deluge in Public Policy Analysis? Policy & Internet 3 (4).

Dr Aude Bicquelet is a Fellow in LSE’s Department of Methodology. Her main research interests include computer-assisted analysis, Text Mining methods, comparative politics and public policy. She has published a number of journal articles in these areas and is the author of a forthcoming book, “Textual Analysis” (Sage Benchmarks in Social Research Methods, in press).

These online campaigning organisations run multi-issue agendas, are geographically decentralized, and run sophisticated media strategies. The best known of these are MoveOn in the US, internationally focused Avaaz, and GetUp! in Australia. However, new online campaigning organisations are emerging all the time that more often than not have direct lineage through former staff and similar tactics to this first wave. These newer organisations include the UK-based 38 Degrees, SumOfUs that works on consumer issues to hold corporations accountable, and Change.Org, a for-profit organisation that hosts and develops petitions for grassroots groups.

Existing civil society focused organisations are also being challenged to fundamentally change their approach, to move political tactics and communications online, and to grow their member lists. David Karpf (2012) has branded this “MoveOn Effect”, where the success of online campaigning organisations like MoveOn has fundamentally changed and disrupted the advocacy organisation scene. But how has this shift occurred? How have these new organisations succeeded in being both innovative and politically successful?

One increasingly common answer is to focus on how they have developed low threshold online tactics where the risk to participants is reduced. This includes issue and campaign specific online petitions, letter writing, emails, donating money, and boycotts. The other answer is to focus more closely on the discursive tactics these organisations use in their campaigns, based on a shared commitment to a storytelling strategy, and the practical realisation of a ‘theory of change’. That is, to ask how campaigns produce successful stories that follow a concrete theory of why taking action inevitably leads to a desired result.

Storytelling is a device for explaining politics and a campaign via “cause and effect relations, through its sequencing of events, rather than by appeals to standards of logic and proof” (Polletta et al. 2011, 111). These campaign stories characteristically have a plot and identifiable characters, a beginning and middle to the story, but the recipient of the story can create, or rather act out, the end. Framing is important to understanding social movement action but a narrative or storytelling driven analysis focuses more on how language or rhetoric is used, and reveals the underlying “common sense” and emotional frames used in online campaigns’ delivery of messages (Polletta 2009). Polletta et al. (2011, 122) suggest that activists have been successful against better resourced and influential opponents and elites when they “sometimes but not always, have been able to exploit popular associations of narrative with people over power, and moral urgency over technical rationality”.

We have identified four stages of storytelling that need to occur for a campaign to be successful:

1. An emotional identification with the issue by the story recipient, to mobilize participation
2. A shared sense of community on the issue, to build solidarity (‘people over power’)
3. Moral urgency for action (rather than technical persuasion), to resolve the issue and create social change
4. Securing of public and political support by neutralising counter-movements.

The new online campaigning organisations all prioritise a storytelling approach in their campaigns, using it to build their own autobiographical story and to differentiate what they do from ‘politics as usual’, characterised as party-based, adversarial politics. Harvard scholar and organising practitioner Marshall Ganz’s ideas on the practice of storytelling underpin the philosophy of the New Organizing Institute, which provides training for increasing numbers of online activists. Having received training, these professional campaigners informally join the network of established and emerging ‘theory of change’ organisations such as MoveOn, AVAAZ, Organising for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, SumOfUs, and so on.

GetUp! is a member of this network, has over 600,000 members in Australia, and has conducted high-profile public policy campaigns on issues as diverse as mental health, electoral law, same-sex marriage, and climate change. GetUp!’s communications strategy tries to use storytelling to reorient Australian political debate — and the nature of politics itself — in an affective way. And underpinning all their political tactics is the construction of effective online campaign stories. GetUp! has used stories to help citizens, and to a lesser extent, decision-makers, identify with an issue, build community, and act in recognition of the moral urgency for political change.

Yet despite GetUp!’s commitment to a storytelling technique, it does not always work — these organisations rarely publicise their failed campaigns, or those that do not even get past the initial email ‘ask’. It is important to look at how campaigns unfold to see how storytelling develops, and also to judge whether it is a success or not. This moves the analysis onto an organisation’s whole campaign, rather than studying only decontextualised emails or online petitions. In contrasting two campaigns in-depth we judged one on mental health policy to be a success in meeting the four storytelling criteria; and the other on climate change policy (which was promoted externally as a success) to actually be a storytelling failure.

The mental health story was able to build solidarity and emotional identification around families and friends of those with illness (not sufferers themselves) after celebrity experts launched the campaign to bring awareness to and increase funding for mental health. Mental health was presented by GetUp! as a purely moral dilemma, with very little mention by any opponents of the economic implications of policy reform. In the end the policy was changed, an extra $2.2 billion of funding for mental health was announced in the 2011 Federal Budget, and the Australian Prime Minister appeared with GetUp! in an online video to make the funding announcement.

GetUp’s climate change storytelling, however, failed on all four criteria. Despite national policy change taking place similar to what they had advocated, GetUp!’s climate change campaign did not achieve the level of member or public mobilisation achieved by their mental health campaign. GetUp! used partisan, adversarial tactics that can be partly attributed to climate change becoming an increasingly polarised issue in Australian political debate. This was particularly the case as the oppositional counter-movement successfully reframed climate change as solely an economic issue, focusing on the imposition of an expensive new tax. This story defeated GetUp’s moral urgency story, and their attempt to create ‘people-power’ mobilised for a shared environmental concern.

Why is thinking about this important? For a few reasons. It helps us to see online tactics within the context of a broader political campaign, and challenges us to think about how to judge both successful mobilisation and political influence of hybrid online campaign organisations. Yet it also points to the limitations of an affective approach based on moral urgency alone. Technical persuasion and, more often than not, economic reality still matter for both mobilisation and political change.

References

Chadwick, Andrew (2007) “Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity” Political Communication, 24 (3): 283-301.

Karpf, David (2012) The MoveOn Effect: The unexpected transformation of American political advocacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Polletta, Francesca (2009) “Storytelling in social movements” in Culture, Social Movements and Protest ed. Hank Johnston Surrey: Ashgate, 33-54.

Polletta, Francesca, Pang Ching, Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner, and Alice Motes (2011) “The sociology of storytelling” Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 109–30.

Read the full paper: Vromen, A. and Coleman, W. (2013) Online Campaigning Organizations and Storytelling Strategies: GetUp! in Australia. Policy and Internet 5 (1).

Meanwhile, less attention is paid on the fact that the Internet has raised new issues for the policy making agenda around which activists are mobilising, such as issues related to internet governance, online freedom of expression, digital privacy or copyright. Contemporary social movements serve as indicators of new core challenges within society, and can thus constitute an enriching resource for the policy debate arena, particularly with regards to the urgent issues raised by the fast development of the Internet. The literature on social movements is rich in examples of campaigns that have successfully influenced public policy. Classic works have proved how major reforms can start as a consequence of civic mobilisations, and the history provides evidence of the influence of collective action within policy debates on environmental, national security, and peace issues.

However, as mentioned above and argued by Giugni (2004), social movement research has traditionally paid more attention to the process rather than the outcomes of mobilisations. The difficulty of identifying the consequences of collective action and the factors that contribute to its success may lie behind this tendency. As Gamson (1975) argues, the notion of success is elusive and can be most usefully defined with reference to a set of outcomes; these may include the new advantages gained by the group’s beneficiaries after a challenge with targets, or they may refer to the status of the challenging group and its legitimacy.

As for the factors determining success, some scholars believe that collective action is likely to succeed when its claims are close to the aims of political elites. Others, like Kriesi (1995), note that government responses depend on the forms and tactics of contentious politics. Activists occupy different positions on the spectrum between radical and reformist, which in turn affects their willingness to engage with policy-makers. For instance, movements pursuing a type of ‘prefigurative’ politics tend to avoid direct contact with policy-makers, focusing instead on building alternatives which ‘prefigure’ the values that they would like to see on a grander scale.

The Internet has raised new questions around the outcomes of collective action and its interface with policy making. Internet governance, for instance, constitutes a new source of contentious politics, while the use of the Internet for the organisation of protest influences the forms of contemporary collective action. As a tool of collective action, the Internet facilitates the rapid organisation of protests around issues of public concern. Mobilizations can be organised without a formal hierarchy in place, and spread easily as online networking helps the creation of flexible ‘opt-in/opt-out’ coalitions. Information about protest can diffuse through online interpersonal networks and alternative media, and can capture the attention of mainstream news outlets. In addition, the Internet has expanded the ‘repertoire of contention’ of current movements. Petitions, direct action, and occupations now have their online counterparts with tactics such as email bombings, DDoS attacks, and e-petitions.

The affordances of online tools are thought to be affecting the characteristics of collective action and thus its capacities for policy change. Compared to past mobilisations, current movements tend to be more decentralised and flexible, constituted by loose coalitions between a plurality of actors. They are also more inclusive, addressing a diverse and at times incongruent combination of issues. As Della Porta (2005) points out, online mobilisations tend to have a more temporary and fleeting character as they can emerge and dissolve with equal speed; they are also more global in nature, since they can scale up easily and at a low cost.

At the same time, the Internet has facilitated the rise of a what Chadwick defines as new ‘hybrid’ type of civil society actor who combines traditional tactics, such as petitioning, with the more flexible forms of organising favoured by less institutional groups. Organizations like MoveOn in the U.S., Avaaz on the transnational level, and GetUp! in Australia use the power of the Internet to influence policy makers. The Internet helps such organisations to operate at a very low cost, which in turn allows them to be flexible and easily switch the focus of campaigns around issues that capture the public interest.

However, the Internet has become in itself an object of policy and further attention must be paid in considering its implications as a source of new contentious politics. Melucci (1996) argues that research on collective action should pay attention to the new types of inequality that generate contentious politics, rather than restricting its focus to the forms of mobilisations. Studies of online collective action should thus consider the Internet not only as a tool for practicing politics but also as a new “dominant discourse” which produces new claims and inequalities.

Current inequalities in governing digital mediated communication generate what Kriesi (1995) calls ‘windows of opportunities’ for collective action to play an important role in policy making on Internet-related issues. Within this framework, an increasing body of research is addressing collective action around the governance of the Internet, the regulation of free and open software, privacy and data retention, file sharing and copyright issues, and online freedom of expression as a fundamental human right.

Whether and to what extent these new types of actors and mobilisations organised through and around the Internet can have an effect on policy making is an issue requiring further research. For instance, the decentralised and temporary character of some movements , together with their lack of clearly identified leaders and spokespersons can make it difficult in establishing themselves as legitimate representatives of public opinion. New types of ‘hybrid’ actors may encounter problems in establishing themselves as legitimate representatives of public opinion. In addition, new online tactics like e-petitions, which require limited time and commitment from participants, tend to have a weaker impact on policy makers. At the same time, the technical nature of Internet regulation complicates efforts to influence public opinion due to the degree of knowledge necessary for the lay public to understand the issues at stake.

Despite these potential limitations, collective action through and around the internet can enrich policy making. It can help to connect local voices with policy makers and facilitate their involvement in policy-making processes. It can also contribute to new policy debates around urgent issues concerning the Internet. As the Policy and Internet special issue on ‘Online Collective Action and Policy Change’ explores, online collective action can thus constitute an important resource and participant in policy debates with whom policy makers should create new lines of dialogue.

Read the full article at: Calderaro, A. and Kavada A., (2013) “Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change“, Policy and Internet 5(1).

Twitter: @andreacalderaro / @AnastasiaKavada
Web: Andrea’s Personal Page / Anastasia’s Personal Page

References

Giugni, Marco. 2004. Social Protest and Policy Change : Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gamson, William A. 1975. The Strategy of Social Protest. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1995. “The Political Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements: its Impact on their Mobilization.” In The Politics of Social Protest, eds. J. Jenkins and B. Dermans. London: UCL Press, pp. 167–198.

Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Within this framework, the first article in this issue, “Networked Collective Action and the Institutionalized Policy Debate: Bringing Cyberactivism to the Policy Arena?” by Stefania Milan and Arne Hintz (2013), looks at the Internet as both a tool of collective action and an object of policy. The authors provide a comprehensive overview of how computer-mediated communication creates not only new forms of organisational structure for collective action, but also new contentious policy fields. By focusing on what the authors define as ‘techie activists,’ Milan and Hintz explore how new grassroots actors participate in policy debates around the governance of the Internet at different levels. This article provides empirical evidence to what Kriesi et al. (1995) defines as “windows of opportunities” for collective action to contribute to the policy debate around this new space of contentious politics. Milan and Hintz demonstrate how this has happened from the first World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 to more recent debates about Internet regulation.

Yana Breindl and François Briatte’s (2013) article “Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against Copyright Reform in France and the European Union” complements Milan and Hintz’s analysis by looking at how the regulation of copyright issues opens up new spaces of contentious politics. The authors compare how online and offline initiatives and campaigns in France around the “Droit d’Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Société de l’Information” (DADVSI) and “Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sure Internet” (HADOPI) laws, and in Europe around the Telecoms Package Reform, have contributed to the deliberations within the EU Parliament. They thus add to the rich debate on the contentious issues of intellectual property rights, demonstrating how collective action contributes to this debate at the European level.

The remaining articles in this special issue focus more on the online tactics and strategies of collective actors and the opportunities opened by the Internet for them to influence policy makers. In her article, “Activism and The Online Mediation Opportunity Structure: Attempts to Impact Global Climate Change Policies?” Julie Uldam (2013) discusses the tactics used by London-based environmental activists to influence policy making during the 17th UN climate conference (COP17) in 2011. Based on ethnographic research, Uldam traces the relationship between online modes of action and problem identification and demands. She also discusses the differences between radical and reformist activists in both their preferences for online action and their attitudes towards policy makers. Drawing on Cammaerts’ (2012) framework of the mediation opportunity structure, Uldam shows that radical activists preferred online tactics that aimed at disrupting the conference, since they viewed COP17 as representative of an unjust system. However, their lack of technical skills and resources prevented them from disrupting the conference in the virtual realm. Reformist activists, on the other hand, considered COP17 as a legitimate adversary, and attempted to influence its politics mainly through the diffusion of alternative information online.

The article by Ariadne Vromen and William Coleman (2013) “Online Campaigning Organizations and Storytelling Strategies: GetUp! Australia,” also investigates a climate change campaign but shifts the focus to the new ‘hybrid’ collective actors, who use the Internet extensively for campaigning. Based on a case study of GetUp!, Vromen and Coleman examine the storytelling strategies employed by the organisation in two separate campaigns, one around climate change, the other around mental health. The authors investigate the factors that led one campaign to be successful and the other to have limited resonance. They also skilfully highlight the difficulties encountered by new collective actors to gain legitimacy and influence policy making. In this respect, GetUp! used storytelling to set itself apart from traditional party-based politics and to emphasise its identity as an organiser and representative of grassroots communities, rather than as an insider lobbyist or disruptive protestor.

Romain Badouard and Laurence Monnoyer-Smith (2013), in their article “Hyperlinks as Political Resources: The European Commission Confronted with Online Activism,” explore some of the more structured ways in which citizens use online tools to engage with policy makers. They investigate the political opportunities offered by the e-participation and e-government platforms of the European Commission for activists wishing to make their voice heard in the European policy making sphere. They focus particularly on strategic uses of web technical resources and hyperlinks, which allows citizens to refine their proposals and thus increase their influence on European policy.

Finally, Jo Bates’ (2013) article “The Domestication of Open Government Data Advocacy in the UK: A Neo-Gramscian Analysis” provides a pertinent framework that facilitates our understanding of the policy challenges posed by the issue of open data. The digitisation of data offers new opportunities for increasing transparency; traditionally considered a fundamental public good. By focusing on the Open Data Government initiative in the UK, Bates explores the policy challenges generated by increasing transparency via new Internet platforms by applying the established theoretical instruments of Gramscian ‘Trasformismo.’ This article frames the open data debate in terms consistent with the literature on collective action, and provides empirical evidence as to how citizens have taken an active role in the debate on this issue, thereby challenging the policy debate on public transparency.

Taken together, these articles advance our understanding of the interface between online collective action and policy making. They introduce innovative theoretical frameworks and provide empirical evidence around the new forms of collective action, tactics, and contentious politics linked with the emergence of the Internet. If, as Melucci (1996) argues, contemporary social movements are sensors of new challenges within current societies, they can be an enriching resource for the policy debate arena. Gaining a better understanding of how the Internet might strengthen this process is a valuable line of enquiry.

Read the full article at: Calderaro, A. and Kavada A., (2013) “Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change“, Policy and Internet 5(1).

Twitter: @AnastasiaKavada / @andreacalderaro
Web: Anastasia’s Personal Page / Andrea’s Personal Page

References

Badouard, R., and Monnoyer-Smith, L. 2013. Hyperlinks as Political Resources: The European Commission Confronted with Online Activism. Policy and Internet 5(1).

Bates, J. 2013. The Domestication of Open Government Data Advocacy in the UK: A Neo-Gramscian Analysis. Policy and Internet 5(1).

Breindl, Y., and Briatte, F. 2013. Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against Copyright Reform in France and the European Union. Policy and Internet 5(1).

Cammaerts, Bart. 2012. “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure.” European Journal of Communication 27(2): 117–134.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1995. “The Political Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements: its Impact on their Mobilization.” In The Politics of Social Protest, eds. J. Jenkins and B. Dermans. London: UCL Press, pp. 167–198.

Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Milan, S., and Hintz, A. 2013. Networked Collective Action and the Institutionalized Policy Debate: Bringing Cyberactivism to the Policy Arena? Policy and Internet 5(1).

Uldam, J. 2013. Activism and the Online Mediation Opportunity Structure: Attempts to Impact Global Climate Change Policies? Policy and Internet 5(1).

Vromen, A., and Coleman, W. 2013. Online Campaigning Organizations and Storytelling Strategies: GetUp! in Australia. Policy and Internet 5(1).

POLICY: In December 2011, the European Parliament Directive on Combating the Sexual Abuse, Sexual Exploitation of Children and Child Pornography was adopted. The directive’s much-debated Article 25 requires Member States to ensure the prompt removal of child pornography websites hosted in their territory and to endeavor to obtain the removal of such websites hosted outside their territory. Member States are also given the option to block access to such websites to users within their territory. Both these policy choices have been highly controversial and much debated; Karel Demeyer, Eva Lievens, and Jos Dumortie analyse the technical and legal means of blocking and removing illegal child sexual content from the Internet, clarifying the advantages and drawbacks of the various policy options.

Another issue of jurisdiction surrounds government use of cloud services. While cloud services promise to render government service delivery more effective and efficient, they are also potentially stateless, triggering government concern over data sovereignty. Kristina Irion explores these issues, tracing the evolution of individual national strategies and international policy on data sovereignty. She concludes that data sovereignty presents national governments with a legal risk that can’t be addressed through technology or contractual arrangements alone, and recommends that governments retain sovereignty over their information.

While the Internet allows unprecedented freedom of expression, it also facilitates anonymity and facelessness, increasing the possibility of damage caused by harmful online behavior, including online bullying. Myoung-Jin Lee, Yu Jung Choi, and Setbyol Choi investigate the discourse surrounding the introduction of the Korean Government’s “Verification of Identity” policy, which aimed to foster a more responsible Internet culture by mandating registration of a user’s real identity before allowing them to post to online message boards. The authors find that although arguments about restrictions on freedom of expression continue, the policy has maintained public support in Korea.

A different theoretical approach to another controversy topic is offered by Sameer Hinduja, who applies Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to the phenomenon of music piracy, arguing that we should pay attention not only to the social aspects, but also to the technical, economic, political, organizational, and contextual aspects of piracy. He argues that each of these components merits attention and response by law enforcers if progress is to be made in understanding and responding to digital piracy.

GOVERNMENT: While many governments have been lauded for their success in the online delivery of services, fewer have been successful in employing the Internet for more democratic purposes. Tamara A. Small asks whether the Canadian government — with its well-established e-government strategy — fits the pattern of service delivery oriented (rather than democracy oriented) e-government. Based on a content analysis of Government of Canada tweets, she finds that they do indeed tend to focus on service delivery, and shows how nominal a commitment the Canadian government has made to the more interactive and conversational qualities of Twitter.

While political scientists have greatly benefitted from the increasing availability of online legislative data, data collections and search capabilities are not comprehensive, nor are they comparable across the different U.S. states. David L. Leal, Taofang Huang, Byung-Jae Lee, and Jill Strube review the availability and limitations of state online legislative resources in facilitating political research. They discuss levels of capacity and access, note changes over time, and note that their usability index could potentially be used as an independent variable for researchers seeking to measure the transparency of state legislatures.

RERESENTATION: An ongoing theme in the study of elected representatives is how they present themselves to their constituents in order to enhance their re-election prospects. Royce Koop and Alex Marland compare presentation of self by Canadian Members of Parliament on parliamentary websites and in the older medium of parliamentary newsletters. They find that MPs are likely to present themselves as outsiders on their websites, that this differs from patterns observed in newsletters, and that party affiliation plays an important role in shaping self-presentation online.

Many strategic, structural and individual factors can explain the use of online campaigning in elections; based on candidate surveys, Julia Metag and Frank Marcinkowski show that strategic and structural variables, such as party membership or the perceived share of indecisive voters, do most to explain online campaigning. Internet-related perceptions are explanatory in a few cases; if candidates think that other candidates campaign online they feel obliged to use online media during the election campaign.

ACTIVISM: Mainstream opinion at the time of the protests of the “Arab Spring” – and the earlier Iranian “Twitter Revolution” – was that use of social media would significantly affect the outcome of revolutionary collective action. Throughout the Libyan Civil War, Twitter users took the initiative to collect and process data for use in the rebellion against the Qadhafi regime, including map overlays depicting the situation on the ground. In an exploratory case study on crisis mapping of intelligence information, Steve Stottlemyre and Sonia Stottlemyre investigate whether the information collected and disseminated by Twitter users during the Libyan civil war met the minimum requirements to be considered tactical military intelligence.

Philipp S. Mueller and Sophie van Huellen focus on the 2009 post-election protests in Teheran in their analysis of the effect of many-to-many media on power structures in society. They offer two analytical approaches as possible ways to frame the complex interplay of media and revolutionary politics. While social media raised international awareness by transforming the agenda-setting process of the Western mass media, the authors conclude that, given the inability of protesters to overthrow the regime, a change in the “media-scape” does not automatically imply a changed “power-scape.”

A different theoretical approach is offered by Mark K. McBeth, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Molly C. Arrandale Anderson, and Barbara Rose, who look at how interest groups increasingly turn to new media such as YouTube as tools for indirect lobbying, allowing them to enter into and have influence on public policy debates through wide dissemination of their policy preferences. They explore the use of policy narratives in new media, using a Narrative Policy Framework to analyze YouTube videos posted by the Buffalo Field Campaign, an environmental activist group.

Helen Margetts: Editorial

Ben Sayre, Leticia Bode, Dhavan Shah, Dave Wilcox, and Chirag Shah: Agenda Setting in a Digital Age: Tracking Attention to California Proposition 8 in Social Media, Online News and Conventional News

Kathleen McNutt and Adam Wellstead: Virtual Policy Networks in Forestry and Climate Change in the U.S. and Canada: Government Nodality, Internationalization and Actor Complexity

Julien Talpin and Stéphanie Wojcik: Deliberating Environmental Policy Issues: Comparing the Learning Potential of Online and Face-To-Face Discussions on Climate Change

Andrew A. Adams, Kiyoshi Murata, and Yohko Orito: The Development of Japanese Data Protection

Scott Jordan: The Application of Net Neutrality to Wireless Networks Based on Network Architecture

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