In their Policy & Internet article “Does the Internet Encourage Political Participation? Use of an Online Platform by Members of a German Political Party,” Katharina Gerl, Stefan Marschall, and Nadja Wilker examine the German Greens’ online collaboration platform to ask why only some party members and supporters use it. The platform aims improve the inclusion of party supporters and members in the party’s opinion-formation and decision-making process, but it has failed to reach inactive members. Instead, those who have already been active in the party also use the online platform. It also seems that classical resources such as education and employment status do not (directly) explain differences in participation; instead, participation is motivated by process-related and ideological incentives.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: You say “When it comes to explaining political online participation within parties, we face a conceptual and empirical void” .. can you explain briefly what the offline models are, and why they don’t work for the Internet age?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: According to Verba et al. (1995) the reasons for political non-participation can be boiled down to three factors: (1) citizens do not want to participate, (2) they cannot, (3) nobody asked them to. Speaking model-wise we can distinguish three perspectives: Citizens need certain resources like education, information, time and civic skills to participate (resource model and civic voluntarism model). The social psychological model looks at the role of attitudes and political interest that are supposed to increase participation. In addition to resources and attitudes, the general incentives model analyses how motives, costs and benefits influence participation.

These models can be applied to online participation as well, but findings for the online context indicate that the mechanisms do not always work like in the offline context. For example, age plays out differently for online participation. Generally, the models have to be specified for each participation context. This especially applies for the online context as forms of online participation sometimes demand different resources, skills or motivational factors. Therefore, we have to adapt and supplemented the models with additional online factors like internet skills and internet sophistication.

Ed.: What’s the value to a political party of involving its members in policy discussion? (i.e. why go through the bother?)

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Broadly speaking, there are normative and rational reasons for that. At least for the German parties, intra-party democracy plays a crucial role. The involvement of members in policy discussion can serve as a means to strengthen the integration and legitimation power of a party. Additionally, the involvement of members can have a mobilizing effect for the party on the ground. This can positively influence the linkage between the party in central office, the party on the ground, and the societal base. Furthermore, member participation can be a way to react on dissatisfaction within a party.

Ed.: Are there any examples of successful “public deliberation” — i.e. is this maybe just a problem of getting disparate voices to usefully engage online, rather than a failure of political parties per se?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: This is definitely not unique to political parties. The problems we observe regarding online public deliberation in political parties also apply to other online participation platforms: political participation and especially public deliberation require time and effort for participants, so they will only be willing to engage if they feel they benefit from it. But the benefits of participation may remain unclear as public deliberation – by parties or other initiators – often takes place without a clear goal or a real say in decision-making for the participants. Initiators of public deliberation often fail to integrate processes of public deliberation into formal and meaningful decision-making procedures. This leads to disappointment for potential participants who might have different expectations concerning their role and scope of influence. There is a risk of a vicious circle and disappointed expectations on both sides.

Ed.: Based on your findings, what would you suggest that the Greens do in order to increase participation by their members on their platform?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Our study shows that the members of the Greens are generally willing to participate online and appreciate this opportunity. However, the survey also revealed that the most important incentive for them is to have an influence on the party’s decision-making. We would suggest that the Greens create an actual cause for participation, meaning to set clear goals and to integrate it into specific and relevant decisions. Participation should not be an end in itself!

Ed.: How far do political parties try to harness deliberation where it happens in the wild e.g. on social media, rather than trying to get people to use bespoke party channels? Or might social media users see this as takeover by the very “establishment politics” they might have abandoned, or be reacting against?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Parties do not constrain their online activities to their own official platforms and channels but also try to develop strategies for influencing discourses in the wild. However, this works much better and has much more authenticity as well as credibility if it isn’t parties as abstract organizations but rather individual politicians such as members of parliament who engage in person on social media, for example by using Twitter.

Ed.: How far have political scientists understood the reasons behind the so-called “crisis of democracy”, and how to address it? And even if academics came up with “the answer” — what is the process for getting academic work and knowledge put into practice by political parties?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: The alleged “crisis of democracy” is in first line seen as a crisis of representation in which the gap between political elites and the citizens has widened drastically within the last years, giving room to populist movements and parties in many democracies. Our impression is that facing the rise of populism in many countries, politicians have become more and more attentive towards discussions and findings in political science which have been addressing the linkage problems for years. But perhaps this is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Read the full article: Gerl, K., Marschall, S., and Wilker, N. (2016) Does the Internet Encourage Political Participation? Use of an Online Platform by Members of a German Political Party. Policy & Internet doi:10.1002/poi3.149

Katharina Gerl, Stefan Marschall, and Nadja Wilker were talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

The empirical findings of their comparative analysis across three types of news platforms broadly support the assumption that platform design affects the level of deliberative quality of user comments. Deliberation was most likely to be found in news fora, which are of course specifically designed to initiate user discussions. News websites showed a lower level of deliberative quality, with Facebook coming last in terms of meeting deliberative design criteria and sustaining deliberation. However, while Facebook performed poorly in terms of overall level of deliberative quality, it did promote a high degree of general engagement among users.

The study’s findings suggest that deliberative discourse in the virtual public sphere of the Internet is indeed possible, which is good news for advocates of deliberative theory. However, this will only be possible by carefully considering how platforms function, and how they are designed. Some may argue that the “power of design” (shaped by organizers like media companies), contradicts the basic idea of open debate amongst equals where the only necessary force is Habermas’s “forceless force of the better argument”. These advocates of an utterly free virtual public sphere may be disappointed, given it’s clear that deliberation is only likely to emerge if the platform is designed in a particular way.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed: Just briefly: what design features did you find helped support public deliberation, i.e. reasoned, reciprocal, respectful, constructive discussion?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: There are several design features which are known to influence online deliberation. However, in this study we particularly focus on moderation, asynchronous discussion, clear topic definition, and the availability of information, which we have found to have a positive influence on the quality of online deliberation.

Ed.: I associate “Internet as a deliberative space” with Habermas, but have never read him: what’s the short version of what he thinks about “the public sphere” — and how the Internet might support this?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: Well, Habermas describes the public sphere as a space where free and equal people discuss topics of public import in a specific way. The respectful exchange of rational reasons is crucial in this normative ideal. Due to its open architecture, the Internet has often been presented as providing the infrastructure for large scale deliberation processes. However, Habermas himself is very skeptical as to whether online spaces support his ideas on deliberation. Ironically, he is one of the most influential authors in online deliberation scholarship.

Ed.: What do advocates of the Internet as a “deliberation space” hope for — simply that people will feel part of a social space / community if they can like things or comment on them (and see similar viewpoints); or that it will result in actual rational debate, and people changing their minds to “better” viewpoints, whatever they may be? I can personally see a value for the former, but I can’t imagine the latter ever working, i.e. given people basically don’t change?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: We are thinking that both hopes are present in the current debate, and we partly agree with your perception that changing minds seems to be difficult. But we may also be facing some methodological or empirical issues here, because changing of minds is not an easy thing to measure. We know from other studies that deliberation can indeed cause changes of opinion. However, most of this probably takes place within the individual’s mind. Robert E. Goodin has called this process “deliberation within” and this is not accessible through content analysis. People do not articulate “Oh, thanks for this argument, I have changed my mind”, but they probably take something away from online discussions which makes them more open minded.

Ed.: Does Wikipedia provide an example where strangers have (oddly!) come together to create something of genuine value — but maybe only because they’re actually making a specific public good? Is the basic problem of the idea of the “Internet supporting public discourse” that this is just too aimless an activity, with no obvious individual or collective benefit?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: We think Wikipedia is a very particular case. However, we can learn from this case that the collective goal plays a very important role for the quality of contributions. We know from empirical research that if people have the intention of contributing to something meaningful, discussion quality is significantly higher than in online spaces without that desire to have an impact.

Ed.: I wonder: isn’t Twitter the place where “deliberation” now takes place? How does it fit into, or inform, the deliberation literature, which I am assuming has largely focused on things like discussion fora?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: This depends on the definition of the term “deliberation”. We would argue that the limitation to 280 characters is probably not the best design feature for meaningful deliberation. However, we may have to think about deliberation in less complex contexts in order to reach more people; but this is a polarizing debate.

Ed.: You say that “outsourcing discussions to social networking sites such as Facebook is not advisable due to the low level of deliberative quality compared to other news platforms”. Facebook has now decided that instead of “connecting the world” it’s going to “bring people closer together” — what would you recommend that they do to support this, in terms of the design of the interactive (or deliberative) features of the platform?

Katharina / Dennis / Christiane: This is a difficult one! We think that the quality of deliberation on Facebook would strongly benefit from moderators, which should be more present on the platform to structure the discussions. By this we do not only mean professional moderators but also participative forms of moderation, which could be encouraged more by mechanisms which support such behaviour.

Read the full article: Katharina Esau, Dennis Friess, and Christiane Eilders (2017) Design Matters! An Empirical Analysis of Online Deliberation on Different News Platforms. Policy & Internet 9 (3) 321-342.

Katharina (@kathaesa), Dennis, and Christiane were talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Using cross-sectional survey data from five e-enabled elections in Estonia — a country with a decade’s experience of nationwide remote Internet voting — the authors show e-voting to be strongly persistent among voters, with clear evidence of habit formation. While a technological fix probably won’t address the underlying reasons for low turnout, it could help stop further decline by making voting easier for those who are more likely to turn out. Arresting turnout decline by keeping those who participate participating might be one realistic goal that e-voting is able to achieve.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: There seems to be a general trend of declining electoral turnouts worldwide. Is there any form of consensus (based on actual data) on why voting rates are falling?

Mihkel / Kristjan: A consensus in terms of a single major source of turnout decline that the data points to worldwide is clearly lacking. There is however more of an agreement as to why certain regions are experiencing a comparatively steeper decline. Disenchantment with democracy and an overall disappointment in politics is the number one reason usually listed when discussing lower and declining turnout levels in new democracies.

While the same issues are nowadays also listed for older established democracies, there is no hard comparative evidence for it. We do know that the level of interest in and engagement with politics has declined across the board in Western Europe when compared to the 1960-70s, but this doesn’t count as disenchantment, and the clear decline in turnout levels in established democracies started a couple of decades later, in the early 1990s.

Given that turnout levels are still widely different depending on the country, the overall worldwide decline is probably a combination of the addition of new democracies with low and more-rapidly declining turnout levels, and a plethora of country-specific reasons in older democracies that are experiencing a somewhat less steep decline in turnout.

Ed.: Is the worry about voting decline really about “falling representation” per se, or that it might be symptomatic of deeper problems with the political ecosystem, i.e. fewer people choosing politics as a career, less involvement in local politics, less civic engagement (etc.). In other words — is falling voting (per se) even the main problem?

Mihkel / Kristjan: We can only agree; it clearly is a symptom of deeper problems. Although high turnout is a good thing, low turnout is not necessarily a problem as people have the freedom not to participate and not to be interested in politics. It becomes a problem when low turnout leads to a lack of legitimacy of the representative body and consequently also of the whole process of representation. And as you rightly point out, real problems start much earlier and at a lower level than voting in parliamentary elections. The paradox is that the technology we have examined in our article — remote internet voting — clearly can’t address these fundamental problems.

Ed.: I’m assuming the Estonian voters were voting remotely online (rather than electronically in a booth), i.e. in their own time, at their convenience? Are you basically testing the effect of offering a more convenient voting format? (And finding that format to be habit-forming?).

Mihkel / Kristjan: Yes. One of the reasons we examined Internet voting from this angle was the apparent paradox of every third vote being cast online but also only a minute increase in turnout. A few other countries also experimenting with electronic voting have seen no tangible differences in turnout levels. The explanation is of course that it is a convenience voting method that makes voting simpler for people who are already quite likely to vote — now they simply use a more convenient option to do so. But what we noted in our article was a clearly higher share of electronic voters who turned out more consistently over different elections in comparison to voters voting on paper, and even when they didn’t show traits that usually correlate with electronic voting, like living further away from polling stations. So convenience did not seem to tell the whole story, even though it might have been one of the original reasons why electronic voting was picked up.

Ed.: Presumably with remote online voting, it’s possible to send targeted advertising to voters (via email and social media), with links to vote, i.e. making it more likely people will vote in the moment, in response to whatever issues happen to be salient at the time. How does online campaigning (and targeting) change once you introduce online voting?

Mihkel / Kristjan: Theoretically, parties should be able to lock voters in more easily by advertising links to the voting solution in their online campaigns; as in banners saying “vote for me and you can do it directly here (linked)”. In the Estonian case there is an informal agreement to remain from doing that, however, in order to safeguard the neutrality of online voting. Trust in online voting is paramount, even more so than is the case with paper voting, so it probably is a good idea to try to ensure that people trust the online voting solution to be controlled by a neutral state agent tasked with conducting the elections, in order to avoid any possible associations between certain parties and the voting environment (which linking directly to the voting mechanism might cause to happen). That can never be 100% ensured though, so online campaigns coupled with online voting can make it harder for election authorities to convey the image of impartiality of their procedures.

As for voting in the moment I don’t see online voting to be substantially more susceptible to this than other voting modes — given last minute developments can influence voters voting on paper as well. I think the latest US and French presidential elections are a case in point. Some argue that the immediate developments and revelations in the Clinton email scandal investigation a couple of weeks before voting day turned the result. In the French case the hacking and release of Macron’s campaign communications immediately before voting day however didn’t play a role in the outcome. Voting in the moment will happen or not regardless of the voting mode being used.

Ed.: What do you think the barriers are to greater roll-out of online voting: presumably there are security worries, i.e. over election hacking and lack of a paper trail? (and maybe also worries about the possibility of coercive voting, if it doesn’t take place alone in a booth?)

Mihkel / Kristjan: The number one barrier to greater roll-out remains security worries about hacking. Given that people cannot observe electronic voting (i.e. how their vote arrives at the voting authorities) the role of trust becomes more central than for paper voting. And trust can be eroded easily by floating rumours even without technically compromising voting systems. The solution is to introduce verifiability into the system, akin to a physical ballot in the case of paper voting, but this makes online voting even more technologically complex.

A lot of research is being put into verifiable electronic voting systems to meet very strict security requirements. The funny thing is however that the fears holding back wider online voting are not really being raised for paper voting, even though they should. At a certain stage of the process all paper votes become bits of information in an information system as local polling stations enter or report them into computer systems that are used to aggregate the votes and determine the seat distribution. No election is fully paper based anymore.

Vote coercion problems of course cannot be ruled out and is by definition more likely when the voting authorities don’t exercise control over the immediate voting environment. I think countries that suffer from such problems shouldn’t introduce a system that might exacerbate that even more. But again, most countries allow for multiple modes that differ in the degree of neutrality and control exercised by the election authority. Absentee ballots and postal voting (which is very widespread in some countries, like Switzerland), are as vulnerable to voter coercion as is remote Internet voting. Online voting is simply one mode of voting — maintaining a healthy mix of voting modes is probably the best solution to ensure that elections are not compromised.

Ed.: I guess declining turnout is probably a problem that is too big and complex to be understood or “fixed” — but how would you go about addressing it, if asked to do so..?

Mihkel / Kristjan: We fully agree — the technology of online voting will not fix low turnout as it doesn’t address the underlying problem. It simply makes voting somewhat more convenient. But voting is not difficult in the first place — with weekend voting, postal voting and absentee ballots; just to name a few things that already ease participation.

There are technologies that have a revolutionary effect (i.e. that alter impact and that are truly innovatory) and then there are small technological fixes that provide for a simpler and more pleasurable existence. Online voting is not revolutionary; it does not give a new experience of participation, it is simply one slightly more convenient mode of voting and for that a very worthwhile thing. And I think this is the maximum that can be done and that is within our control when it comes to influencing turnout. Small incremental fixes to a large multifaceted problem.

While much of the modern political process is now carried out digitally, ICTs have yet to bring democracies to their full utopian ideal. The drivers of involvement in digital politics from an individual perspective are well studied, but less attention has been paid to the supply-side of online engagement in politics. In his Policy & Internet article “Inequality in Local Digital Politics: How Different Preconditions for Citizen Engagement Can Be Explained,” Gustav Lidén examines the supply of channels for digital politics distributed by Swedish municipalities, in order to understand the drivers of variation in local online engagement.

He finds a positive trajectory for digital politics in Swedish municipalities, but with significant variation between municipalities when it comes to opportunities for engagement in local politics via their websites. These patterns are explained primarily by population size (digital politics is costly, and larger societies are probably better able to carry these costs), but also by economic conditions and education levels. He also find that a lack of policies and unenthusiastic politicians creates poor possibilities for development, verifying previous findings that without citizen demand — and ambitious politicians — successful provision of channels for digital politics will be hard to achieve.

We caught up with Gustav to discuss his findings:

Ed.: I guess there must be a huge literature (also in development studies) on the interactions between connectivity, education, the economy, and supply and demand for digital government: and what the influencers are in each of these relationships. Not to mention causality.. I’m guessing “everything is important, but nothing is clear”: is that fair? And do you think any “general principles” explaining demand and supply of electronic government / democracy could ever be established, if they haven’t already?

Gustav: Although the literature in this field is becoming vast the subfield that I am primarily engaged in, that is the conditions for digital policy at the subnational level, has only recently attracted greater numbers of scholars. Even if predictors of these phenomena can be highly dependent on context, there are some circumstances that we can now regard as being the ‘usual suspects’. Not surprisingly, resources of both economic and human capital appear to be important, irrespective of the empirical case. Population size also seems to be a key determinant that can influence these kind of resources.

In terms of causality, few studies that I am familiar with have succeeded in examining the interplay of both demand for and supply of digital forms of politics. In my article I try to get closer to the causal chain by examining both structural predictors as well as adding qualitative material from two cases. This makes it possible to establish better precision on causal chains since it enables judgements on how structural conditions influence key stakeholders.

Ed.: You say government-citizen interactions in Sweden “are to a larger extent digital in larger and better-off societies, while ‘analog’ methods prevail in smaller and poorer ones.” Does it particularly matter whether things are digital or analog at municipal level: as long as they all have equal access to national-level things?

Gustav: I would say so, yes. However, this could vary in relation to the responsibilities of municipalities among different countries. The municipal sector in Sweden is significant. Its general costs represent about one quarter of the country’s GDP and the sector is responsible for important parts of the welfare sector. In addition to this, municipalities also represent the most natural arena for political engagement — the typical political career starts off in the local council. Great variation in digital politics among municipalities is therefore problematic — there is a risk of inequality between municipalities if citizens from one municipality face greater possibilities for information and participation while those residing in another are more restrained.

Ed.: Sweden has areas of very low population density: are paper / telephone channels cheaper for municipalities to deliver in these areas, or might that just be an excuse for any lack of enthusiasm? i.e. what sorts of geographical constraints does Sweden face?

Gustav: This is a general problem for a large proportion of the Swedish municipalities. Due to government efforts, ambitions for assuring high-speed internet connections (including more sparsely populated areas), are under way. Yet in recent research, the importance for fast internet access in relation to municipalities’ work with digital politics has been quite ambiguous. My guess would, however, be that if the infrastructure is in place it will, sooner or later, be impossible for municipalities to refrain from working with more digital forms of politics.

Ed.: I guess a cliche of the Swedes (correct me if I’m wrong!) is that despite the welfare state / tradition of tolerance, they’re not particularly social — making it difficult, for example, for non-Swedes to integrate. How far do you think cultural / societal factors play a role in attempts to create “digital community,” in Sweden, or elsewhere?

Gustav: This cliche is perhaps most commonly related to the Swedish countryside. However, the case studies in my article illustrates a contrary image. Take the municipality of Gagnef as an example, one of my two cases, in which informants describe a vibrant civil society with associations representing a great variety of sectors. One interesting finding, though, is that local engagement is channeled through these traditional forms and not particularly through digital media. Still, from a global perspective, Sweden is rightfully described as an international leader in terms of digitalization. This is perhaps most visible in the more urban parts of the country; even if there are many good examples from the countryside in which the technology is one way to counteract great distances and low population density.

Ed.: And what is the role of the central government in all this? i.e. should they (could they? do they?) provide encouragement and expertise in providing local-level digital services, particularly for the smaller and poorer districts?

Gustav: Due to the considerable autonomy among the municipalities the government has not regulated municipalities working with this issue. However, they have encouraged and supported parts of it, primarily when it comes to the investment of technological infrastructure. My research does show that smaller and poorer municipalities have a hard time finding the right resources for developing digital forms of politics. Local political leaders find it hard to prioritize these issues when there is almost a constant need for more resources for schools and elderly care. But this is hardly unique for Sweden. In a study of the local level in the US, Norris and Reddick show how lack of financial resources is the number one constraint for the development of digital services. I think that government regulation, i.e. forcing municipalities to distribute specific digital channels, could lower inequalities between municipalities but would be unthinkable without additional government funding.

Ed.: Finally: do you see it as “inevitable” that everyone will eventually be online, or could pockets of analog government-citizen interaction persist basically indefinitely?

Gustav: Something of a countermovement opposing the digital society appears to exist in several societies. In general, I think we need to find a more balanced way to describe the consequences of digitalization. Hopefully, most people see both the value and the downsides of a digital society, but the debate tends to be dominated either by naïve optimists or complete pessimists. Policy makers need though, to start thinking of the consequences of both inequalities in relation to this technique and pay more attention to the risks related to it.

Read the full article: Lidén, G. (2016) Inequality in Local Digital Politics: How Different Preconditions for Citizen Engagement Can Be Explained. Policy & Internet 8 (3) doi:10.1002/poi3.122.

Gustav Lidén was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

See his websites: https://www.miun.se/Personal/gustavliden/ and http://gustavliden.blogspot.se/

These applications are based on the idea of issue and proximity voting — the parties and candidates recommended by VAAs are those with the highest number of matching positions on a number of political questions and issues. Many of these questions are much more specific and detailed than party programs and electoral platforms, and show the voters exactly what the party or candidates stand for and how they will vote in parliament once elected. In his Policy & Internet article “Do VAAs Encourage Issue Voting and Promissory Representation? Evidence From the Swiss Smartvote,” Andreas Ladner examines the extent to which VAAs alter the way voters perceive the meaning of elections, and encourage them to hold politicians to account for election promises.

His main hypothesis is that VAAs lead to “promissory representation” — where parties and candidates are elected for their promises and sanctioned by the electorate if they don’t keep them. He suggests that as these tools become more popular, the “delegate model” is likely to increase in popularity: i.e. one in which politicians are regarded as delegates voted into parliament to keep their promises, rather than being voted a free mandate to act how they see fit (the “trustee model”).

We caught up with Andreas to discuss his findings:

Ed.: You found that issue-voters were more likely (than other voters) to say they would sanction a politician who broke their election promises. But also that issue voters are less politically engaged. So is this maybe a bit moot: i.e. if the people most likely to force the “delegate model” system are the least likely to enforce it?

Andreas: It perhaps looks a bit moot in the first place, but what happens if the less engaged are given the possibility to sanction them more easily or by default. Sanctioning a politician who breaks an election promise is not per se a good thing, it depends on the reason why he or she broke it, on the situation, and on the promise. VAA can easily provide information to what extent candidates keep their promises — and then it gets very easy to sanction them simply for that without taking other arguments into consideration.

Ed.: Do voting advice applications work best in complex, multi-party political systems? (I’m not sure anyone would need one to distinguish between Trump / Clinton, for example?)

Andreas: Yes, I believe that in very complex systems – like for example in the Swiss case where voters not only vote for parties but also for up to 35 different candidates – VAAs are particularly useful since they help to process a huge amount of information. If the choice is only between two parties or two candidates which are completely different, than VAAs are less helpful.

Ed.: I guess the recent elections / referendum I am most familiar with (US, UK, France) have been particularly lurid and nasty: but I guess VAAs rely on a certain quiet rationality to work as intended? How do you see your Swiss results (and Swiss elections, generally) comparing with these examples? Do VAAs not just get lost in the noise?

Andreas: The idea of VAAs is to help voters to make better informed choices. This is, of course, opposed to decisions based on emotions. In Switzerland, elections are not of outmost importance, due to specific features of our political system such as direct democracy and power sharing, but voters seem to appreciate the information provided by smartvote. Almost 20% of the voter cast their vote after having consulted the website.

Ed.: Macron is a recent example of someone who clearly sought (and received) a general mandate, rather than presenting a detailed platform of promises. Is that unusual? He was criticised in his campaign for being “too vague,” but it clearly worked for him. What use are manifesto pledges in politics — as opposed to simply making clear to the electorate where you stand on the political spectrum?

Andreas: Good VAAs combine electoral promises on concrete issues as well as more general political positions. Voters can base their decisions on either of them, or on a combination of both of them. I am not arguing in favour of one or the other, but they clearly have different implications. The former is closer to the delegate model, the latter to the trustee model. I think good VAAs should make the differences clear and should even allow the voters to choose.

Ed.: I guess Trump is a contrasting example of someone whose campaign was all about promises (while also seeking a clear mandate to “make America great again”), but who has lied, and broken these (impossible) promises seemingly faster than people can keep track of them. Do you think his supporters care, though?

Andreas: His promises were too far away from what he can possibly keep. Quite a few of his voters, I believe, do not want them to be fully realized but rather that the US move a bit more into this direction.

Ed.: I suppose another example of an extremely successful quasi-pledge was the Brexit campaign’s obviously meaningless — but hugely successful — “We send the EU £350 million a week; let’s fund our NHS instead.” Not to sound depressing, but do promises actually mean anything? Is it the candidate / issue that matters (and the media response to that), or the actual pledges?

Andreas: I agree that the media play an important role and not always into the direction they intend to do. I do not think that it is the £350 million a week which made the difference. It is much more a general discontent and a situation which was not sufficiently explained and legitimized which led to this unexpected decision. If you lose the support for your policy than it gets much easier for your opponents. It is difficult to imagine that you can get a majority built on nothing.

Ed.: I’ve read all the articles in the Policy & Internet special issue on VAAs: one thing that struck me is that there’s lots of incomplete data, e.g. no knowledge of how people actually voted in the end (or would vote in future). What are the strengths and weaknesses of VAAs as a data source for political research?

Andreas: The quality of the data varies between countries and voting systems. We have a self-selection bias in the use of VAAs and often also into the surveys conducted among the users. In general we don’t know how they voted, and we have to believe them what they tell us. In many respects the data does not differ that much from what we get from classic electoral studies, especially since they also encounter difficulties in addressing a representative sample. VAAs usually have much larger Ns on the side of the voters, generate more information about their political positions and preferences, and provide very interesting information about the candidates and parties.

Read the full article: Ladner, A. (2016) Do VAAs Encourage Issue Voting and Promissory Representation? Evidence From the Swiss Smartvote. Policy & Internet 8 (4). DOI: doi:10.1002/poi3.137.

Andreas Ladner was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Fake news, post-truth, “alternative facts”, filter bubbles — this is the news and media environment we apparently now inhabit, and that has formed the fabric and backdrop of Brexit (“£350 million a week”) and Trump (“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period”). Do social media divide us, hide us from each other? Are you particularly aware of what content is personalised for you, what it is you’re not seeing? How much can we do with machine-automated or crowd-sourced verification of facts? And are things really any worse now than when Bacon complained in 1620 about the false notions that “are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein”?

1. Bernie Hogan: How Facebook divides us [Times Literary Supplement]

27 October 2016 / 1000 words / 5 minutes

“Filter bubbles can create an increasingly fractured population, such as the one developing in America. For the many people shocked by the result of the British EU referendum, we can also partially blame filter bubbles: Facebook literally filters our friends’ views that are least palatable to us, yielding a doctored account of their personalities.”

Bernie Hogan says it’s time Facebook considered ways to use the information it has about us to bring us together across political, ideological and cultural lines, rather than hide us from each other or push us into polarized and hostile camps. He says it’s not only possible for Facebook to help mitigate the issues of filter bubbles and context collapse; it’s imperative, and it’s surprisingly simple.

2. Luciano Floridi: Fake news and a 400-year-old problem: we need to resolve the ‘post-truth’ crisis [the Guardian]

29 November 2016 / 1000 words / 5 minutes

“The internet age made big promises to us: a new period of hope and opportunity, connection and empathy, expression and democracy. Yet the digital medium has aged badly because we allowed it to grow chaotically and carelessly, lowering our guard against the deterioration and pollution of our infosphere. […] some of the costs of misinformation may be hard to reverse, especially when confidence and trust are undermined. The tech industry can and must do better to ensure the internet meets its potential to support individuals’ wellbeing and social good.”

The Internet echo chamber satiates our appetite for pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods, and has become the defining challenge of the 21st century, says Luciano Floridi. So far, the strategy for technology companies has been to deal with the ethical impact of their products retrospectively, but this is not good enough, he says. We need to shape and guide the future of the digital, and stop making it up as we go along. It is time to work on an innovative blueprint for a better kind of infosphere.

3. Philip Howard: Facebook and Twitter’s real sin goes beyond spreading fake news

3 January 2017 / 1000 words / 5 minutes

“With the data at their disposal and the platforms they maintain, social media companies could raise standards for civility by refusing to accept ad revenue for placing fake news. They could let others audit and understand the algorithms that determine who sees what on a platform. Just as important, they could be the platforms for doing better opinion, exit and deliberative polling.”

Only Facebook and Twitter know how pervasive fabricated news stories and misinformation campaigns have become during referendums and elections, says Philip Howard — and allowing fake news and computational propaganda to target specific voters is an act against democratic values. But in a time of weakening polling systems, withholding data about public opinion is actually their major crime against democracy, he says.

4. Brent Mittelstadt: Should there be a better accounting of the algorithms that choose our news for us?

7 December 2016 / 1800 words / 8 minutes

“Transparency is often treated as the solution, but merely opening up algorithms to public and individual scrutiny will not in itself solve the problem. Information about the functionality and effects of personalisation must be meaningful to users if anything is going to be accomplished. At a minimum, users of personalisation systems should be given more information about their blind spots, about the types of information they are not seeing, or where they lie on the map of values or criteria used by the system to tailor content to users.”

A central ideal of democracy is that political discourse should allow a fair and critical exchange of ideas and values. But political discourse is unavoidably mediated by the mechanisms and technologies we use to communicate and receive information, says Brent Mittelstadt. And content personalization systems and the algorithms they rely upon create a new type of curated media that can undermine the fairness and quality of political discourse.

5. Heather Ford: Verification of crowd-sourced information: is this ‘crowd wisdom’ or machine wisdom?

19 November 2013 / 1400 words / 6 minutes

“A key question being asked in the design of future verification mechanisms is the extent to which verification work should be done by humans or non-humans (machines). Here, verification is not a binary categorisation, but rather there is a spectrum between human and non-human verification work, and indeed, projects like Ushahidi, Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo have all developed different verification mechanisms.”

‘Human’ verification, a process of checking whether a particular report meets a group’s truth standards, is an acutely social process, says Heather Ford. If code is law and if other aspects in addition to code determine how we can act in the world, it is important that we understand the context in which code is deployed. Verification is a practice that determines how we can trust information coming from a variety of sources — only by illuminating such practices and the variety of impacts that code can have in different environments can we begin to understand how code regulates our actions in crowdsourcing environments.

.. and just to prove we’re capable of understanding and acknowledging and assimilating multiple viewpoints on complex things, here’s Helen Margetts, with a different slant on filter bubbles: “Even if political echo chambers were as efficient as some seem to think, there is little evidence that this is what actually shapes election results. After all, by definition echo chambers preach to the converted. It is the undecided people who (for example) the Leave and Trump campaigns needed to reach. And from the research, it looks like they managed to do just that.”

The Authors

Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the OII; his research interests lie at the intersection of social networks and media convergence.

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.

Philip Howard is the OII’s Professor of Internet Studies. He investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world.

Brent Mittelstadt is an OII Postdoc His research interests include the ethics of information handled by medical ICT, theoretical developments in discourse and virtue ethics, and epistemology of information.

Heather Ford completed her doctorate at the OII, where she studied how Wikipedia editors write history as it happens. She is now a University Academic Fellow in Digital Methods at the University of Leeds. Her forthcoming book “Fact Factories: Wikipedia’s Quest for the Sum of All Human Knowledge” will be published by MIT Press.

Helen Margetts is the OII’s Director, and Professor of Society and the Internet. She specialises in digital era government, politics and public policy, and data science and experimental methods. Her most recent book is Political Turbulence (Princeton).

Coming up! .. It’s the economy, stupid / Augmented reality and ambient fun / The platform economy / Power and development / Internet past and future / Government / Labour rights / The disconnected / Ethics / Staying critical

This was probably the nastiest Presidential election in recent memory: awash with Twitter bots and scandal, polarisation and filter bubbles, accusations of interference by Russia and the Director of the FBI, and another shock result. We have written about electoral prediction elsewhere: instead, here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy — the problems, but also potential ways forward.

1. James Williams: The Clickbait Candidate

10 October 2016 / 2700 words / 13 minutes

“Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivize, relentless competition for our attention […] Like clickbait or outrage cascades, Donald Trump is merely the sort of informational packet our media environment is designed to select for.”

James Williams says that now is probably the time to have that societal conversation about the design ethics of the attention economy — because in our current media environment, attention trumps everything.

2. Sam Woolley, Philip Howard: Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election [Wired]

15 May 2016 / 850 words / 4 minutes

“Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras […] each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto aren’t people. They’re bots.”

It’s no surprise that automated spam accounts (or bots) are creeping into election politics, say Sam Woolley and Philip Howard. Demanding bot transparency would at least help clean up social media — which, for better or worse, is increasingly where presidents get elected.

3. Phil Howard: Is Social Media Killing Democracy?

15 November 2016 / 1100 words / 5 minutes

“This is the big year for computational propaganda — using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits […] these technologies permit too much fake news, encourage our herding instincts, and aren’t expected to provide public goods.”

Phil Howard discusses ways to address fake news, audit social algorithms, and deal with social media’s “moral pass” — social media is damaging democracy, he says, but can also be used to save it.

4. Helen Margetts: Don’t Shoot the Messenger! What part did social media play in 2016 US e­lection?

15 November 2016 / 600 words / 3 minutes

“Rather than seeing social media solely as the means by which Trump ensnared his presidential goal, we should appreciate how they can provide a wealth of valuable data to understand the anger and despair that the polls missed, and to analyse political behaviour and opinion in the times ahead.”

New social information and visibility brings change to social behaviour, says Helen Margetts — ushering in political turbulence and unpredictability. Social media made visible what could have remain a country’s dark secret (hatred of women, rampant racism, etc.), but it will also underpin any radical counter-movement that emerges in the future.

5. Helen Margetts: Of course social media is transforming politics. But it’s not to blame for Brexit and Trump

9 January 2017 / 1700 words / 8 minutes

“Even if political echo chambers were as efficient as some seem to think, there is little evidence that this is what actually shapes election results. After all, by definition echo chambers preach to the converted. It is the undecided people who (for example) the Leave and Trump campaigns needed to reach. And from the research, it looks like they managed to do just that.”

Politics is a lot messier in the social media era than it used to be, says Helen Margetts, but rather than blaming social media for undermining democracy, we should be thinking about how we can improve the (inevitably major) part that it plays.

The Authors

James Williams is an OII doctoral candidate, studying the ethics of attention and persuasion in technology design.

Sam Woolley is a Research Assistant on the OII’s Computational Propaganda project; he is interested in political bots, and the intersection of political communication and automation.

Philip Howard is the OII’s Professor of Internet Studies and PI of the Computational Propaganda project. He investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world.

Helen Margetts is the OII’s Director, and Professor of Society and the Internet. She specialises in digital era government, politics and public policy, and data science and experimental methods. Her most recent book is Political Turbulence (Princeton).

Coming up .. Fake news and filter bubbles / It’s the economy, stupid / Augmented reality and ambient fun / The platform economy / Power and development / Internet past and future / Government / Labour rights / The disconnected / Ethics / Staying critical

#5OIIPieces

Attention has focused on echo chambers, with many arguing that social media users exist in ideological filter bubbles, narrowly focused on their own preferences, prey to fake news and political bots, reinforcing polarization and leading voters to turn away from the mainstream. Mark Zuckerberg has responded with the strange claim that his company (built on $5 billion of advertising revenue) does not influence people’s decisions.

So what role did social media play in the political events of 2016?

Political turbulence and the new populism

There is no doubt that social media has brought change to politics. From the waves of protest and unrest in response to the 2008 financial crisis, to the Arab spring of 2011, there has been a generalized feeling that political mobilization is on the rise, and that social media had something to do with it.

Our book investigating the relationship between social media and collective action, Political Turbulence, focuses on how social media allows new, “tiny acts” of political participation (liking, tweeting, viewing, following, signing petitions and so on), which turn social movement theory around. Rather than identifying with issues, forming collective identity and then acting to support the interests of that identity – or voting for a political party that supports it – in a social media world, people act first, and think about it, or identify with others later, if at all.

These tiny acts of participation can scale up to large-scale mobilizations, such as demonstrations, protests or campaigns for policy change. But they almost always don’t. The overwhelming majority (99.99%) of petitions to the UK or US governments fail to get the 100,000 signatures required for a parliamentary debate (UK) or an official response (US).

The very few that succeed do so very quickly on a massive scale (petitions challenging the Brexit and Trump votes immediately shot above 4 million signatures, to become the largest petitions in history), but without the normal organizational or institutional trappings of a social or political movement, such as leaders or political parties – the reason why so many of the Arab Spring revolutions proved disappointing.

This explosive rise, non-normal distribution and lack of organization that characterizes contemporary politics can explain why many political developments of our time seem to come from nowhere. It can help to understand the shock waves of support that brought us the Italian Five Star Movement, Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and most recently Brexit and Trump – all of which have campaigned against the “establishment” and challenged traditional political institutions to breaking point.

Each successive mobilization has made people believe that challengers from outside the mainstream are viable – and that is in part what has brought us unlikely results on both sides of the Atlantic. But it doesn’t explain everything.

We’ve had waves of populism before – long before social media (indeed many have made parallels between the politics of 2016 and that of the 1930s). While claims that social media feeds are the biggest threat to democracy, leading to the “disintegration of the general will” and “polarization that drives populism” abound, hard evidence is more difficult to find.

The myth of the echo chamber

The mechanism that is most often offered for this state of events is the existence of echo chambers or filter bubbles. The argument goes that first social media platforms feed people the news that is closest to their own ideological standpoint (estimated from their previous patterns of consumption) and second, that people create their own personalized information environments through their online behaviour, selecting friends and news sources that back up their world view.

Once in these ideological bubbles, people are prey to fake news and political bots that further reinforce their views. So, some argue, social media reinforces people’s current views and acts as a polarizing force on politics, meaning that “random exposure to content is gone from our diets of news and information”.

Really? Is exposure less random than before? Surely the most perfect echo chamber would be the one occupied by someone who only read the Daily Mail in the 1930s – with little possibility of other news – or someone who just watches Fox News? Can our new habitat on social media really be as closed off as these environments, when our digital networks are so very much larger and more heterogeneous than anything we’ve had before?

Research suggests not. A recent large-scale survey (of 50,000 news consumers in 26 countries) shows how those who do not use social media on average come across news from significantly fewer different online sources than those who do. Social media users, it found, receive an additional “boost” in the number of news sources they use each week, even if they are not actually trying to consume more news. These findings are reinforced by an analysis of Facebook data, where 8.8 billion posts, likes and comments were posted through the US election.

Recent research published in Science shows that algorithms play less of a role in exposure to attitude-challenging content than individuals’ own choices and that “on average more than 20% of an individual’s Facebook friends who report an ideological affiliation are from the opposing party”, meaning that social media exposes individuals to at least some ideologically cross-cutting viewpoints: “24% of the hard content shared by liberals’ friends is cross-cutting, compared to 35% for conservatives” (the equivalent figures would be 40% and 45% if random).

In fact, companies have no incentive to create hermetically sealed (as I have heard one commentator claim) echo chambers. Most of social media content is not about politics (sorry guys) – most of that £5 billion advertising revenue does not come from political organizations. So any incentives that companies have to create echo chambers – for the purposes of targeted advertising, for example – are most likely to relate to lifestyle choices or entertainment preferences, rather than political attitudes.

And where filter bubbles do exist they are constantly shifting and sliding – easily punctured by a trending cross-issue item (anybody looking at #Election2016 shortly before polling day would have seen a rich mix of views, while having little doubt about Trump’s impending victory).

And of course, even if political echo chambers were as efficient as some seem to think, there is little evidence that this is what actually shapes election results. After all, by definition echo chambers preach to the converted. It is the undecided people who (for example) the Leave and Trump campaigns needed to reach.

And from the research, it looks like they managed to do just that. A barrage of evidence suggests that such advertising was effective in the 2015 UK general election (where the Conservatives spent 10 times as much as Labour on Facebook advertising), in the EU referendum (where the Leave campaign also focused on paid Facebook ads) and in the presidential election, where Facebook advertising has been credited for Trump’s victory, while the Clinton campaign focused on TV ads. And of course, advanced advertising techniques might actually focus on those undecided voters from their conversations. This is not the bottom-up political mobilization that fired off support for Podemos or Bernie Sanders. It is massive top-down advertising dollars.

Ironically however, these huge top-down political advertising campaigns have some of the same characteristics as the bottom-up movements discussed above, particularly sustainability. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s dictum that candidates “campaign in poetry and govern in prose” may need an update. Barack Obama’s innovative campaigns of online social networks, micro-donations and matching support were miraculous, but the extent to which he developed digital government or data-driven policy-making in office was disappointing. Campaign digitally, govern in analogue might be the new mantra.

Chaotic pluralism

Politics is a lot messier in the social media era than it used to be – whether something takes off and succeeds in gaining critical mass is far more random than it appears to be from a casual glance, where we see only those that succeed.

In Political Turbulence, we wanted to identify the model of democracy that best encapsulates politics intertwined with social media. The dynamics we observed seem to be leading us to a model of “chaotic pluralism”, characterized by diversity and heterogeneity – similar to early pluralist models – but also by non-linearity and high interconnectivity, making liberal democracies far more disorganized, unstable and unpredictable than the architects of pluralist political thought ever envisaged.

Perhaps rather than blaming social media for undermining democracy, we should be thinking about how we can improve the (inevitably major) part that it plays.

Within chaotic pluralism, there is an urgent need for redesigning democratic institutions that can accommodate new forms of political engagement, and respond to the discontent, inequalities and feelings of exclusion – even anger and alienation – that are at the root of the new populism. We should be using social media to listen to (rather than merely talk at) the expression of these public sentiments, and not just at election time.

Many political institutions – for example, the British Labour Party, the US Republican Party, and the first-past-the-post electoral system shared by both countries – are in crisis, precisely because they have become so far removed from the concerns and needs of citizens. Redesign will need to include social media platforms themselves, which have rapidly become established as institutions of democracy and will be at the heart of any democratic revival.

As these platforms finally start to admit to being media companies (rather than tech companies), we will need to demand human intervention and transparency over algorithms that determine trending news; factchecking (where Google took the lead); algorithms that detect fake news; and possibly even “public interest” bots to counteract the rise of computational propaganda.

Meanwhile, the only thing we can really predict with certainty is that unpredictable things will happen and that social media will be part of our political future.

Discussing the echoes of the 1930s in today’s politics, the Wall Street Journal points out how Roosevelt managed to steer between the extremes of left and right because he knew that “public sentiments of anger and alienation aren’t to be belittled or dismissed, for their causes can be legitimate and their consequences powerful”. The path through populism and polarization may involve using the opportunity that social media presents to listen, understand and respond to these sentiments.

This piece draws on research from Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2016), by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri.

It is cross-posted from the World Economic Forum, where it was first published on 22 December 2016.

This is the big year for computational propaganda — using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook now provide a structure for our political lives. We’ve always relied on many kinds of sources for our political news and information. Family, friends, news organizations, charismatic politicians certainly predate the internet. But whereas those are sources of information, social media now provides the structure for political conversation. And the problem is that these technologies permit too much fake news, encourage our herding instincts, and aren’t expected to provide public goods.

First, social algorithms allow fake news stories from untrustworthy sources to spread like wildfire over networks of family and friends. Many of us just assume that there is a modicum of truth-in-advertising. We expect this from advertisements for commercial goods and services, but not from politicians and political parties. Occasionally a political actor gets punished for betraying the public trust through their misinformation campaigns. But in the United States “political speech” is completely free from reasonable public oversight, and in most other countries the media organizations and public offices for watching politicians are legally constrained, poorly financed, or themselves untrustworthy. Research demonstrates that during the campaigns for Brexit and the U.S. presidency, large volumes of fake news stories, false factoids, and absurd claims were passed over social media networks, often by Twitter’s highly automated accounts and Facebook’s algorithms.

Second, social media algorithms provide very real structure to what political scientists often call “elective affinity” or “selective exposure”. When offered the choice of who to spend time with or which organizations to trust, we prefer to strengthen our ties to the people and organizations we already know and like. When offered a choice of news stories, we prefer to read about the issues we already care about, from pundits and news outlets we’ve enjoyed in the past. Random exposure to content is gone from our diets of news and information. The problem is not that we have constructed our own community silos — humans will always do that. The problem is that social media networks take away the random exposure to new, high-quality information.

This is not a technological problem. We are social beings and so we will naturally look for ways to socialize, and we will use technology to socialize each other. But technology could be part of the solution. A not-so-radical redesign might occasionally expose us to new sources of information, or warn us when our own social networks are getting too bounded.

The third problem is that technology companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have been given a “moral pass” on the obligations we hold journalists and civil society groups to.

In most democracies, the public policy and exit polling systems have been broken for a decade. Many social scientists now find that big data, especially network data, does a better job of revealing public preferences than traditional random digit dial systems. So Facebook actually got a moral pass twice this year. Their data on public opinion would have certainly informed the Brexit debate, and their data on voter preferences would certainly have informed public conversation during the US election.

Facebook has run several experiments now, published in scholarly journals, demonstrating that they have the ability to accurately anticipate and measure social trends. Whereas journalists and social scientists feel an obligation to openly analyze and discuss public preferences, we do not expect this of Facebook. The network effects that clearly were unmeasured by pollsters were almost certainly observable to Facebook. When it comes to news and information about politics, or public preferences on important social questions, Facebook has a moral obligation to share data and prevent computational propaganda. The Brexit referendum and US election have taught us that Twitter and Facebook are now media companies. Their engineering decisions are effectively editorial decisions, and we need to expect more openness about how their algorithms work. And we should expect them to deliberate about their editorial decisions.

There are some ways to fix these problems. Opaque software algorithms shape what people find in their news feeds. We’ve all noticed fake news stories (often called clickbait), and while these can be an entertaining part of using the internet, it is bad when they are used to manipulate public opinion. These algorithms work as “bots” on social media platforms like Twitter, where they were used in both the Brexit and US presidential campaign to aggressively advance the case for leaving Europe and the case for electing Trump. Similar algorithms work behind the scenes on Facebook, where they govern what content from your social networks actually gets your attention.

So the first way to strengthen democratic practices is for academics, journalists, policy makers and the interested public to audit social media algorithms. Was Hillary Clinton really replaced by an alien in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign? We all need to be able to see who wrote this story, whether or not it is true, and how it was spread. Most important, Facebook should not allow such stories to be presented as news, much less spread. If they take ad revenue for promoting political misinformation, they should face the same regulatory punishments that a broadcaster would face for doing such a public disservice.

The second problem is a social one that can be exacerbated by information technologies. This means it can also be mitigated by technologies. Introducing random news stories and ensuring exposure to high quality information would be a simple — and healthy — algorithmic adjustment to social media platforms. The third problem could be resolved with moral leadership from within social media firms, but a little public policy oversight from elections officials and media watchdogs would help. Did Facebook see that journalists and pollsters were wrong about public preferences? Facebook should have told us if so, and shared that data.

Social media platforms have provided a structure for spreading around fake news, we users tend to trust our friends and family, and we don’t hold media technology firms accountable for degrading our public conversations. The next big thing for technology evolution is the Internet of Things, which will generate massive amounts of data that will further harden these structures. Is social media damaging democracy? Yes, but we can also use social media to save democracy.

Is this really the case? At first glance, the ingredients of the Trump victory — as for Brexit — seem remarkably traditional. The Trump campaign spent more on physical souvenirs than on field data, more on Make America Great Again hats (made in China) than on polling. The Daily Mail characterisation of judges as Enemies of the People after their ruling that the triggering of Article 50 must be discussed in parliament seemed reminiscent of the 1930s. Likewise, US crowds chanting ‘Lock her up’, like lynch mobs, seemed like ghastly reminders of a pre-democratic era.

Clearly social media were a big part of the 2016 election, used heavily by the candidates themselves, and generating 8.8 billion posts, likes and commentson Facebook alone. Social media also make visible what in an earlier era could remain a country’s dark secret — hatred of women (through death and rape threats and trolling of female politicians in both the UK and US), and rampant racism.

This visibility, society’s new self-awareness, brings change to political behaviour. Social media provide social information about what other people are doing: viewing, following, liking, sharing, tweeting, joining, supporting and so on. This social information is the driver behind the political turbulence that characterises politics today. Those rustbelt Democrats feeling abandoned by the system saw on social media that they were not alone — that other people felt the same way, and that Trump was viable as a candidate. For a woman drawn towards the Trump agenda but feeling tentative, the hashtag #WomenForTrump could reassure her that there were like-minded people she could identify with. Decades of social science research shows information about the behaviour of others influences how groups behave and now it is driving the unpredictability of politics, bringing us Trump, Brexit, Corbyn, Sanders and unexpected political mobilisation across the world.

These are not echo chambers. As recent research shows, people are exposed to cross-cutting discourse on social media, across ever larger and more heterogeneous social networks. While the hypothetical #WomenForTrump tweeter or Facebook user will see like-minded behaviour, she will also see a peppering of social information showing people using opposing hashtags like #ImWithHer, or (post-election) #StillWithHer. It could be argued that a better example of an ‘echo chamber’ would be a regular Daily Mail reader or someone who only watched Fox News.

The mainstream media loved Trump: his controversial road-crash views sold their newspapers and advertising. Social media take us out of that world. They are relatively neutral in their stance on content, giving no particular priority to extreme or offensive views as on their platforms, the numbers are what matter.

Rather than seeing social media solely as the means by which Trump ensnared his presidential goal, we should appreciate how they can provide a wealth of valuable data to understand the anger and despair that the polls missed, and to analyse political behaviour and opinion in the times ahead. Social media can also shine the light of transparency on the workings of a Trump administration, as they did on his campaign. They will be critical for building networks of solidarity to confront the intolerance, sexism and racism stirred up during this bruising campaign. And social media will underpin any radical counter-movement that emerges in the coming years.

Helen Margetts is the author of Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action and thanks her co-authors Peter John, Scott Haleand Taha Yasseri.

Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilize online communities to achieve specific organizational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear.

In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate on the website was used by about 7% of the users; the rest were only passive readers or supported initiatives made by others. Nevertheless, Avoin Ministeriö has been instrumental in creating support for several of the most successful initiatives during the period, showing that the website has been a key actor during the introductory phase of the Citizens’ initiative in Finland.

We study how developments in political attitudes were affected by outcome satisfaction and process satisfaction. Outcome satisfaction concerns whether the participants get their preferred outcome through their involvement, and this has been emphasized by proponents of direct democracy. Since citizens get involved to achieve a specific outcome, their evaluation of the experience hinges on whether or not they achieve this outcome. Process satisfaction, on the other hand, is more concerned with the perceived quality of decision making. According to this perspective, what matters is that participants find that their concerns are given due consideration. When people find the decision making to be fair and balanced, they may even accept not getting their preferred outcome. The relative importance of these two perspectives remains disputed in the literature.

The research design consisted of two surveys administered to the users of Avoin Ministeriö before and after the decision of the Finnish Parliament on the first citizens’ initiative in concerning a ban on the fur-farming industry in Finland. This allowed us to observe how involvement in the crowdsourcing process shaped developments in central political attitudes among the users of Avoin Ministeriö and what factors determined the developments in subjective political legitimacy. The first survey was conducted in fall 2012, when the initiators were gathering signatures in support of the initiative to ban fur-farming, while the second survey was conducted in summer 2013 when Parliament rejected the initiative. Altogether 421 persons filled in both surveys, and thus comprised the sample for the analyses.

The study yielded a number of interesting findings. First of all, those who were dissatisfied with Parliament rejecting the initiative experienced a significantly more negative development in political trust compared to those who did not explicitly support the initiative. This shows that the crowdsourcing process had a negative impact on political legitimacy among the initiative’s supporters, which is in line with previous contributions emphasizing the importance of outcome legitimacy. It is worth noting that this also affected trust in the Finnish President, even if he has no formal powers in relation to the Citizens’ initiative in Finland. This shows that negative effects on political legitimacy could be more severe than just a temporary dissatisfaction with the political actors responsible for the decision.

Nevertheless, the outcome may not be the most important factor for determining developments in political legitimacy. Our second major finding indicated that those who were dissatisfied with the way Parliament handled the initiative also experienced more negative developments in political legitimacy compared to those who were satisfied. Furthermore, this effect was more pervasive than the effect for outcome satisfaction. This implies that the procedures for handling non-binding initiatives may play a strong role in citizens’ perceptions of representative institutions, which is in line with previous findings emphasising the importance of procedural aspects and evaluations for judging political authorities.

We conclude that there is a beneficial impact on political legitimacy if crowdsourced citizens’ initiatives have broad appeal so they can be passed in Parliament. However, it is important to note that positive effects on political legitimacy do not hinge on Parliament approving citizens’ initiatives. If the MPs invest time and resources in the careful, transparent and publicly justified handling of initiatives, possible negative effects of rejecting initiatives can be diminished. Citizens and activists may accept an unfavourable decision if the procedure by which it was reached seems fair and just. Finally, the results give reason to be hopeful about the role of crowdsourcing in restoring political legitimacy, since a majority of our respondents felt that the possibility of crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives clearly improved Finnish democracy.

While all hopes may not have been fulfilled so far, crowdsourcing legislation therefore still has potential to help rebuild political legitimacy.

Read the full article: Christensen, H., Karjalainen, M., and Nurminen, L., (2015) Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland. Policy and Internet 7 (1) 25–45.

Henrik Serup Christensen is Academy Research Fellow at SAMFORSK, Åbo Akademi University.

Maija Karjalainen is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science and Contemporary History in the University of Turku, Finland.

Laura Nurminen is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at Helsinki University, Finland.

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.

Counts of public Facebook posts mentioning any of the party leaders’ surnames. Data generated by social media can be used to understand political behaviour and institutions on an ongoing basis.[/caption]‘Congratulations to my friend @Messina2012 on his role in the resounding Conservative victory in Britain’ tweeted David Axelrod, campaign advisor to Miliband, to his former colleague Jim Messina, Cameron’s strategy adviser, on May 8th. The former was Obama’s communications director and the latter campaign manager of Obama’s 2012 campaign. Along with other consultants and advisors and large-scale data management platforms from Obama’s hugely successful digital campaigns, Conservative and Labour used an arsenal of social media and digital tools to interact with voters throughout, as did all the parties competing for seats in the 2015 election.

The parties ran very different kinds of digital campaigns. The Conservatives used advanced data science techniques borrowed from the US campaigns to understand how their policy announcements were being received and to target groups of individuals. They spent ten times as much as Labour on Facebook, using ads targeted at Facebook users according to their activities on the platform, geo-location and demographics. This was a top down strategy that involved working out was happening on social media and responding with targeted advertising, particularly for marginal seats. It was supplemented by the mainstream media, such as the Telegraph for example, which contacted its database of readers and subscribers to services such as Telegraph Money, urging them to vote Conservative. As Andrew Cooper tweeted after the election, ‘Big data, micro-targeting and social media campaigns just thrashed “5 million conversations” and “community organizing”’.

He has a point. Labour took a different approach to social media. Widely acknowledged to have the most boots on the real ground, knocking on doors, they took a similar ‘ground war’ approach to social media in local campaigns. Our own analysis at the Oxford Internet Institute shows that of the 450K tweets sent by candidates of the six largest parties in the month leading up to the general election, Labour party candidates sent over 120,000 while the Conservatives sent only 80,000, no more than the Greens and not much more than UKIP. But the greater number of Labour tweets were no more productive in terms of impact (measured in terms of mentions generated: and indeed the final result).

Both parties’ campaigns were tightly controlled. Ostensibly, Labour generated far more bottom-up activity from supporters using social media, through memes like #votecameron out, #milibrand (responding to Miliband’s interview with Russell Brand), and what Miliband himself termed the most unlikely cult of the 21st century in his resignation speech, #milifandom, none of which came directly from Central Office. These produced peaks of activity on Twitter that at some points exceeded even discussion of the election itself on the semi-official #GE2015 used by the parties, as the figure below shows. But the party remained aloof from these conversations, fearful of mainstream media mockery.

The Brand interview was agreed to out of desperation and can have made little difference to the vote (partly because Brand endorsed Miliband only after the deadline for voter registration: young voters suddenly overcome by an enthusiasm for participatory democracy after Brand’s public volte face on the utility of voting will have remained disenfranchised). But engaging with the swathes of young people who spend increasing amounts of their time on social media is a strategy for engagement that all parties ought to consider. YouTubers like PewDiePie have tens of millions of subscribers and billions of video views – their videos may seem unbelievably silly to many, but it is here that a good chunk the next generation of voters are to be found.

Only one of the leaders had a presence on social media that managed anything like the personal touch and universal reach that Obama achieved in 2008 and 2012 based on sustained engagement with social media – Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP’s use of social media, developed in last September’s referendum on Scottish independence had spawned a whole army of digital activists. All SNP candidates started the campaign with a Twitter account. When we look at the 650 local campaigns waged across the country, by far the most productive in the sense of generating mentions was the SNP; 100 tweets from SNP local candidates generating 10 times more mentions (1,000) than 100 tweets from (for example) the Liberal Democrats.

Scottish Labour’s failure to engage with Scottish peoples in this kind of way illustrates how difficult it is to suddenly develop relationships on social media – followers on all platforms are built up over years, not in the short space of a campaign. In strong contrast, advertising on these platforms as the Conservatives did is instantaneous, and based on the data science understanding (through advertising algorithms) of the platform itself. It doesn’t require huge databases of supporters – it doesn’t build up relationships between the party and supporters – indeed, they may remain anonymous to the party. It’s quick, dirty and effective.

The pollsters’ terrible night

So neither of the two largest parties really did anything with social media, or the huge databases of interactions that their platforms will have generated, to generate long-running engagement with the electorate. The campaigns were disconnected from their supporters, from their grass roots.

But the differing use of social media by the parties could lend a clue to why the opinion polls throughout the campaign got it so wrong, underestimating the Conservative lead by an average of five per cent. The social media data that may be gathered from this or any campaign is a valuable source of information about what the parties are doing, how they are being received, and what people are thinking or talking about in this important space – where so many people spend so much of their time. Of course, it is difficult to read from the outside; Andrew Cooper labeled the Conservatives’ campaign of big data to identify undecided voters, and micro-targeting on social media, as ‘silent and invisible’ and it seems to have been so to the polls.

Many voters were undecided until the last minute, or decided not to vote, which is impossible to predict with polls (bar the exit poll) – but possibly observable on social media, such as the spikes in attention to UKIP on Wikipedia towards the end of the campaign, which may have signaled their impressive share of the vote. As Jim Messina put it to msnbc news following up on his May 8^th tweet that UK (and US) polling was ‘completely broken’ – ‘people communicate in different ways now’, arguing that the Miliband campaign had tried to go back to the 1970s.

Surveys – such as polls — give a (hopefully) representative picture of what people think they might do. Social media data provide an (unrepresentative) picture of what people really said or did. Long-running opinion surveys (such as the Ipsos MORI Issues Index) can monitor the hopes and fears of the electorate in between elections, but attention tends to focus on the huge barrage of opinion polls at election time – which are geared entirely at predicting the election result, and which do not contribute to more general understanding of voters. In contrast, social media are a good way to track rapid bursts in mobilization or support, which reflect immediately on social media platforms – and could also be developed to illustrate more long running trends, such as unpopular policies or failing services.

As opinion surveys face more and more challenges, there is surely good reason to supplement them with social media data, which reflect what people are really thinking on an ongoing basis – like, a video in rather than the irregular snapshots taken by polls. As a leading pollster João Francisco Meira, director of Vox Populi in Brazil (which is doing innovative work in using social media data to understand public opinion) put it in conversation with one of the authors in April – ‘we have spent so long trying to hear what people are saying – now they are crying out to be heard, every day’. It is a question of pollsters working out how to listen.

Political big data

Analysts of political behaviour – academics as well as pollsters — need to pay attention to this data. At the OII we gathered large quantities of data from Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube in the lead-up to the election campaign, including mentions of all candidates (as did Demos’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Media). Using this data we will be able, for example, to work out the relationship between local social media campaigns and the parties’ share of the vote, as well as modeling the relationship between social media presence and turnout.

We can already see that the story of the local campaigns varied enormously – while at the start of the campaign some candidates were probably requesting new passwords for their rusty Twitter accounts, some already had an ongoing relationship with their constituents (or potential constituents), which they could build on during the campaign. One of the candidates to take over the Labour party leadership, Chuka Umunna, joined Twitter in April 2009 and now has 100K followers, which will be useful in the forthcoming leadership contest.

Election results inject data into a research field that lacks ‘big data’. Data hungry political scientists will analyse these data in every way imaginable for the next five years. But data in between elections, for example relating to democratic or civic engagement or political mobilization, has traditionally been woefully short in our discipline. Analysis of the social media campaigns in #GE2015 will start to provide a foundation to understand patterns and trends in voting behaviour, particularly when linked to other sources of data, such as the actual constituency-level voting results and even discredited polls — which may yet yield insight, even having failed to achieve their predictive aims. As the OII’s Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri have argued, we need ‘a theory-informed model to drive social media predictions, that is based on an understanding of how the data is generated and hence enables us to correct for certain biases’

A political data science

Parties, pollsters and political analysts should all be thinking about these digital disconnects in #GE2015, rather than burying them with their hopes for this election. As I argued in a previous post, let’s use data generated by social media to understand political behaviour and institutions on an ongoing basis. Let’s find a way of incorporating social media analysis into polling models, for example by linking survey datasets to big data of this kind. The more such activity moves beyond the election campaign itself, the more useful social media data will be in tracking the underlying trends and patterns in political behavior.

And for the parties, these kind of ways of understanding and interacting with voters needs to be institutionalized in party structures, from top to bottom. On 8th May, the VP of a policy think-tank tweeted to both Axelrod and Messina ‘Gentlemen, welcome back to America. Let’s win the next one on this side of the pond’. The UK parties are on their own now. We must hope they use the time to build an ongoing dialogue with citizens and voters, learning from the success of the new online interest group barons, such as 38 degrees and Avaaz, by treating all internet contacts as ‘members’ and interacting with them on a regular basis. Don’t wait until 2020!

Helen Margetts is the Director of the OII, and Professor of Society and the Internet. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, investigating political behaviour, digital government and government-citizen interactions in the age of the internet, social media and big data. She has published over a hundred books, articles and major research reports in this area, including Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (with Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, 2015).

Scott A. Hale is a Data Scientist at the OII. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in the social sciences. He is particularly interested in the area of human-computer interaction and the spread of information between speakers of different languages online and the roles of bilingual Internet users. He is also interested in collective action and politics more generally.

Today’s parliamentary decision is also a milestone for another reason: it is the first piece of “crowdsourced” legislation on its way to becoming law in Finland. A 2012 constitutional change made it possible for 50,000 citizens or more to propose a bill to the parliament, through a mechanism known as the citizen initiative. Citizens can develop bills on a website maintained by the Open Ministry, a government-supported citizen association. The Open Ministry aims to be the deliberative version of government ministries that do the background work for government bills. Once the text of a citizen bill is finalised, citizens can also endorse it on a website maintained by the Ministry of Justice. If a bill attracts more than 50,000 endorsements within six months, it is delivered to the parliament.

A significant reason behind the creation of the citien initiative system was to increase citizen involvement in decision making and thus enhance the legitimacy of Finland’s political system: to make people feel that they can make a difference. Finland, like most Western democracies, is suffering from dwindling voter turnout rates (though in the last parliamentary elections, domestic voter turnout was a healthy 70.5 percent). However, here lies one of the potential pitfalls of the citizen initiative system. Of the six citizen bills delivered to the parliament so far, parliamentarians have outright rejected most proposals. According to research presented by Christensen and his colleagues at our Internet, Politics & Policy conference in Oxford in September (and to be published in issue 7:1 of Policy and Internet, March 2015), there is a risk that the citizen iniative system ends up having an effect that is opposite from what was intended:

“[T]hose who supported [a crowdsourced bill rejected by the parliament] experienced a drop in political trust as a result of not achieving this outcome. This shows that political legitimacy may well decline when participants do not get the intended result (cf. Budge, 2012). Hence, if crowdsourcing legislation in Finland is to have a positive impact on political legitimacy, it is important that it can help produce popular Citizens’ initiatives that are subsequently adopted by Parliament.”

One reason why citizen initiatives have faced a rough time in the parliament is that they are a somewhat odd addition to the parliament’s existing ways of working. The Finnish parliament, like most parliaments in representative democracies, is used to working in a government-opposition arrangement, where the government proposes bills, and parliamentarians belonging to government parties are expected to support those bills and resist bills originating from the opposition. Conversely, opposition leaders expect their members to be loyal to their own initiatives. In this arrangement, citizen initiatives have fallen into a no-man’s land where they are endorsed by neither government nor opposition members. Thanks to the party whip system, their only hope of passing has been in being adopted by the government. But the whole point of citizen initiatives is that they would allow bills not proposed by the government to reach parliament, making the exercise rather pointless.

The marriage equality citizen initiative was able to break this pattern not only because it enjoyed immense popular support, but also because many parliamentarians saw marriage equality as a matter of conscience, where the party whip system wouldn’t apply. Parliamentarians across party lines voted in support and against the initiative, in many cases ignoring their party leaders’ instructions.

Prime Minister Alexander Stubb commented immediately after the vote that the outcome “shows the power of citizen initiatives”, “citizen democracy and direct democracy”. Now that a precedent has been set, it is possible that subsequent citizen initiatives, too, get judged more on their merits than on who proposed them. Today’s decision on marriage equality may thus turn out to be historic not only for advancing equality and fairness, but also for helping to define crowdsourcing’s role in Finnish parliamentary decision making.

Vili Lehdonvirta is a Research Fellow and DPhil Programme Director at the Oxford Internet Institute, and an editor of the Policy & Internet journal. He is an economic sociologist who studies the social and economic dimensions of new information technologies around the world, with particular expertise in digital markets and crowdsourcing.

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).

Ed: In your paper you note that the opinions of many young people closely mirrored those of the government’s statements about the Internet — in what way?

David: In 2010 the government published a White Paper on the Internet in China in which they argued that the main uses of the Internet were for obtaining information, and for communicating with others. In contrast to Euro-American discourses around the Internet as a ‘force for democracy’, the students’ answers to our questions agreed with the evaluation of the government and did not see the Internet as a place to begin organising politically. The main reason for this — in my opinion — is that young Chinese are not used to discussing ‘politics’, and are mostly focused on pursuing the ‘Chinese dream’: good job, large flat or house, nice car, suitable spouse; usually in that order.

Ed: The Chinese Internet has usually been discussed in the West as a ‘force for democracy’ — leading to the inevitable relinquishing of control by the Chinese Communist Party. Is this viewpoint hopelessly naive?

David: Not naive as such, but both deterministic and limited, as it assumes that the introduction of technology can only have one ‘built-in’ outcome, thus ignoring human agency, and as it pretends that the Chinese Communist Party does not use technology at all. Given the intense involvement of Party and government offices, as well as of individual party members and government officials with the Internet it makes little sense to talk about ‘the Party’ and ‘the Internet’ as unconnected entities. Compared to governments in Europe or America, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government have embraced the Internet and treated it as a real and valid communication channel between citizens and government/Party at all levels.

Ed: Chinese citizens are being encouraged by the government to engage and complain online, eg to expose inefficiency and corruption. Is the Internet just a space to blow off steam, or is it really capable of ‘changing’ Chinese society, as many have assumed?

David: This is mostly a matter of perspective and expectations. The Internet has NOT changed the system in China, nor is it likely to. In all likelihood, the Internet is bolstering the legitimacy and the control of the Chinese Communist Party over China. However, in many specific instances of citizen unhappiness and unrest, the Internet has proved a powerful channel of communication for the people to achieve their goals, as the authorities have reacted to online protests and supported the demands of citizens. This is a genuine change and empowerment of the people, though episodic and local, not global.

Ed: Why do you think your respondents were so accepting (and welcoming) of government control of the Internet in China: is this mainly due to government efforts to manage online opinion, or something else?

David: I think this is a reflex response fairly similar to what has happened elsewhere as well. If e.g. children manage to access porn sites, or an adult manages to groom several children over the Internet the mass media and the parents of the children call for ‘government’ to protect the children. This abrogation of power and shifting of responsibility to ‘the government’ by individuals — in the example by parents, in our study by young Chinese — is fairly widespread, if deplorable. Ultimately this demand for government ‘protection’ leads to what I would consider excessive government surveillance and control (and regulation) of online spaces in the name of ‘protection’ and the public’s acquiescence of the policing of cyberspace. In China, this takes the form of a widespread (resigned) acceptance of government censorship; in the UK it led to the acceptance of GCHQ’s involvement in Prism, or of the sentencing of Deyka Ayan Hassan or of Liam Stacey, which have turned the UK into the only country in the world in which people have been arrested for posting single, offensive posts on microblogs.

Ed: How does the central Government manage and control opinion online?

David: There is no unified system of government control over the Internet in China. Instead, there are many groups and institutions at all levels from central to local with overlapping areas of responsibility in China who are all exerting an influence on Chinese cyberspaces. There are direct posts by government or Party officials, posts by ‘famous’ people in support of government decisions or policies, paid, ‘hidden’ posters or even people sympathetic to the government. China’s notorious online celebrity Han Han once pointed out that the term ‘the Communist Party’ really means a population group of over 300 million people connected to someone who is an actual Party member.

In addition to pro-government postings, there are many different forms of censorship that try to prevent unacceptable posts. The exact definition of ‘unacceptable’ changes from time to time and even from location to location, though. In Beijing, around October 1, the Chinese National Day, many more websites are inaccessible than, for example in Shenzhen during April. Different government or Party groups also add different terms to the list of ‘unacceptable’ topics (or remove them), which contributes to the flexibility of the censorship system.

As a result of the often unpredictable ‘current’ limits of censorship, many Internet companies, forum and site managers, as well as individual Internet users add their own ‘self-censorship’ to the mix to ensure their own uninterrupted presence online. This ‘self-censorship’ is often stricter than existing government or Party regulations, so as not to even test the limits of the possible.

Ed: Despite the constant encouragement / admonishment of the government that citizens should report and discuss their problems online; do you think this is a clever (ie safe) thing for citizens to do? Are people pretty clever about negotiating their way online?

David: If it looks like a duck, moves like a duck, talks like a duck … is it a duck? There has been a lot of evidence over the years (and many academic articles) that demonstrate the government’s willingness to listen to criticism online without punishing the posters. People do get punished if they stray into ‘definitely illegal’ territory, e.g. promoting independence for parts of China, or questioning the right of the Communist Party to govern China, but so far people have been free to express their criticism of specific government actions online, and have received support from the authorities for their complaints.

Just to note briefly; one underlying issue here is the definition of ‘politics’ and ‘power’. Following Foucault, in Europe and America ‘everything’ is political, and ‘everything’ is a question of power. In China, there is a difference between ‘political’ issues, which are the responsibility of the Communist Party, and ‘social’ issues, which can be discussed (and complained about) by anybody. It might be worth exploring this difference of definitions without a priori acceptance of the Foucauldian position as ‘correct’.

Ed: There’s a lot of emphasis on using eg social media to expose corrupt officials and hold them to account; is there a similar emphasis on finding and rewarding ‘good’ officials? Or of officials using online public opinion to further their own reputations and careers? How cynical is the online public?

David: The online public is very cynical, and getting ever more so (which is seen as a problem by the government as well). The emphasis on ‘bad’ officials is fairly ‘normal’, though, as ‘good’ officials are not ‘newsworthy’. In the Chinese context there is the additional problem that socialist governments like to promote ‘model workers’, ‘model units’, etc. which would make the praising of individual ‘good’ officials by Internet users highly suspect. Other Internet users would simply assume the posters to be paid ‘hidden’ posters for the government or the Party.

Ed: Do you think (on balance) that the Internet has brought more benefits (and power) to the Chinese Government or new problems and worries?

David: I think the Internet has changed many things for many people worldwide. Limiting the debate on the Internet to the dichotomies of government vs Internet, empowered netizens vs disenfranchised Luddites, online power vs wasting time online, etc. is highly problematic. The open engagement with the Internet by government (and Party) authorities has been greater in China than elsewhere; in my view, the Chinese authorities have reacted much faster, and ‘better’ to the Internet than authorities elsewhere. As the so-called ‘revelations’ of the past few months have shown, governments everywhere have tried and are trying to control and use Internet technologies in pursuit of power.

Although I personally would prefer the Internet to be a ‘free’ and ‘independent’ place, I realise that this is a utopian dream given the political and economic benefits and possibilities of the Internet. Given the inevitability of government controls, though, I prefer the open control exercised by Chinese authorities to the hypocrisy of European and American governments, even if the Chinese controls (apparently) exceed those of other governments.

Dr David Herold is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he researches Chinese culture and contemporary PRC society, China’s relationship with other countries, and Chinese cyberspace and online society. His paper Captive Artists: Chinese University Students Talk about the Internet was presented at the presented at “China and the New Internet World”, International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, June 2013.

David Herold was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Links to the articles are included below. Happy reading!

Helen Margetts: Editorial

David Karpf: Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism

Elisabeth A. Jones and Joseph W. Janes: Anonymity in a World of Digital Books: Google Books, Privacy, and the Freedom to Read

Stefan Larsson and Måns Svensson: Compliance or Obscurity? Online Anonymity as a Consequence of Fighting Unauthorised File-sharing

Irina Shklovski and David M. Struthers: Of States and Borders on the Internet: The Role of Domain Name Extensions in Expressions of Nationalism Online in Kazakhstan

Andreas Jungherr and Pascal Jürgens: The Political Click: Political Participation through E-Petitions in Germany

Jan Fivaz and Giorgio Nadig: Impact of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) on Voter Turnout and Their Potential Use for Civic Education

Anne-Marie Oostveen: Outsourcing Democracy: Losing Control of e-Voting in the Netherlands