Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Campaigning in the 2010 UK General Election

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

Drawing attention to the fact that the 2010 UK General Election was dominated not by the Internet but by a very traditional media instead, namely the TV debates of party leaders.

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

The first day of the conference found an end in style with a well-received reception at Oxford’s fine Divinity Schools. Day Two of the conference kicked off with panels on “Mobilisation and Agenda Setting”,”Virtual Goods” and “Comparative Campaigning”. ICTlogy has been busy summarising some of the panels at the conference including this morning one’s with some interesting contributions on comparative campaigning. The second round of panels included a number of scientific approaches to the role of the Internet for the recent UK election: Gibson, Cantijoch and Ward in their analysis of the UK Elections drew attention to the fact that the 2010 UK General Election was dominated not by the Internet but by a very traditional media instead, namely the TV debates of party leaders. Importantly, they suggest to treat eParticipation as a multi-dimensional concept, ie. distinguish different forms of eParticipation with differing degrees of involvement, in fact in much the same way as we have come to treat traditional forms of participation. Anstead and Jensen aimed to trace distinctions in election campaigning between the national and the local level. They have found evidence that online campaigns are both decentralised (little mention of national campaigns) and localised (emphasizing horizontal links with the community). Lilleker and Jackson looked at how much party websites did encourage participation. They found that first and foremost, parties are about promoting their personnel and are rather cautious in engaging in any interactive communication. Most efforts were aimed at the campaign and not about getting input into policy. Even though there were more Web 2.0 features in use than in previous years, participation was low. Sudulich and Wall were interested in the uptake of online campaigning (campaign website, Facebook profile) by election candidates. They take into account a range of factors including bookmakers odds for candidates but found little explanatory effects overall.

Conferences

Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: What is our impact on the Internet? Keynote by Arthur Lupia

by Professor Tobias Escher 16/09/2010

Have we been as effective as we could have been in changing people’s beliefs and behaviours?

by Professor Tobias Escher 16/09/2010

Arthur Lupia has just been delivering the opening keynote on our very own conference “Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: An Impact Assessment” here in Oxford. He started by turning on the audience: What is our impact on the Internet? Have we been as effective as we could have been in changing people’s beliefs and behaviours? However, this wasn’t about benchmarking success of researchers into Internet and Politics but about the question why many well-intentioned projects—be it making people participate in politics, be getting across the relevance of your ground-breaking research or whatever—ultimately fail. Arthur Lupia’s main argument that many of these well-meant enterprises do not take into account sufficiently how people are. How they are is—according to Lupia—mainly defined by three broad influences: biology social behaviour (e.g. how we learn etc) political contexts So in order to successfully persuade others (in any benign meaning of course) he posits three necessary conditions (implying that they might not be sufficient): attention: as people have a limited capacity to pay attention, your message will only get through if they feel its urgency and relevance for them elaboration: relate your message to the audience. People will only listen if it is unique and highly relevant to them. Ways to achieve this is by making it local, concrete and immediate but also by making the desired change possible, making clear that the desired effect is within reach credibility: Finally, credibility is key but this is not an absolute value but it is domain-specific. Credibility is bestowed on someone by the audience and depends on whether the audience believes (not matter if correctly) that you are knowledgeable and share their interests See the summary by ICTlogy about the talk and the Q&A session. To follow the conference on Twitter on all over the Internet, look for the IPP2010 tag.