Articles from Policy & Internet, Democracy, Governance & Security, Policy, Politics & Government

A plot on democracy: has the role of e-petitioning changed with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories?

by Ben Lyall 16/12/2024

The emergence of conspiracy theories within petitions is paradoxical: why target these beliefs at the government using an official government channel?

by Ben Lyall 16/12/2024

Silhouette of a hand placing a vote into a ballot box, symbolizing democracy.

In an era of increased digitisation, e-petitions have become a popular form of political engagement. However, as the parameters of truth, democracy, false news, and conspiracy are challenged, so too is the original role of parliamentary petitioning. In our article, published in Policy & Internet, my co-author and I argue that the amplification of conspiracy theories shifts the goalposts for e-petitioning in terms of function. Specifically, unlike traditional petitions, they are not primarily aimed at producing policy changes. Instead, they function as social objects that achieve various community outcomes while adhering to petition rules. Signatures on these petitions, although lacking automatic results, signal popularity. Thus, the content of petitions can serve as a platform for airing shared grievances on topics such as immigration, economics, and health—and can even experiment with new forms of communication, such as emojis. As it is known, petitions alone rarely lead to policy changes, though they often reflect public sentiment and can significantly impact protest campaigns or social movements. E-petitions exist in various formats, with private platforms like Change.org being among the most well-known. In Australia, there are different types of e-petitioning, and it’s important to distinguish between them. The first type is private e-petitions, which serve as gathering spaces for individuals united by a common cause. The second type is parliamentary petitions, which can be initiated at either the state or federal level. Parliamentary petitioning is a process entrenched in parliamentary conventions. The petitions committee enforces rules that enable Australian residents and citizens to express concerns to Parliament and has some authority to compel action from government representatives. While rare, there are notable examples of e-petitions that have led to meaningful change. For instance, the Senate inquiry into media diversity, initiated by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2020, started with e-petitioning. Similarly, changes to teacher education requirements, which received numerous petitions in 2021, are currently being implemented. Our recent article for Policy & Internet…

Collective Action, Articles from Policy & Internet, Democracy

Can e-participation be improved? Lessons from two successful initiatives.

by Professor Sonia Royo and Professor Lourdes Torres 06/05/2024

Many initiatives have been launched, but some of them fail and/or are abandoned, contributing to mistrust among citizens and consuming scarce resources.

by Professor Sonia Royo and Professor Lourdes Torres 06/05/2024

Electronic participation (e-participation) has grown across the world in recent decades and many governments offer a range of opportunities for e-participation. Many initiatives have been launched, but some of them fail and/or are abandoned, contributing to mistrust among citizens and consuming scarce resources. Therefore, it is crucial for policymakers and practitioners to understand what factors contribute to the success and continuity of e-participation initiatives. This blog entry is based on a research paper titled “The success of e-participation. Learning lessons from Decide Madrid and We asked, You said, We did in Scotland” by S. Royo, B. Bellò, L. Torres and J. Downe, recently published in Policy & Internet (P&I). These two initiatives were selected due to their international recognition (software adopted by hundreds of institutions worldwide) and duration (platforms launched in 2015 and 2014, respectively, and active at present). Decide Madrid, developed by Madrid city Council, received the 2018 United Nations Public Service Award and the open-source software developed for this platform (Consul) is the most widely used to enable active citizen participation. We asked, You said, We did is a feature of the platform Citizen Space, designed by the private company Delib, and used by more than 180 organizations. The results show that these two successful initiatives share a top-down approach, a strong leadership and senior management/political support, embeddedness in the formal policy-making processes, high levels of internal and external collaboration with clear accountability relationships and careful consideration of design features. Most of these factors are related to organizational or managerial dimensions, rather than being linked to the institutional context or the ICT component. These are good news, as policymakers should be able to influence on them more easily. Our results also show that support from politicians and senior managers is not only essential in the initial stages of e-participation, but also to provide resources and adjustments in the administrative structures to ensure the long-term continuity of these initiatives. Conversely, some factors highlighted in…

Articles from Policy & Internet, Democracy, Methods, Politics & Government

Do online consultations make citizens more satisfied with local democracy?

by Professor Tobias Escher 15/04/2024

We find that giving citizens an opportunity to have a say in political decisions influences their opinions about local politics—but not all of them are satisfied.

by Professor Tobias Escher 15/04/2024

In political discussions, the legitimacy crisis of democracy is a common theme. Even though citizens value the concept of democracy, they are often unhappy with how it is implemented. This issue also extends to the local level, where political decisions directly affect citizens. It is worth noting that whenever a local conflict arises, citizens (and policymakers themselves) often call for more participation as a means to increase the legitimacy of such decisions. As a result, municipalities frequently conduct public consultations and increasingly use the Internet to enable online participation. But what role can these online consultations play in improving legitimacy? In a recent study published by Policy & Internet, Bastian Rottinghaus and I investigated how participation in local consultation processes affects attitudes toward local politics. To achieve this, we examined participation procedures in which three German municipalities consulted their citizens on local cycling infrastructure. In each case, citizens submitted, commented on, and evaluated proposals through an online platform. After the end of these consultations, we surveyed nearly 600 citizens who had participated in these procedures. Here are some of our key findings: • The participation processes influenced the attitudes of those who participated in these consultations. • For many participants, the positive effect that was hoped for did indeed occur: they were more positive about local institutions (mayor, administration) and local politics as a whole. The decisive factor for the assessment was whether one expected local politics to take the citizens’ proposals seriously and act upon them. In other words, the result of the process was more important to attitudes than the process itself. • It is worth noting that this also applies to those with negative views of local politics. However, previous experience with local politics also played a role: those who already had a higher level of satisfaction and trust in the municipality became more positive by participating. • At the same time, participation may reduce satisfaction, especially…

Collective Action, Democracy

Hate speech by political actors on X. The Spanish case.

by Dr Elias Said-Hung 09/01/2024

Political agents utilize digital platforms as alternative venues to solidify their ideological stances, employing rhetorical tactics characterized by substantial emotional impact, disinformation content, and hate expressions against specific individuals or social groups.

by Dr Elias Said-Hung 09/01/2024

The widespread use of social networking platforms has facilitated enhanced communication between users and significantly influenced public opinion due to the vast amount of information readily available. Often, this information is shared anonymously and with immediate effect. Political figures have capitalized on this opportunity to engage with their audience directly, circumventing traditional media outlets. Their objective is to garner the attention of their potential voters by expressing their political perspectives on prominent issues and leaving a lasting impression on public opinion. Like numerous other countries, Spain grapples with political polarization and heightened tensions among actors in the prevailing landscape. During the early 2010s, Spain witnessed a significant increase in politically extreme groups, such as Vox, contributing to heightened political polarization. Political agents utilize digital platforms as alternative venues to solidify their ideological stances, employing rhetorical tactics characterized by substantial emotional impact, disinformation content, and hate expressions against specific individuals or social groups. This approach perpetuates prejudices and stereotypes among message recipients by repeatedly employing denigrant language. This phenomenon happens in a fragmented multi-party system like Spain’s, which comprises an array of national, local, and regional actors, and where the traditional two-party system is losing influence, and such tactics have attained greater significance. Digital platforms have emerged as the primary mode of interaction, facilitated by the echo chamber effect and homophily between users who typically engage in such scenarios. In these situations, political actors applied unidirectional communication to their voters. A form of communication that can involve the dissemination of disinformation and hate speech as tools for their rhetoric. This blog entry is based on a research paper titled “Promotion of hate speech by Spanish political actors on Twitter”, recently published in Policy & Internet (P&I). The study examines the extent and nature of hate speech on Twitter, as expressed by the 16 political groups in Spain’s Congress in 2020. We recognize the limitations of the scope of the paper. However, it…

Democracy, Interviews, Politics & Government

Does Internet voting offer a solution to declining electoral turnout?

by David Sutcliffe 19/09/2017

While a technological fix probably won’t address the underlying reasons for low turnout, it could help stop further decline by making voting easier.

by David Sutcliffe 19/09/2017

Electronic voting in Brussels. © European Union 2014 – European Parliament.

e-Voting had been discussed as one possible remedy for the continuing decline in turnout in Western democracies. In their Policy & Internet article “Could Internet Voting Halt Declining Electoral Turnout? New Evidence that e-Voting is Habit-forming”, Mihkel Solvak and Kristjan Vassil examine the degree to which e-voting is more habit forming than paper voting. Their findings indicate that while e-voting doesn’t seem to raise turnout, it might at least arrest its continuing decline in Western democracies. And any technology capable of stabilising turnout is worth exploring. 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…

Collective Action, Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Exploring the Ethics of Monitoring Online Extremism

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

(Part 2 of 2) The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. In the second of a two-part post, Josh Cowls and Ian Brown discuss the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen. Read the first post. Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorised in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet? Josh: I think that is right—many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US). A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing! Ed: So…

Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material

by Bertram Vidgen 18/02/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen 18/02/2016

In terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. Image by Miguel Discart (Flickr).

The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. Josh Cowls discusses the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen.* *please note that the views given here do not necessarily reflect the content of the report, or those of the lead author, Ian Brown. Ed: Josh, could you let us know the purpose of the report, outline some of the key findings, and tell us how you went about researching the topic? Josh: Sure. In the report we take a step back from the ground-level question of ‘what are the police doing?’ and instead ask, ‘what are the ethical and political boundaries, rationale and justifications for policing the web for these kinds of activity?’ We used an international human rights framework as an ethical and legal basis to understand what is being done. We also tried to further the debate by clarifying a few things: what has already been done by law enforcement, and, really crucially, what the perspectives are of all those involved, including lawmakers, law enforcers, technology companies, academia and many others. We derived the insights in the report from a series of workshops, one of which was held as part of the EU-funded VOX-Pol network. The workshops involved participants who were quite high up in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, the tech industry civil society, and academia. We followed these up with interviews with other individuals in similar positions and conducted background policy research. Ed: You highlight that many extremist groups (such as Isis) are making really significant use of online platforms to organise,…

Democracy, Politics & Government

Does crowdsourcing citizen initiatives affect attitudes towards democracy?

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Exploring how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. In their Policy and Internet journal article ‘Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland’, Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen explore how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy. They find that crowdsourcing citizen initiatives can potentially strengthen political legitimacy, but both outcomes and procedures matter for the effects. Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilise online communities to achieve specific organisational 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…

Collective Action, Democracy, Politics & Government, Publications

Last 2010 issue of Policy and Internet just published (2,4)

by David Sutcliffe 20/12/2010

We are pleased to present seven articles, all of which focus on a substantive public policy issue arising from widespread use of the Internet.

by David Sutcliffe 20/12/2010

The last 2010 issue of Policy and Internet has just been published! We are pleased to present seven articles, all of which focus on a substantive public policy issue arising from widespread use of the Internet: online political advocacy and petitioning, nationalism and borders online, unintended consequences of the introduction of file-sharing legislation, and the implications of Internet voting and voting advice applications for democracy and political participation. Links to the articles are included below. Happy reading! Helen Margetts: Editorial David Karpf: Online Political Mobilisation 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

Democracy, Politics & Government, Publications

Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Political Participation and Petitioning

by Professor Tobias Escher 16/09/2010

ePetitions are an interesting research object because not only is petitioning a rather popular political participation activity offline but also online.

by Professor Tobias Escher 16/09/2010

This panel was one of three in the first round of panels and has been focusing on ePetitions. Two contributions from Germany and two contributions from the UK brought a useful comparative perspective to the debate. ePetitions are an interesting research object because not only is petitioning a rather popular political participation activity offline but also online. It is also one of the few eParticipation activities quite a number of governments have been implemented by now, namely the UK, Germany and Scotland. Andreas Jungherr was providing a largely quantitative analysis of co-signature dynamics on the ePetitions website of the German Bundestag, providing some background on how many petitions attract a lot of signatures (only a few) and how many petitions a user signs (usually only one). This provided a background for the summary of a comprehensive study on ePetitioning in the German parliament by Ralf Linder. He offered a somewhat downbeat assessment in that the online system has failed to engage traditionally underrepresented groups of society to petitioning even though it has had impacted on the public debate. Giovanni Navarria was much harsher in his criticism of ePetitioning on the Downing Street site based on his analysis of the petition against the road tax. He concluded that the government was actually wrong in putting such a service onto its website as it had created unrealistic expectations a representative government could not meet. In contrast Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos in his evaluation of local ePetitioning in the Royal Borough of Kingston made a case for petitions on the local level to have the potential to really enhance local government democracy. This is a finding that is particularly important in the light of the UK government mandating online petitioning for all local authorities in the UK.