Stormzy 1: The Sun 0—Three Reasons Why #GE2017 Was the Real Social Media Election

by Helen Margetts 15/06/2017

It could be the first election where the right wing tabloids finally ceded their influence to new media.

by Helen Margetts 15/06/2017

After its initial appearance as a cynical but safe device by Teresa May to ratchet up the Conservative majority, the UK general election of 2017 turned out to be one of the most exciting and unexpected of all time. One of the many things for which it will be remembered is as the first election where it was the social media campaigns that really made the difference to the relative fortunes of the parties, rather than traditional media. And it could be the first election where the right wing tabloids finally ceded their influence to new media, their power over politics broken according to some. Social media have been part of the UK electoral landscape for a while. In 2015, many of us attributed the Conservative success in part to their massive expenditure on targeted Facebook advertising, 10 times more than Labour, whose ‘bottom-up’ Twitter campaign seemed mainly to have preached to the converted. Social media advertising was used more successfully by Leave.EU than Remain in the referendum (although some of us cautioned against blaming social media for Brexit). But in both these campaigns, the relentless attack of the tabloid press was able to strike at the heart of the Labour and Remain campaigns and was widely credited for having influenced the result, as in so many elections from the 1930s onwards. However, in 2017 Labour’s campaign was widely regarded as having made a huge positive difference to the party’s share of the vote—unexpectedly rising by 10 percentage points on 2015—in the face of a typically sustained and viscious attack by the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Express. Why? There are (at least) three reasons. First, increased turnout of young people is widely regarded to have driven Labour’s improved share of the vote—and young people do not in general read newspapers not even online. Instead, they spend increasing proportions of their time on social media platforms on mobile…

Interviews, Politics & Government

Could Voting Advice Applications force politicians to keep their manifesto promises?

by David Sutcliffe 12/06/2017

A number of studies have shown that VAA use has an impact on the cognitive behaviour of users, on their likelihood to participate in elections, and on the choice of the party they vote for.

by David Sutcliffe 12/06/2017

To what extent do VAAs alter the way voters perceive the meaning of elections, and encourage them to hold politicians to account for election promises? Image: ep_jhu (Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

In many countries, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become an almost indispensable part of the electoral process, playing an important role in the campaigning activities of parties and candidates, an essential element of media coverage of the elections, and being widely used by citizens. A number of studies have shown that VAA use has an impact on the cognitive behaviour of users, on their likelihood to participate in elections, and on the choice of the party they vote for. 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…

Interviews, Politics & Government

Is Left-Right still meaningful in politics? Or are we all just winners or losers of globalisation now?

by David Sutcliffe 16/05/2017

The Left–Right dimension is the most common way of conceptualising ideological difference. But in an ever more globalised world, are the concepts of Left and Right still relevant?

by David Sutcliffe 16/05/2017

Theresa May meets European Council President Donald Tusk in April, ahead of the start of Brexit talks. Image: European Council President (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Left–Right dimension—based on the traditional cleavage in society between capital and labor—is the most common way of conceptualising ideological difference. But in an ever more globalised world, are the concepts of Left and Right still relevant? In recent years political scientists have increasingly come to talk of a two-dimensional politics in Europe, defined by an economic (Left–Right) dimension, and a cultural dimension that relates to voter and party positions on sociocultural issues. In his Policy & Internet article “Cleavage Structures and Dimensions of Ideology in English Politics: Evidence From Voting Advice Application Data”, Jonathan Wheatley argues that the cleavage that exists in many European societies between “winners” and “losers” of globalisation has engendered a new ideological dimension pitting “cosmopolitans” against “communitarians” and that draws on cultural issues relating to identity—rather than economic issues. He identifies latent dimensions from opinion data generated by two Voting Advice Applications deployed in England in 2014 and 2015—finding that the political space in England is defined by two main ideological dimensions: an economic Left–Right dimension and a cultural communitarian–cosmopolitan dimension. While they co-vary to a significant degree, with economic rightists tending to be more communitarian and economic leftists tending to be more cosmopolitan, these tendencies do not always hold and the two dimensions should be considered as separate. The identification of the communitarian–cosmopolitan dimension lends weight to the hypothesis of Kriesi et al. (2006) that politics is increasingly defined by a cleavage between “winners” and “losers” of globalisation, with “losers” tending to adopt a position of cultural demarcation and to perceive “outsiders” such as immigrants and the EU, as a threat. If an economic dimension pitting Left against Right (or labour against capital) defined the political arena in Europe in the twentieth century, maybe it’s a cultural cleavage that pits cosmopolitans against communitarians that defines politics in the twenty-first. We caught up with Jonathan to discuss his findings: Ed.: The big thing that happened…

Politics & Government

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: The US Election

by David Sutcliffe 20/01/2017

Here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy—the problems, but also potential ways forward.

by David Sutcliffe 20/01/2017

Image from Gage Skidmore via Flickr Creative Commons

This is the first post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: The US Election. 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 incentivise, 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:…

Politics & Government

Can we predict electoral outcomes from Wikipedia traffic?

by taha yasseri 06/12/2016

Data show that the relative change in page views to the general Wikipedia page on the election can offer an estimate of the relative change in election turnout.

by taha yasseri 06/12/2016

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump in a residential backyard near Jordan Creek Parkway and Cody Drive in West Des Moines, Iowa, with lights and security cameras. Image by Tony Webster (Flickr).

As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into the fabric of social life their ability to generate large amounts of information about the opinions and activities of the population increases. The opportunities in this area are enormous: predictions based on socially generated data are much cheaper than conventional opinion polling, offer the potential to avoid classic biases inherent in asking people to report their opinions and behaviour, and can deliver results much quicker and be updated more rapidly. In their article published in EPJ Data Science, Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright develop a theoretically informed prediction of election results from socially generated data combined with an understanding of the social processes through which the data are generated. They can thereby explore the predictive power of socially generated data while enhancing theory about the relationship between socially generated data and real world outcomes. Their particular focus is on the readership statistics of politically relevant Wikipedia articles (such as those of individual political parties) in the time period just before an election. By applying these methods to a variety of different European countries in the context of the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections they firstly show that the relative change in number of page views to the general Wikipedia page on the election can offer a reasonable estimate of the relative change in election turnout at the country level. This supports the idea that increases in online information seeking at election time are driven by voters who are considering voting. Second, they show that a theoretically informed model based on previous national results, Wikipedia page views, news media mentions, and basic information about the political party in question can offer a good prediction of the overall vote share of the party in question. Third, they present a model for predicting change in vote share (i.e., voters swinging towards and away from a party), showing that Wikipedia page-view data provide an important increase…

Politics & Government

Rethinking Digital Media and Political Change

by Ralf Schroeder 23/08/2016

What are the dangers or new opportunities of digital media?

by Ralf Schroeder 23/08/2016

Did Twitter lead to Donald Trump’s rise and success to date in the American campaign for the presidency? Image: Gage Skidmore (Flickr).

One of the major debates in relation to digital media in the United States has been whether they contribute to political polarisation. I argue in a new paper (Rethinking Digital Media and Political Change) that Twitter led to Donald Trump’s rise and success to date in the American campaign for the presidency. There is plenty of evidence to show that Trump received a disproportionate amount of attention on Twitter, which in turn generated a disproportionate amount of attention in the mainstream media. The strong correlation between the two suggests that Trump was able to bypass the gatekeepers of the traditional media. A second ingredient in his success has been populism, which rails against dominant political elites (including the Republican party) and the ‘biased’ media. Populism also rests on the notion of an ‘authentic’ people—by implication excluding ‘others’ such as immigrants and foreign powers like the Chinese—to whom the leader appeals directly. The paper makes parallels with the strength of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party which, in a similar way, has been able to appeal to its following via social media and online newspapers, again bypassing mainstream media with its populist message. There is a difference, however: in the US, commercial media compete for audience share, so Trump’s controversial tweets have been eagerly embraced by journalists seeking high viewership and readership ratings. In Sweden, where public media dominate and there is far less of the ‘horserace’ politics of American politics, the Sweden Democrats have been more locked out of the mainstream media and of politics. In short, Twitter plus populism has led to Trump. I argue that dominating the mediated attention space is crucial. One outcome of how this story ends will be known in November. But whatever the outcome, it is already clear that the role of the media in politics, and how they can be circumvented by new media, requires fundamental rethinking. Ralph Schroeder is Professor and director…

Collective Action, Politics & Government

Political polarisation on social media: do birds of a feather flock together on Twitter?

by Anatoliy Gruzd 05/05/2015

Twitter’s connections tend to be less about strong social relationships and more about connecting with people for the purposes of commenting and information sharing.

by Anatoliy Gruzd 05/05/2015

Twitter has exploded in recent years, now boasting half a billion registered users. Like blogs and the world’s largest social networking platform, Facebook, Twitter has actively been used for political discourse during the past few elections in the US, Canada, and elsewhere but it differs from them in a number of significant ways. Twitter’s connections tend to be less about strong social relationships (such as those between close friends or family members), and more about connecting with people for the purposes of commenting and information sharing. Twitter also provides a steady torrent of updates and resources from individuals, celebrities, media outlets, and any other organisation seeking to inform the world as to its views and actions. This may well make Twitter particularly well suited to political debate and activity. Yet important questions emerge in terms of the patterns of conduct and engagement. Chief among them: are users mainly seeking to reinforce their own viewpoints and link with likeminded persons, or is there a basis for widening and thoughtful exposure to a variety of perspectives that may improve the collective intelligence of the citizenry as a result? Conflict and Polarisation Political polarisation often occurs in a so-called ‘echo chamber’ environment, in which individuals are exposed to only information and communities that support their own viewpoints, while ignoring opposing perspectives and insights. In such isolating and self-reinforcing conditions, ideas can become more engrained and extreme due to lack of contact with contradictory views and the exchanges that could ensue as a result. On the web, political polarisation has been found among political blogs, for instance. American researchers have found that liberal and conservative bloggers in the US tend to link to other bloggers who share their political ideology. For Kingwell, a prominent Canadian philosopher, the resulting dynamic is one that can be characterised by a decline in civility and a lessening ability for political compromise to take hold. He laments the emergence…

Collective Action, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Don’t knock clickivism: it represents the political participation aspirations of the modern citizen

by Max Halupka 01/03/2015

Is an action only ‘political’ if it takes place in the mainstream political arena; involving government, politicians or voting?

by Max Halupka 01/03/2015

Following a furious public backlash in 2011, the UK government abandoned plans to sell off 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland. The public forest campaign by 38 Degrees gathered over half a million signatures.

How do we define political participation? What does it mean to say an action is ‘political’? Is an action only ‘political’ if it takes place in the mainstream political arena; involving government, politicians or voting? Or is political participation something that we find in the most unassuming of places, in sports, home and work? This question, ‘what is politics’ is one that political scientists seem to have a lot of trouble dealing with, and with good reason. If we use an arena definition of politics, then we marginalise the politics of the everyday; the forms of participation and expression that develop between the cracks, through need and ingenuity. However, if we broaden our approach as so to adopt what is usually termed a process definition, then everything can become political. The problem here is that saying that everything is political is akin to saying nothing is political, and that doesn’t help anyone. Over the years, this debate has plodded steadily along, with scholars on both ends of the spectrum fighting furiously to establish a working understanding. Then, the Internet came along and drew up new battle lines. The Internet is at its best when it provides a home for the disenfranchised, an environment where like-minded individuals can wipe free the dust of societal disassociation and connect and share content. However, the Internet brought with it a shift in power, particularly in how individuals conceptualised society and their role within it. The Internet, in addition to this role, provided a plethora of new and customisable modes of political participation. From the onset, a lot of these new forms of engagement were extensions of existing forms, broadening the everyday citizen’s participatory repertoire. There was a move from voting to e-voting, petitions to e-petitions, face-to-face communities to online communities; the Internet took what was already there and streamlined it, removing those pesky elements of time, space and identity. Yet, as the Internet continues…

Politics & Government

Finnish decision to allow same-sex marriage “shows the power of citizen initiatives”

by Vili Lehdonvirta 28/11/2014

It is the first piece of “crowdsourced” legislation on its way to becoming law in Finland.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 28/11/2014

November rainbows in front of the Finnish parliament house in Helsinki, one hour before the vote for same-sex marriage. Photo by Anni Sairio.

In a pivotal vote today, the Finnish parliament voted in favour of removing references to gender in the country’s marriage law, which will make it possible for same-sex couples to get married. It was predicted to be an extremely close vote, but in the end gender neutrality won with 105 votes to 92. Same-sex couples have been able to enter into registered partnerships in Finland since 2002, but this form of union lacks some of the legal and more notably symbolic privileges of marriage. Today’s decision is thus a historic milestone in the progress towards tolerance and equality before the law for all the people of Finland. 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…

Politics & Government

The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website.

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Image of the Telegraph's state of the art "hub and spoke" newsroom layout by David Sim.

The political agenda has always been shaped by what the news media decide to publish—through their ability to broadcast to large, loyal audiences in a sustained manner, news editors have the ability to shape ‘political reality’ by deciding what is important to report. Traditionally, journalists pass to their editors from a pool of potential stories; editors then choose which stories to publish. However, with the increasing importance of online news, editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website. The question of how much influence the audience has in these decisions has always been ambiguous. While in theory we might expect journalists to be attentive to readers, journalism has also been characterised as a profession with a “deliberate…ignorance of audience wants” (Anderson, 2011b). This ‘anti-populism’ is still often portrayed as an important journalistic virtue, in the context of telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Recently, however, attention has been turning to the potential impact that online audience metrics are having on journalism’s “deliberate ignorance”. Online publishing provides a huge amount of information to editors about visitor numbers, visit frequency, and what visitors choose to read and how long they spend reading it. Online editors now have detailed information about what articles are popular almost as soon as they are published, with these statistics frequently displayed prominently in the newsroom. The rise of audience metrics has created concern both within the journalistic profession and academia, as part of a broader set of concerns about the way journalism is changing online. Many have expressed concern about a ‘culture of click’, whereby important but unexciting stories make way for more attention grabbing pieces, and editorial judgments are overridden by traffic statistics. At a time when media business models are under great strain, the…