Collective Action, Interviews, Politics & Government

Do Finland’s digitally crowdsourced laws show a way to resolve democracy’s “legitimacy crisis”?

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

Discussing the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland and analysing how the campaign created practices that affect democratic citizenship.

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. In his article The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation, Taneli Heikka (University of Jyväskylä) discusses the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland in 2014, analysing how the campaign used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. 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…

Mapping, Methods, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Mapping collective public opinion in the Russian blogosphere

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence.

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

Widely reported as fraudulent, the 2011 Russian Parliamentary elections provoked mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia. Image by Nikolai Vassiliev.

Blogs are becoming increasingly important for agenda setting and formation of collective public opinion on a wide range of issues. In countries like Russia where the Internet is not technically filtered, but where the traditional media is tightly controlled by the state, they may be particularly important. The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and the Russian search engine Yandex, with its blog rating service, serves as an important reference point for Russia’s educated public in its search of authoritative and independent sources of information. The blogosphere is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence. One topic that was particularly salient over the period we studied concerned the Russian Parliamentary elections of December 2011. Widely reported as fraudulent, they provoked immediate and mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia, as well as corresponding activity in the blogosphere. Protesters made effective use of the Internet to organise a movement that demanded cancellation of the parliamentary election results, and the holding of new and fair elections. These protests continued until the following summer, gaining widespread national and international attention. Most of the political and social discussion blogged in Russia is hosted on the blog platform LiveJournal. Some of these bloggers can claim a certain amount of influence; the top thirty bloggers have over 20,000 “friends” each, representing a good circulation for the average Russian newspaper. Part of the blogosphere may thereby resemble the traditional media; the deeper into the long tail of average bloggers, however, the more it functions as more as pure public opinion. This “top list” effect may be particularly important in societies (like Russia’s) where popularity lists exert a visible influence on bloggers’ competitive behaviour and on public perceptions of their significance. Given the influence of these top…

Social Data Science

Verification of crowd-sourced information: is this ‘crowd wisdom’ or machine wisdom?

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

The problem with computer code is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse.

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

‘Code’ or ‘law’? Image from an Ushahidi development meetup by afropicmusing.

In ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’, Lawrence Lessig (2006) writes that computer code (or what he calls ‘West Coast code’) can have the same regulatory effect as the laws and legal code developed in Washington D.C., so-called ‘East Coast code’. Computer code impacts on a person’s behaviour by virtue of its essentially restrictive architecture: on some websites you must enter a password before you gain access, in other places you can enter unidentified. The problem with computer code, Lessig argues, is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse. For example, fair use provisions in US copyright law enable certain uses of copyrighted works, such as copying for research or teaching purposes. However the architecture of many online publishing systems heavily regulates what one can do with an e-book: how many times it can be transferred to another device, how many times it can be printed, whether it can be moved to a different format—activities that have been unregulated until now, or that are enabled by the law but effectively ‘closed off’ by code. In this case code works to reshape behaviour, upsetting the balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public to access works to support values like education and innovation. Working as an ethnographic researcher for Ushahidi, the non-profit technology company that makes tools for people to crowdsource crisis information, has made me acutely aware of the many ways in which ‘code’ can become ‘law’. During my time at Ushahidi, I studied the practices that people were using to verify reports by people affected by a variety of events—from earthquakes to elections, from floods to bomb blasts. I then compared these processes with those followed by Wikipedians when editing articles about breaking news events. In order to understand how to best design architecture to enable particular behaviour, it becomes important to…

Collective Action, Politics & Government

Why do (some) political protest mobilisations succeed?

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 19/04/2013

Mobilisation paths are difficult to predict because they depend on the right alignment of conditions on different levels.

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 19/04/2013

The communication technologies once used by rebels and protesters to gain global visibility now look burdensome and dated: much separates the once-futuristic-looking image of Subcomandante Marcos posing in the Chiapas jungle draped in electronic gear (1994) from the uprisings of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. While the only practical platform for amplifying a message was once provided by organisations, the rise of the Internet means that cross-national networks are now reachable by individuals—who are able to bypass organisations, ditch membership dues, and embrace self-organisation. As social media and mobile applications increasingly blur the distinction between public and private, ordinary citizens are becoming crucial nodes in the contemporary protest network. The personal networks that are the main channels of information flow in sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mean that we don’t need to actively seek out particular information; it can be served to us with no more effort than that of maintaining a connection with our contacts. News, opinions, and calls for justice are now shared and forwarded by our friends—and their friends—in a constant churn of information, all attached to familiar names and faces. Given we are more likely to pass on information if the source belongs to our social circle, this has had an important impact on the information environment within which protest movements are initiated and develop. Mobile connectivity is also important for understanding contemporary protest, given that the ubiquitous streams of synchronous information we access anywhere are shortening our reaction times. This is important, as the evolution of mass recruitments—whether they result in flash mobilisations, slow burns, or simply damp squibs—can only be properly understood if we have a handle on the distribution of reaction times within a population. The increasing integration of the mainstream media into our personal networks is also important, given that online networks (and independent platforms like Indymedia) are not the clear-cut alternative to corporate media they once were. We can now…

Conferences

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.