Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies

by Vili Lehdonvirta 12/05/2014

It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 12/05/2014

We can't understand, analyse or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet. Image from the (post-PRISM) "Stop Watching Us" Berlin Demonstration (2013) by mw238.

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, analyse 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…

Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Five recommendations for maximising the relevance of social science research for public policy-making in the big data era

by Helen Margetts 04/11/2013 1 Comment

How can social scientists help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that social science research remains relevant?

by Helen Margetts 04/11/2013 1 Comment

As I discussed in a previous post on the promises and threats of big data for public policy-making, public policy making has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. This increasingly rich data environment poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. So how can social scientists help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that social science research remains relevant? Social scientists have a good record on having policy influence, indeed in the UK better than other academic fields, including medicine, as recent research from the LSE Public Policy group has shown. Big data hold major promise for social science, which should enable us to further extend our record in policy research. We have access to a cornucopia of data of a kind which is more like that traditionally associated with so-called ‘hard’ science. Rather than being dependent on surveys, the traditional data staple of empirical social science, social media such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Search present us with the opportunity to scrape, generate, analyse and archive comparative data of unprecedented quantity. For example, at the OII over the last four years we have been generating a dataset of all petition signing in the UK and US, which contains the joining rate (updated every hour) for the 30,000 petitions created in the last three years. As a political scientist, I am very excited by this kind of data (up to now, we have had big data like this only for voting, and that only at election time), which will allow us to create a complete ecology of petition signing, one of the more popular acts of political participation in the UK. Likewise, we can look at the entire transaction history of online organisations like Wikipedia, or map the link structure of government’s online presence. But…

Ethics, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

The promises and threats of big data for public policy-making

by Helen Margetts 28/10/2013

Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means both citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data.

by Helen Margetts 28/10/2013

The environment in which public policy is made has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means both citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. Policy-making takes place in an increasingly rich data environment, which poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. On the promise side, such data offers a chance for policy-making and implementation to be more citizen-focused, taking account of citizens’ needs, preferences and actual experience of public services, as recorded on social media platforms. As citizens express policy opinions on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook; rate or rank services or agencies on government applications such as NHS Choices; or enter discussions on the burgeoning range of social enterprise and NGO sites, such as Mumsnet, 38 degrees and patientopinion.org, they generate a whole range of data that government agencies might harvest to good use. Policy-makers also have access to a huge range of data on citizens’ actual behaviour, as recorded digitally whenever citizens interact with government administration or undertake some act of civic engagement, such as signing a petition. Data mined from social media or administrative operations in this way also provide a range of new data which can enable government agencies to monitor—and improve—their own performance, for example through log usage data of their own electronic presence or transactions recorded on internal information systems, which are increasingly interlinked. And they can use data from social media for self-improvement, by understanding what people are saying about government, and which policies, services or providers are attracting negative opinions and complaints, enabling identification of a failing school, hospital or contractor, for example. They can solicit such data via their own sites, or those of social enterprises. And they can find out what people are concerned about or looking for, from the Google Search API or Google trends, which record the search…

Methods, Politics & Government

Can text mining help handle the data deluge in public policy analysis?

by Aude Bicquelet 27/10/2013

There has been a major shift in the policies of governments concerning participatory governance—that is, engaged, collaborative, and community-focused public policy.

by Aude Bicquelet 27/10/2013

Policy makers today must contend with two inescapable phenomena. On the one hand, there has been a major shift in the policies of governments concerning participatory governance—that is, engaged, collaborative, and community-focused public policy. At the same time, a significant proportion of government activities have now moved online, bringing about “a change to the whole information environment within which government operates” (Margetts 2009, 6). 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 organisations 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 categorisation, data reduction, visualisation, and speed. 1. Categorisation. When analysing the results…

Ethics, Politics & Government

Responsible research agendas for public policy in the era of big data

by Vicki Nash 19/09/2013

Bringing together leading social science academics with senior government agency staff to discuss its public policy potential.

by Vicki Nash 19/09/2013

Last week the OII went to Harvard. Against the backdrop of a gathering storm of interest around the potential of computational social science to contribute to the public good, we sought to bring together leading social science academics with senior government agency staff to discuss its public policy potential. Supported by the OII-edited journal Policy and Internet and its owners, the Washington-based Policy Studies Organization (PSO), this one-day workshop facilitated a thought-provoking conversation between leading big data researchers such as David Lazer, Brooke Foucault-Welles and Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, e-government experts such as Cary Coglianese, Helen Margetts and Jane Fountain, and senior agency staff from US federal bureaus including Labor Statistics, Census, and the Office for the Management of the Budget. It’s often difficult to appreciate the impact of research beyond the ivory tower, but what this productive workshop demonstrated is that policy-makers and academics share many similar hopes and challenges in relation to the exploitation of ‘big data’. Our motivations and approaches may differ, but insofar as the youth of the ‘big data’ concept explains the lack of common language and understanding, there is value in mutual exploration of the issues. Although it’s impossible to do justice to the richness of the day’s interactions, some of the most pertinent and interesting conversations arose around the following four issues. Managing a diversity of data sources. In a world where our capacity to ask important questions often exceeds the availability of data to answer them, many participants spoke of the difficulties of managing a diversity of data sources. For agency staff this issue comes into sharp focus when available administrative data that is supposed to inform policy formulation is either incomplete or inadequate. Consider, for example, the challenge of regulating an economy in a situation of fundamental data asymmetry, where private sector institutions track, record and analyse every transaction, whilst the state only has access to far more basic performance metrics and accounts.…

Collective Action, Politics & Government

Online collective action and policy change: shifting contentious politics in policy processes

by Andrea Calderaro 02/04/2013

The Internet can facilitate the involvement of social movements in policymaking processes, but also constitute in itself the object of contentious politics.

by Andrea Calderaro 02/04/2013

Research has disproved the notion held by political elites—and some researchers—that collective action resides outside of policy-making processes, and is limited in generating a response from government. The Internet can facilitate the involvement of social movements in policymaking processes, but also constitute in itself the object of contentious politics. Most research on online mobilisations focuses on the Internet as a tool for campaigning and for challenging decision-makers at the national and international level. Meanwhile, less attention is paid on the fact that the Internet has raised new issues for the policy making agenda around which activists are mobilising, such as issues related to internet governance, online freedom of expression, digital privacy or copyright. Contemporary social movements serve as indicators of new core challenges within society, and can thus constitute an enriching resource for the policy debate arena, particularly with regards to the urgent issues raised by the fast development of the Internet. The literature on social movements is rich in examples of campaigns that have successfully influenced public policy. Classic works have proved how major reforms can start as a consequence of civic mobilisations, and the history provides evidence of the influence of collective action within policy debates on environmental, national security, and peace issues. However, as mentioned above and argued by Giugni (2004), social movement research has traditionally paid more attention to the process rather than the outcomes of mobilisations. The difficulty of identifying the consequences of collective action and the factors that contribute to its success may lie behind this tendency. As Gamson (1975) argues, the notion of success is elusive and can be most usefully defined with reference to a set of outcomes; these may include the new advantages gained by the group’s beneficiaries after a challenge with targets, or they may refer to the status of the challenging group and its legitimacy. As for the factors determining success, some scholars believe that collective action is likely to…

Collective Action, Politics & Government, Publications

Online collective action and policy change: new special issue from Policy and Internet

by Anastasia Kavada 18/03/2013

The internet has provided citizens with a greater capacity for coordination and mobilisation, which can strengthen their voice and representation in the policy agenda.

by Anastasia Kavada 18/03/2013

The Internet has multiplied the platforms available to influence public opinion and policy making. It has also provided citizens with a greater capacity for coordination and mobilisation, which can strengthen their voice and representation in the policy agenda. As waves of protest sweep both authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies, this rapidly developing field calls for more detailed enquiry. However, research exploring the relationship between online mobilisation and policy change is still limited. This special issue of ‘Policy and Internet’ addresses this gap through a variety of perspectives. Contributions to this issue view the Internet both as a tool that allows citizens to influence policy making, and as an object of new policies and regulations, such as data retention, privacy, and copyright laws, around which citizens are mobilising. Together, these articles offer a comprehensive empirical account of the interface between online collective action and policy making. Within this framework, the first article in this issue, “Networked Collective Action and the Institutionalized Policy Debate: Bringing Cyberactivism to the Policy Arena?” by Stefania Milan and Arne Hintz (2013), looks at the Internet as both a tool of collective action and an object of policy. The authors provide a comprehensive overview of how computer-mediated communication creates not only new forms of organisational structure for collective action, but also new contentious policy fields. By focusing on what the authors define as ‘techie activists,’ Milan and Hintz explore how new grassroots actors participate in policy debates around the governance of the Internet at different levels. This article provides empirical evidence to what Kriesi et al. (1995) defines as “windows of opportunities” for collective action to contribute to the policy debate around this new space of contentious politics. Milan and Hintz demonstrate how this has happened from the first World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 to more recent debates about Internet regulation. Yana Breindl and François Briatte’s (2013) article “Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against…

Methods, Politics & Government

Experiments are the most exciting thing on the UK public policy horizon

by Helen Margetts 28/02/2013

Very few of these experiments use manipulation of information environments on the internet as a way to change people’s behaviour. The Internet seems to hold enormous promise for ‘Nudging’ by redesigning ‘choice environments’.

by Helen Margetts 28/02/2013

What makes people join political actions? Iraq War protesters crowd Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Image by DavidMartynHunt.

Experiments—or more technically, Randomised Control Trials—are the most exciting thing on the UK public policy horizon. In 2010, the incoming Coalition Government set up the Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office to find innovative and cost effective (cheap) ways to change people’s behaviour. Since then the team have run a number of exciting experiments with remarkable success, particularly in terms of encouraging organ donation and timely payment of taxes. With Bad Science author Ben Goldacre, they have now published a Guide to RCTs, and plenty more experiments are planned. This sudden enthusiasm for experiments in the UK government is very exciting. The Behavioural Insights Team is the first of its kind in the world—in the US, there are few experiments at federal level, although there have been a few well publicised ones at local level—and the UK government has always been rather scared of the concept before, there being a number of cultural barriers to the very word ‘experiment’ in British government. Experiments came to the fore in the previous Administration’s Mindscape document. But what made them popular for Public Policy may well have been the 2008 book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, which shows that by knowing how people think, it is possible to design choice environments that make it “easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society.” Since then, the political scientist Peter John has published ‘Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think, which has received positive coverage in The Economist: The use of behavioural economics in public policy shows promise and the Financial Times: Nudge, nudge. Think, think. Say no more …; and has been reviewed by the LSE Review of Books: Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: experimenting with ways to change civic behaviour. But there is one thing missing here. Very few of these experiments use manipulation of information environments on the internet as a way to change people’s behaviour. The Internet…

Collective Action, Governance & Security, Publications

Papers on Policy, Activism, Government and Representation: New Issue of Policy and Internet

by David Sutcliffe 16/01/2013

Investigating the relationship between Internet-based applications and data and the policy process.

by David Sutcliffe 16/01/2013

We are pleased to present the combined third and fourth issue of Volume 4 of Policy and Internet. It contains eleven articles, each of which investigates the relationship between Internet-based applications and data and the policy process. The papers have been grouped into the broad themes of policy, government, representation, and activism. POLICY: In December 2011, the European Parliament Directive on Combating the Sexual Abuse, Sexual Exploitation of Children and Child Pornography was adopted. The directive’s much-debated Article 25 requires Member States to ensure the prompt removal of child pornography websites hosted in their territory and to endeavor to obtain the removal of such websites hosted outside their territory. Member States are also given the option to block access to such websites to users within their territory. Both these policy choices have been highly controversial and much debated; Karel Demeyer, Eva Lievens, and Jos Dumortie analyse the technical and legal means of blocking and removing illegal child sexual content from the Internet, clarifying the advantages and drawbacks of the various policy options. Another issue of jurisdiction surrounds government use of cloud services. While cloud services promise to render government service delivery more effective and efficient, they are also potentially stateless, triggering government concern over data sovereignty. Kristina Irion explores these issues, tracing the evolution of individual national strategies and international policy on data sovereignty. She concludes that data sovereignty presents national governments with a legal risk that can’t be addressed through technology or contractual arrangements alone, and recommends that governments retain sovereignty over their information. While the Internet allows unprecedented freedom of expression, it also facilitates anonymity and facelessness, increasing the possibility of damage caused by harmful online behaviour, including online bullying. Myoung-Jin Lee, Yu Jung Choi, and Setbyol Choi investigate the discourse surrounding the introduction of the Korean Government’s “Verification of Identity” policy, which aimed to foster a more responsible Internet culture by mandating registration of a user’s real…

Health, Publications, Wellbeing

eHealth: what is needed at the policy level? New special issue from Policy and Internet

by Rik Crutzen 24/05/2012

Policymakers wishing to promote greater choice and control among health system users should take account of the limits to empowerment as well as barriers to participation.

by Rik Crutzen 24/05/2012

The explosive growth of the Internet and its omnipresence in people’s daily lives has facilitated a shift in information seeking on health, with the Internet now a key information source for the general public, patients, and health professionals. The Internet also has obvious potential to drive major changes in the organisation and delivery of health services efforts, and many initiatives are harnessing technology to support user empowerment. For example, current health reforms in England are leading to a fragmented, marketised National Health Service (NHS), where competitive choice designed to drive quality improvement and efficiency savings is informed by transparency and patient experiences, and with the notion of an empowered health consumer at its centre. Is this aim of achieving user empowerment realistic? In their examination of health queries submitted to the NHS Direct online enquiry service, John Powell and Sharon Boden find that while patient empowerment does occur in the use of online health services, it is constrained and context dependent. Policymakers wishing to promote greater choice and control among health system users should therefore take account of the limits to empowerment as well as barriers to participation. The Dutch government’s online public national health and care portal similarly aims to facilitate consumer decision-making behaviour and increasing transparency and accountability to improve quality of care and functioning of health markets. Interestingly, Hans Ossebaard, Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen and Erwin Seydel find the influence of the Dutch portal on choice behaviour, awareness, and empowerment of users to actually be small. The Internet is often discussed in terms of empowering (or even endangering) patients through broadening of access to medical and health-related information, but there is evidence that concerns about serious negative effects of using the Internet for health information may be ill-founded. The cancer patients in the study by Alison Chapple, Julie Evans and Sue Ziebland gave few examples of harm from using the Internet or of damage caused to their relationships…