Online Politics Research

Vancouver.
Wow, time has passed quickly (and very enjoyably). We're in the final session of AoIR 2007 here in Vancouver, and Chris Wells and Justin Reedy are the first speakers; their interest is in the use of Internet in direct democracy. Direct democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere is increasingly common, increasingly important, and different from conventional democratic forms in important ways (the European constitutional referenda in a number of countries are one key example here, while in a number of U.S. states there have been referenda on limiting property tax rates).

The politics and information environments of direct democracy are also very different from electoral politics - how do voters make decisions in this context, then? Do they have enough information, and can they put it to use effectively - which determines whether direct democracy is a good mechanism for democratic decision-making?

There are few partisan cues in direct democracy; instead, voters often need to negotiate complex choices, and they do so in the context of sometimes very variable media coverage (and, at times, a set of direct democracy options which are designed explicitly to confuse voters - e.g. having to vote 'no' to vote in favour of an issue). So, how can we characterise Internet use in this context, and are Internet users better able to obtain the necessary information than non-users?

In the study's first case study, the fact that people were going online to find out about ballot initiatives was a better predictor of participation than is the case in Senate and presidential races; accessing issue-based rather than candidate-based sites also helped here. At the same time, interestingly, people going online were not likely to say that they did so due to an overall dissatisfaction with mass media offerings. In a second case study in Washington State, Internet use also helped voters on initiatives; users and especially regular users of the Net turned out to be more knowledgeable; political knowledge, income, and Internet use were all correlated with knowledge of the proposed initiatives; and Internet users were also more familiar with the level of support for initiatives from interests groups (they were better able to learn electoral cues). Finally, in the case of the EU referenda, Internet users had more knowledge of the draft constitution and policy proposals, and were able to cite more arguments in support of the proposed EU constitution.

So, there are qualitative and quantitative differences between users and non-users; they learnt about issues, not just about candidates, became more knowledgeable about issues and voting cues, and engaged more with the overall debate. This is not limited to groups at specific income levels, but cuts across socioeconomic strata. This may mean that initiative engagement may help activate interest in political Internet use; and that the democratic elements of the Internet could encourage better research by citizens on the initiatives being put to them. Internet users seemed more informed; they participated more in mediated deliberation on issues. General online politics research now needs to be adapted to focus more strongly on direct democracy aspects to further examine these issues.

The next speaker is Shefali Virkar, who begins by highlighting the growing political apathy and disillusionment in Western liberal democracies. In the European Union, a number of e-consultation projects have now emerged to try and work against such developments, and this also constitutes a shift from top-down to bottom-up e-participation frameworks: from e-governance to e-engagement. Shefali suggests an examination of such projects along three key categories: duration (long-term consultations seeking citizen reaction to wider issues, short-term consultations in relation to specific events, and one-off consultations which are highly specialised, issue-based, and often ad hoc); government level (from local to regional to national to Europe-wide); and target audience (participation invited from the general public; feedback invited from targetted or special interest groups).

One example of this is 10 Downing St's e-petition site - translating the traditionally paper-based and non-representative petition model to an online environment. A U.K. e-petition site launched in November 2006 as a joint venture between independent organisation mySociety and the Prime Minister's Office. Key features of this site are a home page with introductory information, a 'create a petition' function (with 1 in 6 petitions rejected on average), a function allowing users to sign petitions, a feedback function which allows for interactions between government and citizen, and a data protection statement (data submitted to the site is held by mySociety, not by the PM's office).

The site allows for informed petitioning and a better quality of participation; from a government standpoint, it allows for better dialogue and enables extremely popular petitions to highlight key issues even while still in progress so that their ideas can be incorporated into policy processes more quickly. However, ignoring petitions also remains possible for the government, and due to the design of the site, serious and non-serious petitions may easily be mixed up with one another. Openness, access, and participation may also be difficult to achieve under strict data protection regulations. Further, political apathy, a lack of publicly available information, participant selection, difficulty in dealing with expectations, and social and technological exclusion of some possible participants also pose problems.

E-petitions nonetheless remain powerful tools, though not necessarily any better or more representative than conventional petitions. Privacy and security issues remain crucial, and more effort must be spent on generating trust and increasing participation; the role of moderators in the discussion is crucial, and it is also important to consider the stage of the policymaking process at which consultation should be introduced. Can Government 2.0 offer something radically different form Government 1.0, then: will e-partitions lead to changes in policy, and are there fresh sets of ways in which e-petitions can be applied to bring together communities, create new spaces for constructive democratic interaction and enable government to offer better consultation?

Up next are Kevin Wang and Hyung Min Lee, who have mapped Web interactivity in political campaigns in the 2006 U.S. House of Representatives election. They begin by noting that political campaigns have moved from informational to interactive, increasingly mobilising supporters and using their sites for fundraising. A milestone in this was the 2004 Presidential election with its resurgence of person-to-person electioneering and the adoption of social networking and marketing tools for political gain.

Four functions of political campaign Websites are informing, involving, connecting, and mobilising (according to Foot and Schneider); interactivity is a key to this. Web interactivity itself needs to be defined more clearly, however - and the definition here is as a level of two-way communication and feedback which results in personalised content and interpersonal relationships. Such interactivity, then, can be measured by examining the level of sites' conversational capability (user-content, user-interface, and user-user interaction), and the level of user choices.

This yields four models: a presence-only model (low on opportunities, low on conversation), publishing model (many content choices, limited conversation), function-specific model (low range of choices, high in conversation), and conversational model (high on both counts). In practice, which of these models is chosen by a campaign is likely to be affected by candidates' age, gender, party affiliation, and incumbency status, and the research here examined whether such differences can be identified in practice. The study examined 90 out of the 432 U.S. House districts, or a total of 167 candidate Websites, and identified the features for each site.

The distribution of candidate sites showed a predominance of the presence-only model, with some crossover into the publishing model and little anywhere else. Democrats scored slightly further towards the publishing model, as did challengers (as opposed to incumbents). This may be because Democrats were pursuing the youth vote, and because of a funding gap requiring Democrats to divert more efforts to fundraising; challengers may similarly have seen interactivity as a cost-effective way to mobilise the grassroots. At the same time, it remains unclear whether such added interactivity did in fact have a significant effect on election outcomes - and the level of explicit understanding of campaign site features and the motivations for their deployment amongst candidates and campaign staff, and of user reactions to such features, still remains to be studied in further detail, too.

The final paper in this final session at AoIR 2007 is by by Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki and Han Woo Park, whose focus is on South Korean and Japanese politicians online. They, too, ask what political information and communication features are present on such Websites; what kind of hyperlink strategies do they use; and do they utilise blogs and mobile phone-usable Websites?

Political culture has variously been defined as the pattern of individual attitudes and orientations towards politics; a system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values; it has been understood as setting the parameters of the political game; and it can be seen as being relationship-oriented. South Korean and Japanese politics can be understood by examining a number of categories: the party-politician relationship (weak in Korea, weak in major and strong in minor Japanese parties, with strong leaders in one and party-mediated leaders in the other country); South Korean parties are more ideologically oriented and there is a two-party system, while in Japan there is one long-ruling party with a range of opposition parties which is gradually crumbling and changing towards a two-party system; politicians in both countries are increasingly transparent in their activities, with a strong civil society in Korea and a weak civil society in Japan - and additionally, politicians depend strongly on local support; election regulations in Korea are strict in terms of media, donations, and face-to-face campaigning, while they are strict in terms of media, timing, and distribution.

The study examined 200 Websites of current national assembly members (100 from each country) in January and February 2006, and examined the informative and interactive features of these Websites. These features included background information, photos and photo albums, party logos, activity reports, endorsements, recent policy documents, newspaper clippings, and voting records; opportunities to join the politician's organisation, to join their political party, to obtain e-paraphernalia, or to volunteer or become an intern; and links to own or other parties, fellow or opposed politicians, to politicians at other levels, to governments, local assemblies, election-related bodies, national assemblies, parliamentary committees, conventional and Internet broadcasters, newspapers, Internet newspapers, mobile phone-accessible Websites, NGOs and civil society groups, and links to the general public or other sites.

The results of this were that many more South Korean politicians included their party logo; almost 100% had a photo album (many more than in Japan), and 16% compared their stance on issues with that of others (while none of the Japanese politicians did so). Endorsements, policy documents, and media clippings were also predominantly found in Korean Websites. On the other hand, options to join politicians' organisations were far more common on Japanese sites, while donating money, subscribing to email from the political sites, participating in online fora, and signing up to distribute political materials online were far more frequent in Korea. Links to politicians' own parties were frequent in both countries (but more so in Korea); Japanese politicians linked more often to peers in the same party at national as well as local levels, while Koreans usually were more likely to link to their national assembly instead. Japanese sites linked more to Internet broadcasters and mobile phone-enabled Websites, Korean sites more to blogs, and Japanese sites more to the general public.

So, South Korean Websites show more involvement between politicians and the public with regard to communication and information features, Japanese politicians link more amongst themselves and channel online interest to formalised offline suport organisations. How this works out in a context of permanent e-campaigining in the future is yet to be seen...

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