ECPR 2011

Reykjavík.
The next ECPR 2011 speaker is Joan Balcells, whose interest is in the impact of the Net on voting behaviour in the 2010 Catalan elections, with a specific focus on the left, pro-independence ERC party (which was in the ruling coalition but lost substantial votes in the election: from 14% of the vote in 2006 to 7% in 2010).

The ERC is defined by its Catalan nationalism, and had a strong following amongst Internet users (in fact, pro-independence attitudes and Internet use appear to be connected). ERC competes with CiU (the mainstream Catalan nationalist party) as well as small pro-independence parties (such as SI) outside the political establishment. Where did ERC’s voters disappear to in 2010, then – to these parties, non-independence parties, or into abstention?

Reykjavík.
Day two at ECPR 2011 starts with a paper by Sarah Oates, whose focus is on Russian political parties online. Generally, Russian political parties don’t function like democratic parties; they are coopted by state interests, and this is true especially for the parties supporting the current regime. Does a presence on the Internet reflect or transform them, however?

United Russia is the largest political party in Russia, with 64% of the vote in 2007; minor parties include the Communists (12%), Liberal Democrats (8%), and A Just Russia (8%). Sarah coded these parties’ Websites for their approaches to providing information, as well as the nature of their content and their interlinkage with other Websites.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Ben O’Loughlin, whose interest is in the effect of near real-time semantic analysis of public sentiments (online) on continuing political processes: in the end, we may end up with a kind of semantic polling of available social media and other electronic data, which enables political actors to target their messages to voters with unprecedented precision and speed. The 2010 election in the U.K. may have been the first rudimentary example of such a feedback loop.

Ben’s study examined the social media data used by TV and print journalists during the election, and interviewed key actors about their emerging practices in dealing with such data. Three main types of reporting were notable: anecdotal (pulling random tweets out of the timeline); quantitative (general stats on user activity as reported by various polling companies); and semantic (processing the content of social media sources).

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Andreas Jungherr, whose interest is in using Twitter data to detect events by identifying sudden bursts of activity in the continuing stream of updates. Such research is especially straightforward on Twitter, due to its convenient API access formats; additionally, the short format of Twitter messages means that key themes in messages can be more easily identified.

Twitter itself does some of this, of course, with its ‘trending topics’ (also broken down for specific geographical regions); further, it is possible to identify the links which are shared as part of tweets, of course, as well as identifying hashtags, @replies, and retweets. And tweets are exactly timestamped, allowing for close analysis of temppral developments.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Rosalynd Southern, whose interest is in the UK general election. In the first place, this examined the Web presence of the various political candidates for the six largest parties (2424 in total), from profiles on their party sites through Web-in-a-box pages solutions organised by the parties to personalised sites. This provides an indication of the role the Web plays in each candidate’s campaigning.

Reykjavík.
The final session for the day at ECPR 2011 (well, before we go and hear from the President of Iceland) has a distinct Twitter theme, and starts with Greg Elmer. His focus is on the use of Twitter in the Canadian election debate of 2008, and on the question of how Twitter contributes to intensifying the permanent election campaign.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Anastasia Kavada, whose focus is on claims that the Net leads to more decentralised forms of organising which help to unite heterogeneous participants in loose collectives. Such claims place communication in a central position, but there appears to be a lack of systematic theoretical frameworks – organisational communication may help here, she suggests.

Reykjavík.
We move on at ECPR 2011 to Andrea Calderaro, who zooms in on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement as a form of political struggle in the network society. It is important here to move beyond digital media as a mere tool, but to question the code itself; FOSS does this by open-sourcing code to allow greater interaction and transparency.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Lance Bennett, whose interest is in connective action (as opposed to collective action). Understanding the logic of such action is important, as it may mean that political organisations need to rethink their outreach activities.

There have been significant self-organising large-scale connective actions recently – from the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados –, with substantial media and political successes. Collective action, by contrast, has its problems: the free rider problem, for example, which can be addressed through formal organisation (but this in turn creates problems with resource mobilisation, collective identity and action framing, and other issues).

Connective action personalises communication, by relying on loose ties and choice in affiliating with organisations and others; by building on easily shareable symbolic content; and by using social media for passing along such personalisable memes. Technology becomes a network agent that changes the game, and personalised sharing overcomes the self-interest barriers to collective actions.

Reykjavík.
The afternoon panel at ECPR 2011 starts with a paper by Bruce Bimber, whose focus is on the role of digital media in encouraging political participation in the US. Does digital media use lead to (or relate to) civic and political involvement? There appears to be a modest relationship, which is moderated by interest; interpretations vary about the substantive importance of that link, though. (Ultimately, effects of Internet use on engagement appear to be positive, but may not be substantial.)

Further, the association between the two may be growing with involvement over time – but that may not continue to be the case as the use of technologies such as Facebook becomes ubiquitous. Perhaps such time-based trends simply don’t make much sense any more.