Just to say, the NPCU blog is not run like this... (sorry - did try to embed, but for some reason, it didn't really like our blog).
Notes from the YouGovStone/FT Ask the Experts event on the US election
Digital Politics: Effects of the Information Age on the 2008 U.S. Election and Beyond, US Embassy May 15, 2008
Panellists:
- Phil Noble (US) Noble & Associates, Washington DC, Founder – PoliticsOnline
- Dr Andrew Chadwick (UK), Head, Department of Politics and International Relations and Director, New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Joanna Shields (US) International President, Bebo
- Jimmy Leach (UK) Director of Digital Communications, Freud Communications and former Head of Digital Communications for the Prime Minister’s Office
Last night I was one of the panellists at this event. It was a lively and interesting debate, with a good range of perspectives and lots of opportunities for audience members to ask questions. Gideon Rachman from the FT was a superb chair, even managing to squeeze in several email questions along the way. You can also view the webcast here. Carole Stone of YouGovStone and the staff at the US Embassy made us feel very welcome while we waited in the Benjamin Franklin room and during the drinks reception that followed.
First up was Phil Noble, now something of an internet campaign veteran. Phil spoke enthusiastically about the Obama campaign and of how the metrics of success for judging campaigns were now evolving. There were some remarkable statistics about Obama’s online fundraising – currently around the quarter of a million dollar mark.
I followed Phil. My talk - The 2008 Digital Campaign: What's New and Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK - was divided between making four basic points about the current campaign before providing a brief snapshot of mine and Nick Anstead’s research on the interplay between the internet and party institutions and electoral environment. The text of my speech is included below this summary.
Joanna Shields, International President of Bebo, one of the biggest social networking sites and soon to be acquired by AOL, came next, with an interesting perspective on the activities of young people away from the formal politics of voting.
Finally, Jimmy Leach brought us all down to earth with a dose of scepticism, not to mention humour, about politicians’ abilities to adapt to the new communication environment. For example, will the openness of the network campaign continue when a candidate enters office? Not likely, Jimmy suggested.
Gideon Rachman’s blog entry at the FT.
Here’s what I said…
The 2008 Digital Campaign: What's New, and Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK
First, I want to highlight four big themes in online campaigning that we’ve seen - so far - in the 2008 electoral cycle in the United States.
Second, as a political scientist, I’ll briefly consider a major puzzle: why has the internet had a greater impact on parties and election campaigning in the United States than it has in the UK?
So, what’s new and interesting in the 2008 US electoral cycle?
First : it seems to me that the internet is coming of age as a platform for political discourse. It has moved from the model of static pages toward a means of enabling a wide range of goals to be achieved through networked software services. Joanna Shields’ company, Bebo, is obviously a significant part of this general trend.
A second big theme of this election is collective intelligence in online campaigning. A distributed network of creators and contributors, the majority of them amateurs, can, using simple online tools, produce information goods that may better those produced by so-called authoritative sources. Though this is not entirely new - we saw this emerge with Howard Dean in 2004 - we now have a recognisable and proven campaigning model. It is based on online venues loosely meshed together through automated linking technologies, particularly blogs and social networking applications.
The internet now enables ongoing citizen vigilance on a grand scale. Political actors and media elites now inhabit an always-on environment in which it is impossible to escape the “little brother” surveillant gaze of citizen-reporters, from Twitter feeds to Flickr photostreams of marches and demonstrations ignored by mainstream media, to video bloggers and their YouTube uploads. One good example here is Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who first published Barack Obama’s now infamous ‘Bittergate’ remarks a few weeks ago.
A third big theme is that online video is now much more important than it was. YouTube has made a sizeable dent in earlier predictions of the emergence of the slick televisual online campaign, able only to be resourced by wealthy politicians. YouTube video conversations are often effective precisely because they don’t depend upon professional media production techniques.
And what are people watching on YouTube? Well, alongside the countless videos of people using Mentos candy to explode bottles of diet Coke, we find citizens watching unedited 37-minute long political speeches! Consider Obama’s ‘More Perfect Union’ speech delivered in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. By last week, almost 5.5 million people had watched that speech in its entirety. We know this because YouTube does not count partial viewings. Micah Sifry of the Techpresident blog, who we had as a speaker at a recent conference on the politics of web 2.0 at Royal Holloway, has spoken of this as a shift from the sound bite to the sound blast.
My fourth and final big theme is that data are now everything. Those who can successfully mine, refine and subsequently protect it are more likely to emerge as dominant. But the interesting thing is that most of these data have been created by the labor of volunteers and they may simply be the by-products of countless distributed and coincidental interactions. Election campaigns in the United States are now characterized by obsessive and continuous recalibration in response to instant online polls, fundraising drives, comments lists on YouTube video pages, and blog posts. But the key point is that informational value emerges from a combination of distributed user generated content and its centralized exploitation. It blends the campaign war room with the campaign network.
So, briefly, to an interesting puzzle: Why has the internet had a greater impact on parties and election campaigning in the United States than it has in the United Kingdom?
This is a quick snapshot of a forthcoming research paper that I’ve co-authored with my colleague, Nick Anstead.
To answer this question we need to understand how the internet interacts with political institutions - in particular, the organization of political parties and the norms and rules of the electoral environment. These vary greatly across political systems.
So we need to ask: what kinds of institutional features are more likely to have affinities with the technological characteristics of internet communication? A comparative approach allows us to hypothesize what may, or may not, gain traction in different political systems.
We hypothesize that different types of party organization and electoral environment have the potential to catalyze or to retard the development of internet campaigning. This is so because these institutions make new communication technologies more or less useful to candidates and parties.
When looked at comparatively, American parties and campaigns are unusual political institutions - quite different from those found in most European liberal democracies.
Consider two aspects of this:
The US is a much more pluralistic political system than the UK. It is federal, it has a strong separation of powers, and parties are comparatively weak and they are not nationally integrated. The UK is, despite devolution, a unitary system, has a very weak separation of powers, and parties and comparatively strong, integrated and hierarchical.
The pluralistic environment in the United States makes it necessary to build campaign networks composed of horizontal and vertical connections that mesh with the fundamentally fluid basis of the system.
Compare this with the UK, where the lines of communication are more vertically oriented, more firmly drawn and are based in long established formal structures with accompanying bureaucracies. The internet's suitability for creating loose horizontal networks has fewer affinities with this set of arrangements.
Second, the mechanisms for candidate recruitment and selection are also radically different in the two countries.
In the US, primaries and caucuses offer an institutional framework for sanctioned dissent. In the UK, the environment for candidate selection is much less open and fluid, and more nationally-oriented.
The long timescale and the uncertainty of the primaries encourages ‘outsiders’ and forces all candidates to continually build coalitions of support.
When the context is fluid, the risks are high, but the costs of organizational innovation are low, candidates are more likely to experiment online
In the UK, there are (literally) no, or very, very few, ‘outsider’ candidates, the selection process is internal to parties, to a fixed timetable and it’s nationally-uniform.
So in the UK, there is less need to use the internet for lowering costs and reducing uncertainty and risk by spreading a campaign across a wide range of networks.
There are other important differences between the two systems, such as the broader media environment and the rules governing campaign finance. If you want more detail on this argument, do feel free to download the paper at our website at Royal Holloway.
By way of a conclusion, I’d like to remind you that the subtitle of my talk was Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK.
Things may be changing as we speak, mainly because the eroding permanent membership base of British parties may actually be incentivizing them to seek alternative models to mobilize support. Watch this space!
Shock: social networking sites are not like real life
Funny video clip from the BBC satirising the process of "friending" in Facebook. Certainly brings home the chasm between face-to-face and online. But when I see comparisons like this I often think they're missing the point a bit. Online environments create new and hybrid contexts for interaction; that's part of what makes them shapers of social change.
Election lexicon
When you sit and read too many blogs and too many articles on electoral politics, you start to notice something: certain words and phrases are contagious. Each election cycle, wherever it occurs either offers up new expressions or pushes them to the forefront of the public mind. This seems to prove that human beings have a group mentality when it comes to language and tend to emulate each other. It is an interesting question about how the Internet is impacting this process. I would hypothesise the rapid communication flows and network structure of new communication technology will catalyse the spread of specific terminology.
I thought it would be fun to try and compile a list of election words and phrases over the next few months. These don't just have to be from the US, but from anywhere in the world. I'm going to start now with a few ideas, but I will try to update it with new suggestions as they occur to me. If anyone has any other ideas, do please leave them in the comments section or mail me.
Without further ado, here are some ideas to get us started.
Blue state and red state. Hard though it is to believe now, but this distinction only appeared in the 2000 election. Prior to that TV networks had mixed and matched their coverage between parties and colours. Due to the polarized electorate in 2000, and the fact that the election was contested for so long, the colours that were being used during that election cycle stuck (for examples: here, here and here). See also purple states.
Kool Aid (as in "drinking the kool aid"). This term originates from the 60s culture when the Kraft-produced soft drink was used as a way of taking acid. Generically, the phrase (which is commonly associated with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly) means anyone who believes fervently and unquestioningly in something. During the 2008 election cycle the term Kool Aid drinkers has frequently been applied to Obama supporters (for example: here, here and here).
Throw someone under a train. This is a new one on me, at least as part of the day-to-day lexicon of politics. Throwing someone under a train involves destroying the reputation of a former ally or friend for one's own political benefit. I first heard it in the immediate aftermath of Obama race speech, where some accused him of "throwing his grandmother under a train in order save his own political skin". It has now become ubiquitous, although there are some variations out there, such as "from a train" and "under a bus" (for example: here and here, and here for the variation).
Update on 2008-05-04 14:55 by Nick Anstead
Safe, legal and rare (Hillary Clinton's view on abortion). This soundbite was suggested by my colleague Chris Boerl. It was first used by Clinton in a 2005 speech to mark the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, in which she appealed for common ground to be found in the polarising abortion debate. Chris reckons it will become an important soundbite for whichever Democrat wins the nomination as it offers a way of triangulatin this key issue (Original use here, although, Chris's prediction is somewhat dented here, with an account of Obama attacking the position).
Update on 2008-05-04 15:03 by Nick Anstead
The kitchen sink. Not a new phrase, but has become politicised in recent weeks. In early March an unnamed Clinton aide used the phrase to describe the type of campaign that would now be run against Obama. It stuck, and for Obama supporters, became an attack line to use against the Clintons and to criticise what they believed were underhand campaign tactics (see: here and here).
Update on 2008-05-31 00:53 by Nick Anstead
Texas two step: No, not the dance (which according to this website requires the following: a wide belt, cowboy boots, bandannas and country-western shirts), but the way Texans select their presidential nominees. Uniquely they count the results of both a primary and a caucus, each of which allocates a proportion of the delegates. But here's where it gets interesting. I have no evidence other than one comment on this thread on Daily Kos, but it has been claimed that the "two-step" phrase is a completely new invention, concocted by the Obama campaign, in order to encourage its supporters to take part in both contests. The phrase is now certainly ubiquitous (here and here).
Update on 2008-05-31 00:59 by Nick Anstead
Rovian: [As in to act in a Rovian manner]. A term coined by Democrats to describe things they deem to be political dirty tricks / negative campaigning. Named for George W. Bush's political adviser Karl Rove. This election cycle has seen Democrats using it to describe their own party members (examples here and here).
Update on 2008-06-12 08:45 by Nick Anstead
Putting. Fullstops. In. Everything. OK, not so much a word as a turn of phrase. I don't even know where it originates from. But it does seem to have become common in presidential politics and proliferated onto a wider range of subjects subsequently. Most obvious example that I frequently see is "Yes. We. Can", Obama's campaign slogan (example here).
Another shameless Internet rip off
A while back, I blogged on the idea that the Internet might be starting to become a dominant cultural form because other media were referencing it. However, while that example clearly fell into the category of "referencing", one I saw tonight was closer to a shameless rip off. Nonetheless, it still speaks about the influence that YouTube is having on popular culture.
So here's the amazing original - one of the most viewed videos in YouTube history.
33 million views later, here's what the advertisers came up with.
All I can say is I hope that got paid a big wad of cash.
Update on 2008-04-29 23:07 by Nick Anstead
Elizabeth Edwards on the press agenda
The fantastic Elizabeth Edwards has just penned a great piece for the NY Times, blasting the press for it focus on the trivial (the fantastic graphic above accompanied the Times article). Edwards's argument is simple - the desire of the press to construct a simplistic narrative framework through which electoral politics can be viewed excludes really viable candidates who should be considered. The two examples she cites are Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who could well have been serious contenders but could not get any real campaign traction. Additionally, she argues that certain candidates whose role in the race is artificially inflated because they "fit" - Rudi Giuliani being used as evidence of this.
I suspect this story has a more personal undertone though. Although Edwards pointedly uses examples of candidates who wound up at the very lowest rung of the primary contest and made little impact, she might well also be thinking of her husband, who despite being a very serious candidate for the Presidency, lost out in the Clinton-Obama deathmatch narrative the media created very rapidly after the Iowa caucus. And it shouldn't be forgotten that Elizabeth Edwards is also returning to a previous campaign talking point about the triviality of the media discourse, which was the subject of what was (in my humble opinion) the best video of the entire campaign season.
Who would the Simpsons vote for?
A long time ago, I remember reading an article about whether the Simpsons (who are, after all, the most typical American family imaginable... well, sort of) would vote if given the choice between George W. Bush and John Kerry. That was actually a fairly simple exercise - Marge would have been solidly for Kerry, while Homer would have gone for the incumbent. This primary season is far more complex than the 2004 general election, so I reckon it is worth asking the question again (with apologies for demonstrating far too good a knowledge of the Simpson's back catalogue): who would the Simpson's vote for?
Marge is fairly easy, I suspect. She would have to be a Hillary supporter, I reckon. Although she now doesn't work and stays at home, Marge was a bit of a second wave feminist when she was school (as I remember, she burnt her bra on one occasion and also wanted to be a female astronaut), so she would certainly feel affinity with Hillary's bid to be the first woman president. Also, despite her liberal politics, Marge is pretty religious, so she might not have been that impressed by Obama's comments about people clinging to their religion.
Now Homer is a bit more of an issue. He is the classic Nascar Dad who would probably have been for Bush in 2004. He doesn't like taxes, politicians, or liberals (and you can bet your life he watches Fox news). So would he be in McCain's column? Maybe. Homer would also be the kind of voter that the Democrats know they have to get back if they are going to win the White House back in November. And at the outset, that seemed a good bet, as an economic downturn encouraged millions of Homers towards the Democrats. But the long and divisive primary may be putting him off. Certainly Homer would need to be convinced to vote for Obama, as he is the demographic that has given the Illinois Senator most problems during the primary contest.
Just for fun, let's just assume that Bart and Lisa can vote too. Bart - the classic millennial generation child - would surely be for Obama. And even if he weren't before this weekend, Obama's Jay-Z-style brush off of Clinton would surely have sealed the deal. More than that though, although supremely confident, Bart needs a bit of hope in his life. His school is hugely underfunded, while his teachers think he is destined for a career working in Krusty Burger (and that's before we even talk about the bullies he has to put up with everyday). I think Lisa is the least predictable of all the Simpsons. She is really clever and believes the world can be made a better place. But she is also quite cynical. I suspect she might have started out supporting Clinton (like her mother, she is a bit of a feminist). The question is how she would have reacted to the campaign? Would she believe that the Clinton's had gone negative and rejected them for it? Or would she regard Obama as rhetorician lacking in substance? It could have gone either way. But if I were making a prediction as to what Lisa Simpson wanted in her heart, it would probably be this: she probably has her fingers crossed that Al Gore gets nominated at the convention.
Morning Seminar Sessions - Day Two
Here is a write-up of the events of this morning's seminar sessions...
Web 2.0 in China
There is more to Chinese Web use than traditional surveillance or game playing.
Examples of Web use in China have been violent, evident in the responses to Western and Tibetan criticism of the government’s handling of the recent protests in Tibet.
Chinese people believe that expression online should be more controlled or validated by an overarching authority. If someone doesn’t think they are an expert in a subject, they will simply not post. This is seen all over the world and is not particular to China.
The net is a place for everyone to exchange. The web is a good thing but there are people who don’t think that one should change their minds via active discussion. They believe that people’s opinions are static and should not be challenged.
Self-censorship and the Rise of Cyber-collectives
Censorship systems in China: technologies, laws, hierarchical administration. Government doesn’t need internet police as censorship is self-serving. People censor themselves in anticipation of government intervention. However, the government targets ISPs and other organisations. In this way, self-censorship is a social safety-valve.
Final Panel Sessions - 4.00 - 5.30
Agenda-setting Research: An Exploratory Study of Spanish News Websites and Mename
Users of social news site, Meneame (http://meneame.net/) used traditional news site more than non-traditional. However, it was seen that there was far greater news coverage on Meneame than that covered by the mainstream Spanish news sources such as La Vanguardia, El Pais and El Mundo.
There was a difference between news values of the viewers of Meneame and those given by mainstream journalists.
Meneame shows more transparency on how the public agenda is manifested.
Politics and Usual? The Use of Facebook in Danish Parliamentar Election Campaigning.
Social network supporters tend to be the same as offline political supporters – there is little interaction sought by voters online
There is also little integration using other digital means. These findings suggest that web 2.0 has not heavily influenced the political process in Denmark.
Politics is not only about education and voting, it is also about entertainment. Entertainment matters and this is seen in the amount of music videos etc that are being seen in current campaigns. More political parties need to think about incorporating entertainment in their political campaigns in order to gain the trust and support of the voters.
Key Note Speeches from Micah Sifry and Michael Turk
Micah Sifry – Personal Democracy Forum
The Revolution will be networked. How open source politics is emerging in America.
Open Source politics – an analogy of open source software and politics. Letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans.
What we are seeing is a changing of the way in which people are co-creators of the political process. They are making their contributions salient be converging into networks and it is these networks which are the key.
Voter can make and disseminate messages better than political parties and traditional media actors.
How has the game changed?
There are all sorts of examples of movements on social networking sites of campaigning gaining significant numbers of voters. The million strong campaign against Hillary Clinton on Facebook, Barack Obama’s MySpace Page.
The Ron Paul campaign updates the public of donors to the site on real time – www.ronpaulgraphs.com -
There is more space online for more content and this is beginning to challenge the sound bite society created by the mainstream media. There is a counter to the sound bite society and this is the sound-blast society, where users are hungry for content – emphasised by the amount of people who are viewing campaign videos on YouTube.
Obama campaign is telling us that the value of the network is more important than a list compiled by a traditional political / power source. Clinton campaign misunderstood the network effect and focused more on compiling traditional lists.
Networks are resilient but they are not nimble – you cannot get networks to get the message of the day.
Campaigns are still not ready to devolve authority, they only want to devolve projects. This force is only going to grow but the question will be what happens to these networks when the campaign finishes? Sifry doesn’t believe that they are going away.
www.personaldemocracy.com www.techpresident.com
The Side Effect – Michael Turk
“The thought that he’ll be President is a side-effect. This campaign is about allowing people to come together to tell their life stories” – comment on the Howard Dean campaign.
The Bush campaign attempted to get its supporters to tell the story of the campaign, be messengers, to their friends and extended networks. This is because the Republican supporters are dispersed over a very large space. They wanted to remove the role of the campaign away from the traditional field organiser – the tools enabling people to vote or become supporters were released in order for people to do something with the latent energy that was being fostered. There was a concern that these tools would be abused by certain groups of people but most of the usage of tools has been constructive and the nefarious use of the net for campaigns has been limited to a few bespoke individuals.
Questions: Who owns the data being generated?
Sifry: There will become an issue of who controls the data from these networks. No-one is conscious yet of the loss of privacy that is being experienced during these campaigns.
Turk: campaigns rely on this consumer database – they map profiles of what constitutes a certain speaker. If this data were used correctly for education about the types of voter under consideration then there would be a very large turnout of voters.
Q: Is the war room model of campaigning being reinvented? Or is it dead?
Turk: campaigns realise that it is all about winning, it is not about improving the lives of the electorate. This is the reason why the war-room model is still in place today, because it is effective.
Sifry: Groups such as MoveOn are viable because they are niche organisations and delegate actionable projects that people can do on a local level. Taking advance of a small amount of people doing the heavy lifting in politics. This is an example of a super-activist group although it is not clear whether it is entirely effective.
The Obama campaign realises that the more sharing of information – such as Yes We Can video – is better in generating more support for the project.