Wiki wars

I don't normally use the blog just to flag up articles, but this is a particularly good one from The National Review on the online defenders of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Wikipedia (just a word of warning - the language gets a bit fruity at points).

Is this the most successful long political YouTube clip ever?

Barack Obama's speech on race earlier this week has been playing absolutely huge in the media in the US (for a good list of stories on the subject, check out Real Clear Politics). As would be expected, the Obama campaign immediately uploaded the whole video - some thirty seven minutes of it - onto YouTube. It has now been watched more than 200,000 times.  

I have to confess, the success of the video has surprised me a bit. I had completely bought into the logic that YouTube was a pop corn medium - light, fluffy and not very filling. Most successful political videos (or videos full-stop, in fact) on YouTube are a couple of minutes long at most. But here is a speech of nearly forty minutes, delivered direct to camera, that has been accessed by thousands and thousands of people in only a few days. I still suspect the general rule holds, but if nothing else, it illustrates what an unusual election cycle this is and how Barack Obama's candidacy has caught the public's imagination.

(My take on the content of the speech is on my personal weblog, here).  

Comparing messages across different political communication environments (from the Ohio State University IWG meeting)

Just finished an interesting day at the latest gathering of the International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking at the Ohio State University's fabulous Barrister Club. Thanks to the Moritz College of Law and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies for sponsoring the event and to the Moritz law students who have looked after us so well.

My paper on 'Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy' (picture below) was first up at 9am, though with jet lag it felt like lunchtime (perhaps the only advantage of jet lag). Thanks to Vince Price (Annenberg School, Penn) for his thoughtful and stimulating discussant comments.

IWG_OSU_March_2008.jpg 

Lots of interesting papers throughout the day and too much to blog about, but I was particularly struck by a discussion right at the end of the session, when participants were commenting on Alicia Schatteman's paper. Alicia is a PhD student at Rutgers University whose dissertation is examining the case of Ontario's Assembly on Electoral Reform.

In the discussion that followed, David Lazer (Kennedy School, Harvard) raised an interesting point about how Alicia's case presented a useful opportunity to consider how communication environments differ and how this might impact political outcomes. So, in the case of the Ontario Assembly there were face to face small group deliberations supported by expert input, a supporting website with rich sources of information and a full record of discussions, and then there was the broader 'mass media' environment and the political campaigning element which involved the political parties, journalists and so on.

The advantage of Alicia's case is that it allows us to compare a single issue - in this case electoral reform - across these very different media ecosystems. An intriguing point here is the extent to which organised party opinion and media management came into play in the mass media environment but was a less powerful force in the small group deliberations. The interactions between these environments, including how what goes on in one gets represented in the others, is also of significance.

It strikes me that this might be a fruitful way of approaching the communication processes surrounding specific policy issues.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Or, in English, the word of the people is the word of God. But just occassionally, you see a reason to doubt the wisdom of this view. I was surfing the Fix blog this morning (the same website that recently proved itself so collectively wise), I found an absolute crackerjack of a comment that completely brightened my day and which I just had to share:

"I think it's time for Hillary Clinton to fold up her tent and go home. Her campaign can be described in one word - low class."

Mixed messages for citizen journalists

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I was watching BBC News 24 today, following the progress of a rather large storm that has hit the UK. Although it wasn't too bad inland (pretty breezy though) it coincided with the spring high tides, so had a very dramatic impact on the coast. It occurred to me that the news media were sending out rather mixed messages. On the one hand, they were leading out earnest spokesperson after earnest spokesperson advising the British public that they should stay in doors and on no account go close to the sea, due to the danger posed by wind and waves.

However, this was immediately followed by the newscasters begging viewers to send in their own photos and videos of the storm. The problem was that some of the pieces of citizen journalism the BBC then went onto show could not have been taken at a safe distance from the coastline. Although the BBC does have a page which advises people "not to take unnecessary risks". The very fact that broadcasters choose to use such items sends out some pretty mixed messages.

Information, brands and transparency

Last night we hosted a fascinating seminar featuring the team from the EPSRC Fair Tracing Project. The project seeks to bolster the ethical objectives of fair trade by providing consumers and producers with a means of electronically tracing the various steps in the production of fair trade products. One of the potential killer applications on which the team are working is the display of a pie chart that shows the breakdown of revenue for a product in terms of who gets what. Another is the use of Google Maps to trace the distance travelled by produce before it reaches the supermarket shelf.

Dorothea Kline and Maria Jose Montero from the Geography Department at Royal Holloway are team members. Their colleagues are drawn from an interesting mix of disciplinary backgrounds, including information systems, computer science, and interface design.

The discussion was immensely interesting and centred upon a potential paradox: if we give consumers very detailed information about fair trade products, are we not at risk of hollowing out the fair trade brand?

Brands provide shortcuts: for good or ill, they provide many of us with shortcuts to decision-making. We are often, as the social psychologists say, 'cognitive misers': we take the easiest path to a decision based on the minimum of information. Brands are often powerful precisely because they are opaque.

Providing much richer information for fair trade goods renders the whole process less opaque, and therefore less simple and less powerful than a simple fair trade sticker. Do the benefits of transparency outweigh the costs?

We're The Economist, stupid

The letter’s page of The Economist a few weeks ago saw a few readers take issue with the newspaper’s habit of labelling anything it disagreed with as ‘populist’, for instance the economic policies of then-aspiring Democratic candidate John Edwards. One reader commented:

Even assuming that they are popular, what is the objective characteristic (with the emphasis on objective) that would transmute them from being good, wholesome popular candidates into nasty, wicked populist ones? In the absence of an objective definition, “populist” seems to be nothing more than a hollow term of abuse that The Economist hurls at anyone whose opinions are at odds with its own. May I suggest that in future you simply describe such people as “evil”. It is easier to pronounce than populist and uses less ink.

In response, this week’s Economist doesn’t hold back. In its Charlemagne column, the view of Europeans who think globalisation might bring them some harm, by creating job insecurity and wage stagnation, environmental damage, offshoring etc, are written off as ‘populist’. Then, the economic positions of Obama and Hillary are both derided as ‘populist claptrap’ for questioning the advantages of US membership of NAFTA. To say populist, as Ernesto Laclau writes, is often to say ‘irrational’, or ‘anti-elitist’. Certainly The Economist is nothing if not confident about speaking from an elite, rational position. But the connotation does seem to be that anyone who disagrees with its editorial line is stupid. I’m not sure that’s a good way to win arguments.

Fair and balanced

Since I posted a little bit of a satire on Hillary a while back, it only seems fair to balance it out. I suspect that when the election is over and all the dust has settled, there will be some very interesting studies on exactly how the media coverage has played out and who has benefited from what.


New article: Why don't we find politicians' claims convincing?

In the days after the 7/7 London bombings why did the British government’s representation of ‘terrorism’ and ‘moderate Muslims’ seem to create the opposite response from Muslim constituencies to that which the government intended? A new paper co-authored by myself and Giles Moss at Oxford has been published in Political Studies that tries to answer this question. There are ways in politics to make claims about states of affairs that allow those we address to engage with the substance of what we say, rather than switch off or view our address as an attack on us. We analysed speeches of Tony Blair, John Reid and others, and responses of British Muslims and British citizens more generally to their speeches. We found that citizens found the politicians’ claims about ‘terrorism’ or ‘Iraq’ to be too certain, too fixed and too direct, making it difficult for citizens to comprehend or connect to their representations as meaningful and negotiable. It was not simply that citizens mistrusted politicians or disagreed with their policies, but that politicians’ rhetoric and mode of address was interpreted as putting matters beyond debate. Citizens understand that politicians must reach decisions and respond urgently to terror attacks, but Blair, Reid and others were deemed to say controversial things and then present them as if they were beyond question. Yet even in moments of crisis, we argue, the responsibility to sustain engagement does not evaporate – if anything it becomes more pressing.

Giles and I hope to build on this article by reconsidering insights from Dewey and Lippmann that, contrary to the notion that citizens are turned off by ‘hard news’, suggest instead that it is around complex, controversial subjects in which politicians are deemed to be failing that publics actually do take an interest. We will look at public responses to the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War as a case in point.

The floodgates are creaking

At the NPCU conference this year, I'm giving a paper on the impact the Internet has had campaign fundraising in the US and the UK. In preparation for this and to get some feedback on my ideas, I did a staff-student seminar on this late last year. During the course of the question and answer session, I made what seemed like a very rash prediction - it was very likely that the whole American public funding system would be destroyed in 2008 by the enhanced fundraising capabilities of campaigns.

In order to understand this comment, we need to examine exactly how public funding works in presidential elections in the States. The whole process is grounded on the principle (decided by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976) that absolute spending caps would amount to a breach of the first amendment - the right to free speech. As a result American legislators have been forced to use another regulatory tool, namely voluntarism, to enforce spending caps. The mechanism for doing this has been to make the receipt public funding conditional on limiting spending.

The funding system for presidential elections is a two stage process:

  • The primary system. This is based on matching for small donations of less than $250. Receiving these benefits though is conditional on taking an overall spending cap plus a number of state restrictions. Already, this system has come under siege, and is now widely regarded as defunct. A number of candidates (for example Bush, 2000; Dean, Kerry and Bush, 2004; and Clinton, Obama and Romney, 2008) have got out of the system. For these campaigns, with their huge fundraising capabilities, the benefits of public funding as far outweighed by the spending caps they have to agree to.
  • The presidential campaign. Whereas the primary system is a public/private hybrid with a spending cap, the presidential election is a purely public affair. Candidates are given a bloc-grant. This is the total sum of money they are allowed to spend on the election. In 2004, each candidate was able to spend just over $74 million. As yet, every candidate to run for office since the system was instigated in the seventies has taken public funds for the presidential election (including Ronald Reagan, who actually opposed the system). This element of the public funding system has seemed pretty solid.

But (and this is what I meant with my comment) it is now conceivable that this system is going to come under immense strain. Think about it - Clinton and Obama have already blown $100 million each on their campaigns to entice a relatively small proportion of the electorate. Does it seem likely that campaigns of this sort will be willing to suffer budget cuts when they move to communicating with the wider electorate? 

Especially given Obama's massive level of fundraising since Super Tuesday, it also doesn't seem unlikely he would be able to out-fundraise the public grant he would be entitled to. And the indications are that he is considering it. We could be watching the death of public funding for presidential elections in the US.