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The arrival of the Internet has surely changed politics, but how? How are political behaviours being altered by this new communication technology, which provides access to new information and new ways to engage? In this short article, Professor Rachel Gibson, the Director of the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, summarizes her research into the topic.

 

The question of whether the Internet is changing politics has been a perennial puzzle that researchers have sought to answer ever since the World Wide Web burst onto our computer screens in the early 1990s. This project seeks to look at this question from the perspective of both political elites (parties and candidates) and voters in the context of an election campaign. The central proposition being investigated is whether the internet is helping to revive the fortunes of political parties by allowing them to become more porous networked structures that are open to more citizen direction and involvement in their campaigns. Alternatively are digital technologies and particularly social media tools like Facebook and Twitter helping to promote a more pro-active citizenry who practice and consume politics in a more independent manner, relying less and less on formal channels of input and becoming more self-directing.

The research has been conducted in three different national elections since 2010 – the UK, Australia and France - with the remaining study of the U.S. Presidential election to conclude later this year. The results produced to date, while not suggesting that the internet is revolutionising political systems is indicative of a number of important trends. First, digital technology does appear to be moving parties toward a new style of collaborative campaigning whereby specialist websites and tools are provided for supporters to undertake certain key tasks such as ‘getting out the vote’ that hitherto were the core responsibility of campaign staff and managed centrally. While this ‘open-source’ approach to campaigning has been most prominent and successfully practiced in the U.S. and was arguably ‘perfected’ by Obama in 2008 it does appear to be emerging closer to home. Several parties in the UK ran ‘inhouse’ social network sites in 2010 to recruit digital activists to help them in their campaign. Notably Labour and the Liberal Democrats, arguably the financial underdogs compared with the Conservatives were most enthusiastic, suggesting that this grassroots approach may be a product of expediency as much as a desire to deepen their democratic ethos. Given falling rates of traditional membership, however, we expect this new form of cyber-affiliation to be something that the parties increasingly promote.

A second key finding has been that outside the party and official campaign context there does appear to be a new form of popular participation emerging online that is associated with younger citizens who typically have less interest and enthusiasm for politics. This mode of engagement that we idenfiy as ‘e-expressive’ centres on the posting or sharing of one’s political opinion on informal social media spaces such as blogs, twitter and social network sites. While one might be tempted to see it as simply an online form of political discussion, its public and viral quality gives it a more deliberateand consequential quality than this more casual or ‘watercooler’ type of political conversation. The consequences of this new form of engagement are perhaps even more interesting in that while other types of online engagement during the campaign such as gathering news and information were linked to an increased likelihood of voting, this e-expressive mode is not. This suggests that while this new option for involvement in politics might be appealing to those who are typically less likely to participate, its informal nature may mean that it does not trigger any interest in engaging via official representative channels.

Joining the two findings together, therefore, it seems that perhaps that despite the best efforts of parties to harness digital technology to improve their fortunes, ultimately they will have to stand to the sidelines while it fosters a growth of the informal sector in politics is something that future research will need to address.

This text first appeared in the ESRC Society Today Magazine, published November 2013. The work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant “The Internet, Electoral Politics and Citizen Participation in Global Perspective” (RES-051-27-0299). The Behavioural Dynamics Institute is grateful to Professor Gibson for granting permission to republish it.