ICTlogy

Notes on the seminar at UOC’s Law and Political Science School Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties: an application to the Catalan case, presented by Albert Batlle, Rosa Borge, Ana Sofía Cardenal and Albert Padró-Solanet, after their homonimous communication at the 4th ECPR General Conference in Pisa.

Is there a crisis on political participation?

From 1950 to our days, participation in elections has notably decreased in most developed countries.

Same applies when we look both at the membership/voters ratio and the absolute membership volume.

Electoral volatility — voters changing the party they vote — also increases.

Why those changes?

Positive approach: changes in cleavages that explained vote intention and no longer can so clearly explain vote intention.

Normative approach: crisis of the institutions themselves, citizenship disaffection.

What’s the role of ICTs in this landscape? Regenerate institutions? Empower voters/members? Raise political parties’ accountability? Enhance participation?

Working hypotheses

• Leveling the playing field: ICTs provide an comparative advantage to small parties, but after comes normalization: the bigger the party, the more resources can allocate
• Depending on the typology of the political party, they tend to interact more or less, communicate with their voters.

It seems that the normalization hypotheses is the most concurrent, political parties do not use ICTs to increase communication, and it geographically happens quite homogeneously.

Theoretical approach

Political parties are led/influenced/build by an ideology, an organization and an electoral market (the really exogenous variable). This leads the party to implement a communication strategy that will determine the party’s ICT uses.

Then, test how different indicators (see also paper below) affect the dependent variable: ICT use on political parties.

• Ideology: left parties associated with better participation scores?
• Party organization: mass parties related to resource generation and provision of information?
• Party organization: catch-all parties more related to campaining?
• Electoral market: more preasure to win votes leads to campaining?
• Electoral market: the more the resources and the expectations to obtain them, the more sophisticated the development of websites?

Findings

Normalization hypotheses seems confirmed: bigger/richer parties have better/richer websites… but smaller ones, do also well in their websites, to obtain support, funding… Thus, seems clear that the electoral market is a very important issue in the strategy of ICT use in political parties.

Nevertheless, it seems that ICTs in general — and, specifically, websites — are not a strategic priority of Catalan political parties.

Mass parties seem to be better connected, have better network than catch-all parties.

My questions/comments

Any research on how parties react to the quantity/quality of the communication — Fourth Estate — arena?

Political parties might not find any incentive to enter the conversation, taking into account the classical literature about how political parties behave. BUT, if there really is a Fifth Estate emerging thanks to web 2.0 technologies, wouldn’t it be a “menace” to the traditional way political parties communicate with voters and members? Wouldn’t it be an incentive — i.e. respond to the fifth power — to engage in more communication, participation?

Maybe we should not take political parties as “political parties” but as communication media: information deliverers and opinion generators. And analyze website strategies not as political strategies but communication strategies: look not at the origin — the political parties, their strategies — but at the destiny — the communication arena.

More info

• Batlle, A., Borge, R., Cardenal, A. S. & Padró-Solanet, A. (2007). Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties: an application to the Catalan case. Communication presented at the 4th ECPR General Conference. Pisa: ECPR. Retrieved

Akeh Lucas Kunen & Zigo Morfaw Damien
E-Health Africa: Overcoming the Barriers to its Implementation. A case study of Sub Sahara Africa

Intend to identify the barriers to e-Health implementation in sub-saharan Africa and see how can these barriers be overcome.

• Political barriers
• Economic barriers
• Socio-cultural factors
• Technical barriers

Solutions to Political barriers

• Leadership
• Leadership
• Leadership

Solutions to Economic barriers

• Infrastructure development
• Poverty alleviation
• Assistance from donor organizations

Solutions to Socio-Cultural barriers

• Education
• Digital divide
• Use of ICTs in public institutions

My Comments

• During the debate, issues arise about citizenship awareness (on e-Health) and overriding (corrupt) governments, which reminds me of some good hints Francisco Lupiáñez about ICTs and e-Health in some cases not empowering but disempowering people, e.g. the distrust on online information about Health in general thus strengthening the link/dependence physicist-patient. Thus, overriding governments with the required awareness might by a tricky issue.

Marije Geldof
ICT for low-literate youth in Ethiopia: the usability challenge

The instruments of literacy create a demand for literacy (Lewis)

Explore current role & future opportunities of ICTs in the live of low-literate (limited reading and writing skills) youth (1o to 20 y.o.) in Africa

Methodological challenges

• Sampling
• Phrasing questions
• Visual representations
• Answering behaviour
• Translation
• Research setting

Preliminary results

• Divide urban and rural
• Gender differences
• Main ICT use: communication long distance; information about country
• Mobile phone popular
• Technology for the educated only
• English necessary for using ICT
• Reading and writing for education, letters, obtaining knowledge, job perspectives
• Impact video
• Imitating
• Low sustainability

Student research seminar: Seok-Jin Eom

In this presentation, I would like to examine what factors made the different outcomes and performances of e-goverment. Focusing on the roles of consultant in private sector and the institutional arrangement through which their policy ideas and knowledge came into government and were fortified and spread, the Federal Enterprise Archietecture initiative in the U.S. federal government will be anlyzed.

The Korean Government benchmarked the US e-Government initatives, but relayed to a “stove-piped” business reference model: shifting from function-driven to agency centric; and from cross-agency to stove-piped systemic.

What’s missing

• Relations between public and private sector
• Receptivity of ideas from private sector to government
• Social locations of the proponents of new ideas (knowledge-bearing groups / knowledge-generating institutions)
• Carriers of ideas from private sector to government
• Institutional arrangement that have influenced the spread, transformation, reinforcement fo the ideas: institutionalized access points, institutionalized managerial tools

Lead: Helen Margetts

What is the impact of the internet on public policy? How does it affect governments’ capacity to influence societal behaviour? One way of tackling this question is to break policy down into four constituent elements – the four ‘tools’ of government policy identified by Christopher Hood and Helen Margetts in their new book The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, building on Hood’s 1983 classic):
• nodality
• authority
• treasure
• organisation
The internet and other digital technologies have potential to impact government’s use of all of these tools, both through the use of such technologies by government itself and through societal trends in internet use, to which governments must respond. New webmetric techniques offer new potential for measuring the extent to which governments use the tools, particularly nodality. This approach can be used to explore general trends, such as the potential for the ‘sharpening’ of government’s tools through the use of technology to ‘group-target’ treatments (Hood and Margetts, 2007). Some authors have also hypothesised impacts specific to particular tools, such as increasing competition for nodality in the digital age (see Escher et al, 2006). Governments that respond to this competition will be well placed to maximise the potential of technological developments. Rapidly increasing use of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ applications, for example, could offer new potential for public policy change and for citizens to move into the ‘front-office’ of public policy design.

NATO: constituent elements of public policy

• Nodality: the property of being at the centre of social and informational networks; being visible/connected in social and informational networks
• Authority: the possession of legal or official power to demand, forbid, guarantee, adjudicate; legally able to command or prohibit
• Treasure: the possession of a stock of money or exchangeable goods; able to exchange using money or other goods
• Organisation: the possession of a stock of people with whatever skills they may have (soldiers, workers, bureaucrats), land, buildings, materials, computers and equipment, somehow arranged; the ability to act directly

Detectors are all the instruments government uses for taking in information.
Effectors are all the tools government can use to try to make an impact on the world outside

Power: resource-based accounts

What do actors use to get other actors do what they want?

• information
• reputation
• money
• legitimate authority
• organisational capital

Nodality in the digital age

• + new potential
• + group targeted nodality is easier/cheaper
• – greater competition for nodality
• – search engines are gatekeepers

Experiments to test the “competitiveness” of government web sitesw: 56% answered with information from governmental sources in an open search, a minority from direct.gov.uk

Nodality in the digital age

Detectors doubling up as effectors

New tools?

• New nodality – new competition
• Narrow-cast government: rise in group-targeted treatments across all tools
• tools run up agains individuals who: do not fit into digitally identifiable groups; circumvent
• government digitally (e.g. false digital identities); choose no to /can’t play digital game

minimizing trouble, vexation, oppression on citizens

• economizing on governmental effort – bringing citizens into front-office – “co-creation”

Measuring nodality

• Visibility: is the site found?
• Accessibility: are users directed to relevant information on site?
• Navigability: can users find their way around the site
• Extroversion: does the site point outwards to other sources
• Competitiveness: does the site compete with other sites

My reflections

• If search engines are gatekeepers: are RSS feeds “gatekeys”? not thrilling to subscribe toa govt. RSS feed ;) but might keep some gates open… and segmentation could be highly increased
• Detectors doubling up as effectors: that’s a very interesting issue, as Web 2.0 technologies can have citizens act like governments, the like of prosumers (the raise of the govzen (government+citizen?)
• local blogs (properly aggregated), wikis to explain in “plain English” regulations and what steps have people followed to achieve some administrative procedure, fora, etc.
• maybe government information should not be in the middle of the citizenry life (nodality in a web 1.0 point of view) but, as it happens in the political blogosphere, just be the source font of information that the social network will then talk about and debate. In political debate in the blogosphere, The New York times is highly relevant, but it is not actually “nodal”, as people do not think of The New York times as the source of political debate. What about web 2.0 nodality? Detectors doubling up as effectors, but being this detectors/effectors not the government direct tools. Should presence on the Web be only measured by the institutional website impact? What about Government and procedure related tags?
• Helen Margetts answers to these reflections stating (and I agree) that most Governments are really uncomfortable with the idea of losing some kind of power, of control, even if some others might even be eager to foster it. From her explanations, I wonder whether e-Democracy is easier to implant than e-Government, which somehow can be interpreted as it is easier to listen than to explain and engage.

Readings

Lead: Sunshine Hillygus

Political scholars have long recognized that information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered how candidates run campaigns–websites, online fundraising, and email communication have become integral to political campaigns. Often, however, these new technologies are viewed as a supplemental communication tool for conducting “politics as usual” — presumed to change the style of political campaigns, but not the basic structure of political interaction. I argue that new technologies have changed not only how candidates communicate with voters, it has also changed the substance of that communication. The explosion of information about individual voters and the diversification and fragmentation of the communications environment have influenced candidates’ ability and willingness to campaign on divisive wedge issues. And whereas the introduction of previous communication technologies, especially television, was used to expand and broaden the audience receiving a campaign message, technologies today are used to narrowly communicate these targeted messages to smaller and segmented audiences. These changes in candidate strategy and campaign tactics have potentially detrimental consequences for political inequality, electoral accountability, and democratic governance.

Overview

• Impact on media: changes informat, nature of news, increased competition, 24h news cycle
• Impact on public: people who use Internet for politics are already politically interested, increases engagement among those interested, increased info sources widened gap in political knowledge
• Impact on politicians: changed how to communicate with the politically interested, changed how raise money, change how make it into political news
• IT has changed who politicians talk to and what they are willing to say: i.e. while the number of unique issues mentioned in candidate speeches are more or less stable, on party platforms the number of issues dealt with is 2.5 times higher

The persuadable voter

[see readings] Who is persuadable electorate? How do candidates attempt to sway them?

Three myths about American Politics

• American voters are polarized along partisan and ideological lines
• The persuadable voters are uninformed, unengaged, and not policy-motivated
• Candidates talk about divisive issues as part of a “base mobilization” strategy

IT and Campaign Strategy

• Candidate strategy depends on information about voters, i.e. will not risk taking a stand on a political issue unless they know how the public will react
• Hyperinformation environment enables candidates to microtarget different messages to diferent voters

While there are almost no moral issues on TV (political) advertising, figures of moral issues go up to 9% of total advertising when done by direct mail.

In mail messages, candidates (i.e. Bush vs. Kerry) don’t usually talk about the same issues. And even if they do, they don’t send them to the same target.

Steps in Microtargeting Process

• Electronic registration files
• Match data from consumer databases, membership lists, etc.
• Survey in state sampled from database
• Statistical model to predict who will vote and how; segment voters into target groups
• Personalize campaign appeals to different target groups

Consequences of New Campaign Strategies

• Fragmentation of campaign policy agenda
• Polarization of candidates
• Exacerbation of political inequality
• Superficial politics
• Potential crisis in governance

My reflections

• Everybody’s seen Minority Report and the personalized ads that appear on the film, or knows about RFID based advertising. Is it a good or a bad thing that the information I really care of (provided my profile is accurately defined) reaches me directly, personally?
• Put it in other words: why Amazon’s suggestions based on pattern recognition are seen as “good” and why such (same?) politics are “superficial politics”? Sunshine Hillygus states that the problem is that even if you’re interested in major issues (Economy, Social Security, etc.) the politicians are prone to touch specific buttons (i.e. Gay Marriage) to win your vote. On the other hand, she hardly criticizes (and I agree) that the problem appears when your unable to zero to the core discourse/ideology of the candidate, as he seems to be a mosaic of microideologies with no strong backbone.
• Can we find a middle place between personalized superficial messages and metaphysical, theoretical, handbook politics? Maybe this middle place is having a coherent candidate with strong and structured believes, and then “granuralize” them so that specific messages — still, coherent with the “big” discourse — get to the potential voter according to his interests. According to Sunshine Hillygus is that this customized message normally hides a lack of backbone, of real discourse besides the populist one. Information Technologies should help on “granularize” information and political proposals while not “distract” neither the voter nor the candidate from policy making (and not politics selling).

Readings

More info

• Sunshine Hillygus on Internet and Campaigns, by John Palfrey
• OII Day 2, by Alla Zollers

The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.

Law Project for the electronic access to Public Administration by the citizenship
Juan Miguel Márquez, Director General of Administrative Modernisation at the Spanish Public Administration Ministry

The aim of the new law is avoiding having to include tons of exceptions or specific cases on “analogue” law on the Public Administration. Thus, this new project provides a brand new framework that includes, on its ground basis, all kind of electronic approaches. Another big aim is to bring into this new framework absolutely all public services so they can be accessed digitally, not just a handful of them: the right to access the Administration, regardless of the platform or the means, is now the goal of this new law (actually in a draft/project version).

The e-Administration Law
Julián Valero, Professor of Administrative Law, University of Múrcia

Left to right: Agustí Cerrillo, Juan Miquel Márquez, Julián Valero

Law, a barrier? There is a crisis in the scope of Law, but Law should come first, and then technology, not the other way egovbarriers.org is just doing a research in this field: in what measure Law is a barrier to technology and technological change.

In this sense, the new law puts some order in some things that were already happening in a somewhat existing “legal void” related to technology and law. This does not mean that we have to forget all guarantees, but evolution is now a need, and the statu quo does not anymore give most answers to nowadays’ reality.

On the other hand, the challenge is to avoid entering into “fashion regulation”, and regulate each and every case as e-Administration when (a) maybe it is already solved or (b) maybe it requires highest level regulation instead of case to case regulation.

One of the best improvements of this law project is that it does not detail each and every procedure (as it was usually done until now), but just set a framework, and quite a flexible one. This is, of course, a good asset, as technology is so quickly changing that, as it had long happened, it overrode or invalidated the regulation framework.

A lacking question in this new law is networking: it is not the same thing information or communication (i.e. data sharing, data transmission), that working with the same information (i.e. working with the same databases), which should be (if it not really is) the reality and not just a hypothesis.

A couple of interesting links:

• Red Derecho TICs, network of ICT Law specialists
• IV Congreso de la Red DerechoTics, IV edition of the “Red Derecho TICs” Congress on e-Administration, Murcia (Spain), 23-25 May 2007

Last but not least: on one hand, the new law enables brand new paths, but, on the other hand, it does not empower little (i.e. local) Administration neither with sufficient budget nor with applications to go on and implant the law in its full scope. This might generate a divide among those Administrations that can and the ones that cannot implant full e-Administration as the law sees it.