Measuring the Volatility of the Political agenda in Public Opinion and News Media

This is the final version. Available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: Replication data and documentation are available at: https://github.com/euagendas/POLVOLRecent election surprises, regime changes, and political shocks indicate that political agendas have become more fast-moving and volatile. The ability to measure the complex dynamics of agenda change and capture the nature and extent of volatility in political systems is therefore more crucial than ever before. This study proposes a definition and operationalization of volatility that combines insights from political science, communications, information theory, and computational techniques. The proposed measures of fractionalization and agenda change encompass the shifting salience of issues in the agenda as a whole and allow the study of agendas across different domains. We evaluate these metrics and compare them to other measures such as issue-level survival rates and the Pedersen Index, which uses public-opinion poll data to measure public agendas, as well as traditional media content to measure media agendas in the UK and Germany. We show how these measures complement existing approaches and could be employed in future agenda-setting research.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)Volkswagen Foundatio

The cyber party: the causes and consequences of organisational innovation in European political parties

This article explores the pressures and possibilities for political parties in the age of widespread use of the Internet. It identifies internet-fuelled trends in political activity which affect party organisational development and proposes the ‘cyber’ party as a new ‘ideal type’ of political party. Cyber parties are organisations rather than institutions, to which voters with multiple preferences offer support according to context. They are characterised by technologically-aided relationships between party and voters rather than formal membership. The article considers some of the possible threats posed by the emergence of the cyber party. It concludes that a cyber party that develops a stronger relationship with its voters (rather than mourning the ‘golden age’ of the mass membership party), could be a positive development in democratic terms. Parties which do not respond to competitive pressures to increase their nodality through innovative use of available technologies may be more likely to face decline

Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General. HC 764 aession 2001-2002, 25 April 2002: Government on the web II

A significant amount of taxpayers’ money is being spent in central and local government in introducing Internet-based services. I have found considerable progress since my previous report in 1999 but weaknesses in information across government on the usage of its web sites, performance indicators to measure progress and methodologies to assess the value added by e-government provision

Incentivization of e-government

HM Customs and Excise’s major programme to use e-technology to improve the efficiency of their business operations and services, although at an early stage, is already showing signs of being able to transform the department’s performance. However, today’s report to Parliament by head of the National Audit Office Sir John Bourn points out some big risks in implementing a programme of this size and recommends measures Customs should take to address them

Incentivization of e-government

HM Customs and Excise’s major programme to use e-technology to improve the efficiency of their business operations and services, although at an early stage, is already showing signs of being able to transform the department’s performance. However, today’s report to Parliament by head of the National Audit Office Sir John Bourn points out some big risks in implementing a programme of this size and recommends measures Customs should take to address them

Better Public Services through e-government': Academic Article in support of Better Public Services through e-government. Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 704-III, Session 2001-2002: 4 April 2002

E-government is about making the full range of government activities - internal processes, the development of policy and services to citizens - available electronically. Despite the bursting of the over-inflated dot com bubble, electronic interactions have rapidly shown astonishing potential for transforming the internal activities of all kinds of organisations and dramatically altering the relationships between organisations and those who use them - in particular, firms and their customers. As a Dutch parliamentary committee put it, 'Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is not a supporting technology, but coincides with the primary process and touches government at its core' (ICT and Government Advisory Committee, 2001: 9). Yet (in the UK in particular) the potential of web-based technologies are taking much longer to be realised in government. Why? What are the obstacles to the development of e-government - do they come from within government organisations themselves, or from society? Are they ingrained in organisational structures and societal interactions - or can they be overcome and if so, how? This short paper reviews and categorises the cultural barriers to e-government, drawing on experiences from overseas and the private sector; cultural theory; social psychological research into societal use of information and communication technologies; and organisational research into the relationship between such technologies and organisational change. It goes on to consider how these barriers can be overcome. Appendix one provides - for the supply side - a short quiz that a civil servant in charge of the development of e-government should consider undertaking to identify the cultural barriers within their own organisational unit.</p

Rapid rise and decay in petition signing

Contemporary collective action, much of which involves social media and other Internet-based platforms, leaves a digital imprint which may be harvested to better understand the dynamics of mobilization. Petition signing is an example of collective action which has gained in popularity with rising use of social media and provides such data for the whole population of petition signatories for a given platform. This paper tracks the growth curves of all 20,000 petitions to the UK government petitions website (http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk) and 1,800 petitions to the US White House site (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov), analyzing the rate of growth and outreach mechanism. Previous research has suggested the importance of the first day to the ultimate success of a petition, but has not examined early growth within that day, made possible here through hourly resolution in the data. The analysis shows that the vast majority of petitions do not achieve any measure of success; over 99 percent fail to get the 10,000 signatures required for an official response and only 0.1 percent attain the 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate (0.7 percent in the US). We analyze the data through a multiplicative process model framework to explain the heterogeneous growth of signatures at the population level. We define and measure an average outreach factor for petitions and show that it decays very fast (reducing to 0.1% after 10 hours in the UK and 30 hours in the US). After a day or two, a petition’s fate is virtually set. The findings challenge conventional analyses of collective action from economics and political science, where the production function has been assumed to follow an S-shaped curve

The advent of a digital state and government-business relations

When one set of social actors passes functions, knowledge of techniques and control of implementation in their key role areas to other actors there could be a number of possible causes and consequences. Some such transfers of control are mutually beneficial, a simple re-division of labour which acknowledges a changing social or environmental context or just the shifting balance of the preferences and priorities amongst the actors involved. But other transfers of control are less innocent and more ‘coerced’, with powers surrendered under pressure and their transfer carrying with it significant feed-through implications for future interactions, and possible ratcheteffects. This paper explores a critical area of this kind for the modern liberal democratic state, the out-sourcing of information and communications technologies (ICTs) from in-house provision by single-country government bureaucracies to multi-national service delivery and system integration companies. We consider first the extent and patterning of conventional ICT out-sourcing in the UK at central government level. Part 2 examines some key possible of the causes and consequences of the out-sourcing trend, and of the significance of a new and general public/private sector interface. The final section is more prospective, arguing that established patterns of control over ICTs have major implications for the transformation of governance now underway in advanced industrial countries towards a ‘digital state’ form, centred on Web-based public services