149 research outputs found
Electoral reform in local government: alternative systems and key issues
The Government plans a full modernisation of local government, including annual elections and a stronger scrutiny role for elected representatives. Such a programme must also consider reform options which improve the match between votes and seats, revitalise local electoral dynamics and strengthen links between councillors and constituents. This research, by Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts, investigates a key possibility for such an agenda: changing the local electoral system. The researchers simulated local elections under five alternative electoral systems to first-past-the-post
Denial, anger, and acceptance: moving to the next phase of the British far-right
In spite of evidence of long-running and large latent support, we have been in a state of denial about the far-right in Britain, which has fed into the growth of UKIP, writes Helen Margetts. Here, she outlines the state of the far-right and argues that we need to move towards acceptance, be alert to signals in long-running trends, and re-examine our political institutions
Modeling the Rise in Internet-based Petitions
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 over 18 months, 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. 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).
After 24 hours, a petition's fate is virtually set. The findings seem to
challenge conventional analyses of collective action from economics and
political science, where the production function has been assumed to follow an
S-shaped curve.Comment: Submitted to EPJ Data Scienc
Data science, artificial intelligence and the third wave of digital era governance
This article examines the model of digital era governance (DEG) in the light of the latest-wave of data-driven technologies, such as data science methodologies and artificial intelligence (labelled here DSAI). It identifies four key top-level macro-themes through which digital changes in response to these developments may be investigated. First, the capability to store and analyse large quantities of digital data obviates the need for data ‘compression’ that characterises Weberian-model bureaucracies, and facilitates data de-compression in data-intensive information regimes, where the capabilities of public agencies and civil society are both enhanced. Second, the increasing capability of robotic devices have expanded the range of tasks that machines extending or substituting workers’ capabilities can perform, with implications for a reshaping of state organisation. Third, DSAI technologies allow new options for partitioning state functions in ways that can maximise organisational productivity, in an ‘intelligent centre, devolved delivery’ model within vertical policy sectors. Fourth, within each tier of government, DSAI technologies offer new possibilities for ‘administrative holism’ - the horizontal allocation of power and functions between organisations, through state integration, common capacity and needs-based joining-up of services. Together, these four themes comprise a third wave of DEG changes, suggesting important administrative choices to be made regarding information regimes, state organisation, functional allocation and outsourcing arrangements, as well as a long-term research agenda for public administration, requiring extensive and detailed analysis
Islamophobes are not all the same! A study of far right actors on Twitter
Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online,
using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up
intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted
victims, create a sense of fear amongst communities and stir up intergroup
tensions and conflict. Accordingly, there is a pressing need to better
understand at a granular level how Islamophobia manifests online and who
produces it. We investigate the dynamics of Islamophobia amongst followers of a
prominent UK far right political party on Twitter, the British National Party.
Analysing a new data set of five million tweets, collected over a period of one
year, using a machine learning classifier and latent Markov modelling, we
identify seven types of Islamophobic far right actors, capturing qualitative,
quantitative and temporal differences in their behaviour. Notably, we show that
a small number of users are responsible for most of the Islamophobia that we
observe. We then discuss the policy implications of this typology in the
context of social media regulation
Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the
world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have
thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period
which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on
the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this
deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the
2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based
campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a
variety of different model specifications including a first difference
regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though
comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that
effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging
the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion
Petition Growth and Success Rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street Website
Now that so much of collective action takes place online, web-generated data
can further understanding of the mechanics of Internet-based mobilisation. This
trace data offers social science researchers the potential for new forms of
analysis, using real-time transactional data based on entire populations,
rather than sample-based surveys of what people think they did or might do.
This paper uses a `big data' approach to track the growth of over 8,000
petitions to the UK Government on the No. 10 Downing Street website for two
years, analysing the rate of growth per day and testing the hypothesis that the
distribution of daily change will be leptokurtic (rather than normal) as
previous research on agenda setting would suggest. This hypothesis is
confirmed, suggesting that Internet-based mobilisation is characterized by
tipping points (or punctuated equilibria) and explaining some of the volatility
in online collective action. We find also that most successful petitions grow
quickly and that the number of signatures a petition receives on its first day
is a significant factor in explaining the overall number of signatures a
petition receives during its lifetime. These findings have implications for the
strategies of those initiating petitions and the design of web sites with the
aim of maximising citizen engagement with policy issues.Comment: To appear in proceeding of WebSci'13, May 1-5, 2013, Paris, Franc
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