In January 2015 the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy will report its recommendations for how to improve British democracy through new new digital technologies. In the second of a series of four posts this week, Professor Charles Pattie at the University of Sheffield Department of Geography argues that digital means of contacting and mobilising individuals are not as effective as face-to-face contact.
Step one in tackling the democratic dislocation identified above is to try and improve participation in politics. We know a great deal about who does and who does not take part in democratic politics, broadly conceived. Much of this reflects various well-known biases of age, education, socio-economic position and so on. Many of these biases are structural and societal, and are very hard to shift. And as a result, they are unlikely to be solved – though they may be ameliorated – by digital means alone.
But an important element of the story of who participates and why concerns something which it is in the power of those who are already politically engaged to do something about. A very substantial body of research points to the importance of active mobilisation as a means of encouraging people to be politically active. Other things being equal, people who are personally invited by others to participate in politics are noticeably more likely to do so than those who are not invited. This extends through election canvassing to invitations (from friends, neighbours, and even relative – though trusted – strangers) to get involved in community groups, parties, political campaigns and so on. When people are personally asked to get involved, they are more likely to do so.
The digital world has considerable potential as a medium through which to contact people and invite their participation. One often-cited example is Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for the Democrat nomination and then for the US Presidency. The accepted wisdom of that contest is that one of Obama’s key weapons was his campaign’s innovative and very active use of new social media to spread the message, recruiting new activists virally and so building a rich resource base both of small-scale donors (who made up in sheer number for their individually small donations to the campaign) and of local activists to pound the streets in key states. The Obama campaign is generally argued to have spotted the potential of new social media earlier and, more important still, been able to exploit it more effectively than other, more traditional campaigns.
So is this a harbinger of things to come? Perhaps. But there are grounds for healthy scepticism. Yes, the Obama campaign did use NSM very effectively. But it is much less clear whether this really did engage people new to politics in large numbers. Obama was a remarkably adept and attractive candidate in 2008, and gained substantial (old) media interest right from the start, giving him a flying start over most of his Democrat rivals. Had his campaign not already had this momentum, it is unlikely that the NSM strategy would ever have taken off. There is a strong case for saying that the successful NSM strategy was the result, not the cause, of Obama’s successful insurgency. What is more, very many of those contacted via NSM were already politically engaged and would almost certainly have joined the Obama campaign come what may.
Nor is this just a feature of the 2008 Obama campaign. It is an example of a wider phenomenon. Recent work on the effects of the internet on political participation suggests that it does little or nothing in practice to compensate for already-existing biases in involvement. Those already politically engaged are quick to adopt web technologies as yet further ways of engaging. By and large, those who are politically marginalised just do not. Far from being a potential ‘weapon of the weak’ or even just a leveller of the participatory playing field, it seems, web technologies in practice are far more likely to entrench existing inequalities in political access.
One other aspect of NSM use by the 2008 Obama campaign is also instructive. The main advantages for the campaign were less to do with recruiting new activists (most would have been activists anyway) and much more to do with allowing quick and efficient communication. And it allowed the campaign to collect information on its activists, which in its turn became useful for targeting messages, for directing fund-raising drives and so on (to the extent that the campaign exploited the data generated through NSM about its activists, it was behaving similarly to companies like Facebook).
Probably the most famous story about modern US Presidential campaigns concerns the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. Most political anoraks will know that perceptions of who won the debate depended strongly on the medium through which voters experienced it, radio listeners scoring the debate for Nixon while TV viewers (swayed by Kennedy’s suave, handsome charm against Nixon’s sweaty, unshaved demeanour) gave the honours to Kennedy. A famous story. But it turns out to be an urban myth. Repeated attempts to track down the source of the story have failed. There is no concrete evidence for it. It may well be the case that the story of the critical importance of NSM to Obama’s 2008 victory could be a similar urban myth.
What is more, while the evidence is that while personal invitations do mobilise people to take part in various forms of political action, not all forms of contact are equally effective. Some of the best evidence for those comes from a now very substantial body of experimental research (the pioneer work in this rapidly-expanding field is by Gerber and Green). Overwhelmingly, these experiments confirm that personal really does mean personal. Face to face contact with a real, physically present individual is, other things being equal, just about the most persuasive and mobilising form of contact. Other forms of contact (telephone calls, letters, e-mails, twitter feeds etc. etc.) pale in comparison. More impersonal forms of contact are poor substitutes for meeting someone in the flesh if one wants to encourage people to participate. Quality counts: digital means of contacting and mobilising are not as effective.
Bio
Charles Pattie is Professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. His research specialism is in elections, political campaigning and public participation in politics, on which he has written extensively.
Note: this article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Crick Centre, or the Understanding Politics blog series. For more follow our twitter discussion #understandingpolitics.
