Political Participation in Digital Age

Outside of the formal political system, the internet is a powerful tool used in independent political expression, thus a number of events have used the internet as a means to communicate a political message (Hague and Loader, 1999; Norris, 2001). This has brought the attention of many scholars from many disciplines to examine the integration of political activity online and how internet political connection is understood within our time and space (Hand and Sandywell, 2002).Literature review aims at examining the concept of political participation by citizens through the internet. The second section examines whether the internet has a utopian democratic potential of a more empowered citizen or the dystopian view of the more control and surveillance presenting its de-democratic view. This is examined by looking at personal social media platforms becoming politically engaged and social movements.

Political participation:

Political participation is central to western liberal democracies and essential to legitimize modes of government (Barnes et al, 2007). Political input can be seen when, “individuals have the opportunity to express opinion or exertion of direct influence on the political process” (Hague and Harrop2000, pg,161).According to, Rousseau (1997), political participation has a beneficial psychological impact on each and every citizen thus presenting an interrelationship between the government and citizens. Furthermore, Rousseau’s (1997) social contract theory states that it is important to indicate that laws, not men, should rule. Thus, through participating individual are given a sense of empowerment and active citizenry. Through participatory rights, individuals are being involved in the making of laws and policies hence giving citizens a degree of independence over their life (cited in Pateman, 1970).

Additionally, the politics of presence coined by Phillips (1995) argues that an individual’s presence in the society means that they cannot be ignored and their interests should be reflected by policy makers. In order for the government to be legitimate, it needs to follow the international convention on civil and political rights (ICCPR) that presents the importance of including the majority as well as the minority in political participation since policies implemented would affect both parties (Heywood, 2004). Therefore, it’s the state’s role to develop strategies and opportunities for engagement in order to have an effective government that is able to deliver needed public services (Barries et al,2007, pg,8).

However, recently theorists have argued that there has been a lack of political participation within the democratic system (Norris, 1999). Citizens have been disinterested in political institutions, this is because citizens feel that they are distant from the decision- making process and are caught up in endless promises from politicians that are not being fulfilled (Castells, 2011). Hence, liberal democracy has been associated with private interests, voting strategies, barraging and spectacle, rather focusing in advocating the involvement of ordinary citizens (Putman,1996).

Towards digital democracy

The growing development in information and communication technology (ICT) has impacted political participation. Digital democracy has been defined as “a collective of attempts to practice democracy without the limits of time, space and other physical conditions and using ICT instead” (Hacker and Van Dijk, 2000, pg,30). Consequently, digital democracy is seen as having the ability to change political practices, through the use of ICT platforms present in an interactive link between government and the governed that provides a network of public information as well government bodies being able to gain direct feedback from citizens on political matters at a high speed, (Chambers, 2013). In addition, citizens can feel liberated to freely express their opinion and directly engage with legislation processes such as forming a petition signing on the web. Thus ICT has become an arena that overcomes geographical constrains, people worldwide could join virtual communities of common interest (Van Dijk, 2012).

Consequently, this has led to the recent integration of politics into the sphere of the internet, resulting in a democratic revolution or at least technological fix towards a stronger participatory deliberative (Hacker and Van Dijk,2000; Van Dijk,2012). Richardson (1983) claims that political participation is just a clever ‘con’ used by decision makers in order to increase their legitimacy without any concomitant diminution in their overall power. Hence, the internet could be a tool used when individuals are limited from formal participation, it is an arena where people have the freedom to political expression themselves (Hague and Loader, 1999).

Debating digital democracy and its potential:

The theoretical framework around the democratic potential of the internet presents two main dichotomies the ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ view. Habermas (1991) argues that the utopia dimension of the internet enables individuals to formulate their public opinion, an arena where citizens have access to freedom of assembly, association, expression, and opinion as well as having a say in the general rules that govern social relations. Whilst the other side has been more skeptical over the potential of the internet. The dystopian perspective views the same platform that is viewed as liberating to be actually corrupted by power interest where the elite have been using the internet as a means to monitor and control society (Hetland, 2012).

Online political analysis by the ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ view:

This section will look into examples where the internet has been used to either reach a political end or increase political participation and whether using the internet as a political tool has had a democratic or a de-democratic impact.

Social media has become a means to conduct personal relationships with family and friends, a way to represent the ‘public self’ through personal information shared (Chambers, 2013). Mead (1934) argued that the self is not static but rather constantly constructed and reconstructed through symbolic interaction with others. He states “that the self is made up of the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. ‘I’ become ‘Me’ by internalising the attitudes of others and the me is consequently able to imagine how a generalised other would see its actions” (pg.40). This is not only on personal information that is being shared recently but also the content shared has become politicized, people have been using the internet to flag up their personal political views. Highfields (2016) highlights how the potential of the internet has allowed for “citizen journalism”, a way people could freely voice their opinion. For example, sharing an image of a woman breast feeding may not be a political artifact within itself but it is raising a wider debate about feminism, sexism, misogyny and gender (Tolentino, 2015). This presents how people sharing their personal opinions in matters affecting them can create a discussion online and come up with new ideas hence promoting feminism. (Murthy, 2012).

However, people’s interaction on social media has a clear front stage element to them, a desire to be perceived in a certain way. Goffman (1959) argues that people “select favourable information for display in order to inflate one's positive qualities and downplaying any flaws" (pg,10) Profile pictures present a way in which people want to be perceived in a particular way as well as their political affiliation. However, this has become problematic with the recent introduction to algorithms (Fabret et al, 2001) that filter out information people see and only suggest things that user is interested in, so the user does not see anything from the other side of the argument (Jaeger, 2006). Consequently, a person’s political position may be discriminated against hence democracy will not be realised due to the citizens’ different view. “a concept referred to as cyber balkanization” (Putnam, 2000). This argument is reflected in the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union widely known as to the “Brexit”. The “Brexit” campaign gained the majority of the votes (BBC,2016). Many citizens that were part of the pro-stay campaign were part of the millennial generation and were most active on social media (Putnam, 2000). Their reluctance to engage with the alternative argument that resulted in “dis-informed citizens” (Lash, 2002, pg2). Many people were discouraged to go and vote since they were so sure they would remain, due to the post around them thus presenting the negative impact of the internet (Dearden,2016).

A social movement is "a collective, organised, sustained, and non-institutional challenge to authorities, power-holders or cultural belief and practices” (Godwin and Jasper,2002, pg,3).

However, the means in which a social movement could effective social-political change is through its action repertories position meaning the tactics and strategies they develop (Tilly, 1986 cited in Della-Porta and Diani, 2005). Social movements have intersected communication technology to bring about alternative ways of recruitment to mobilise collective action for people that have already been fuelled by grievance and desire to change status quo. (Godwin and Jasper, 2002; Della-Porta and Diani,2005). While examples presenting success and others backlashed.

The first movement to use the new technology was the indigenous Zapatistas movement in 1994. They were marginalised and lacked political representation in the Mexican government and the establishment of The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) exacerbated the situation (Kowal, 2002; Cleaver, 1998). The movement occurred against the extreme economic and socio-political inequality of neoliberal capitalism (Wolfson, 2012, Best and Kellner, 2001). The public sphere of digital technology enabled them to mobilise their struggle, provided them with a collective voice that was often unheard and gain visibility through worldwide support (Cleaver, 1998; Kowal, 2002; Kahn and Kellner, 2004). Through pre-existing circuits of non-government organisations and activist groups, they were able to present the longstanding issue of land tenure and the exploitation and struggle on behalf of the indigenous population free from the inevitable distortion of the government and second-hand journalism (Deibert, 1998; Ross, 1995). However, an implication of social media is that information could be posted by anyone from hackers or spammers. Therefore, making it difficult whether information gained is legitimate or accurate (Dennis, 2007; Hand and Sandywell, 2002). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the Zapatista movement was able to inspire a wide range movement to integrate this action repertoire (Cleaver,1998).

A more recent example is the ‘Arab spring’ that many scholars referred to as a “media revolution” (Kalliny and Ghanem, 2016; Cottle, 2011). However, media platforms were not the cause of the uprising, it was the shared socio-political disfranchisement, low living conditions, unemployment and lack of political system renew (Gerges, 2013; Bellin et al, 2012). Nevertheless, social media was an action repertoire in dissemination of information that mobilised people into mass demonstration and spread the Arab-pan solidarity (Asef, 2013). The shared footage of Bou-Azizi self-immolation due to dissatisfaction with the Tunisian regime, triggered an international response of people world-wide sharing the post (Gerges, 2013). This presents the idea that democratic potential of the cybernetic media is that citizens have the ability to engage instead of being passive (Hindman, 2009; Gurevitch et al, 2008).

In Egypt, social media enabled “them to navigate between the virtual space of organisation and the physical space demonstration” (El-Ghobashy, 2011, pg,1). The page “We are all Khalid Said” that was set- up after a young Egyptian was beaten to death by state security forces. As the number of subscribers grew it transformed into a faster and a free flow of information to organise the uprising in Tahrir square on the 25th of January 2011 (Ghannam, 2011). Digital technology presents a bottom-up strategies of civil participation and first-hand coverage the revolution (Hand and Sandwell, 2002; Dennis, 2007). Kavanaugh et al (2013) described the uprising as constituting of people with “a rock in one hand, a cell phone in another” a tool in which they could freely express their dissatisfaction.

However, when the Egyptian government realised the potential of the internet, it decided to cut its usage thus presenting the re-impose of top-down control of government eroding its democratic potential (Kahn & Kellner, 2004; Dennis, 2007). Nevertheless, the internet has no locality meaning, when a pathway becomes blocked, other linkages are formed. Google launched “speek2tweet” initiative permitting Egyptians to call a phone number and leave a message that would automatically be posted on Twitter (AlSayyad and Guvenc, 2013). However, even after the step down of Mubarak after 30 years of authoritarian rule, the internet has not had the ability to reconstruct the government dynamic. (Gladwell,2010:45/49) says that the platforms of social media are built around weak ties that make it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. Morozov (2010) describes this as “slacktivism’ meaning a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication” (pg,41) which does not have the capability to sustain political participation over a long period of time

In conclusion, this chapter examined political participation and the recent integration of politics on to the sphere of the internet. It has been argued to either have a democratic/ de-democratic potential and this argument was presented through a number of examples. Social change has been driven by new communication and technology (Gladwell, 2010; Morozoz, 2009). However, it does not explicitly increase political participation, it has rather been a tool that to either express political opinion or in the case of a social movement as a tool for mobilisation and political change and whether its effect is positive or negative differs. (Gerges, 2013; Gladwell 2010; Shirky, 2011).

Methodology

This chapter aims at explaining the methodology and epistemological position that underlines this qualitative research. The rationale of the method of data collection will be discussed, together with issues of reliability and credibility. Finally, outlining the ethical consideration this research undertook.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and how the social world is viewed (Gilbert, 2001). This research contains an interpretation of what the researcher themselves can see (Alexander et al, 2008). The social world is a process of human interaction and an interpretive understanding that has the ability to convey meaning of social action, thus social reality becomes a phenomenon that is subjected to personal experience (Bryman, 2012). Hence, when it comes to technology platforms, social interaction on these sites could never take the meaning of a technical artifact and instead interaction could have a different meaning to different people thus presenting the internet as a site of interpretative work (Grint and Woolger, 1997).

Ontology is the study of being and is concerted with what the social world is made of and our relationship to it (Gilbert, 2001). The constructionist perspective opposes the claims that knowledge is produced through a neutral process of exploration. Thus, presenting a critical analysis of understanding the world we are subjected and the necessitating to challenge to conventional knowledge which is considered unbiased and objective (Burr, 2003). It is essential to point out that knowledge "is a pre-given and entails that, there is not and cannot be a single reality, but rather a version of reality" (Burr, 2003). Consequently, social processes and knowledge are constantly produced and revised due to people engaging with one another rather than being discovered or found. This also applies to the internet since users online are involved in constructing these technology platforms, through practices by which they understand it and though the content they produce (Hine, 2000). Consequently, it becomes impossible to present a definitive version of reality, any research conducted would be producing a certain vergsion of the social reality that it was aimed to investigate (Bryman, 2012).

Method of research

A qualitative analysis allowed for the “collection of rich, descriptive contextually situated data in order to seek understanding of human experience or relationship with a system or culture” (Hine, 2000, pg, 2-3). The main objective of this research is to explore the usage of the internet, by centering and correlating the occurrence of various features of messages posted on social media and the impact these messages have on the political presence by citizens. (Gauntlett and Horsley, 2004). The method of data collection was online ethnography that focused on linguistic status and is characteristic of synchronous research methods. Online ethnography can be understood as traditional ethnography that has been adapted to study online communities (Hine, 2000). It is the observation and understanding of the online behavior of groups of individuals engaging in virtual communities thus allowing for the analysis of everyday activity of online politics without the restriction of temporal distance. This method however has disadvantages, the sampling and representation are impacted by issues created by the digital divide especially in that most tweets published were from non-American users (Fuchs, 2011).

On November 9th the presidential election was between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton. The United States Presidential election uses the Electoral collage that has 538 electors which are called delegates, 100 of them are senate votes and 438 are for the house of representatives. A majority of 270 of the electoral vote is required to win the presidency. The number of votes the house of representative gains is determined by the population of the state. Trump won not because he got the majority of the votes in big states, he just got many more states than Hilary as indicated in figure 1 (Zucker, 2016). Political content posted online rapidly changes depending on events that are occurring within the political sphere. For this reason, it is important to identify the time frame of the study, which is directly after the presidency announcement was made. This study used what Koehler () suggests download the application Twitter on the mobile device to gather online artefacts of tweets by taking screenshots of the three most trending hashtags [shown in figure 2] for 20 minutes per hashtag. This would ensure the validity of content analysis, data collection and coding so that all codes are analysed in the same content.

Method of analysis

Content analysis is a method that analyses media content from written, verbal or visual communication messages (Bertrand and Hughes, 2005) these can range from media programs, photographs, manuscripts, blog post (Flick, 2009) and for the case of this study,m Twitter posts (tweets). Content analysis is widely defined as a “technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identified special characteristics of messages” (Holsti, 1968, cited in Berg, 2009, 341). The method of content analysis was originally quantitative in nature, it involved the technique of classification analysis that has the ability to identifying frequency and the use of certain messages in text (Bos and Tarnai, 1991). However, Krippendorff (2004) argues that qualitative methods have been developed in a response to the often “insensitive or shallow” (pg,10). Hsieh (2005) argues for the need to extent analysis beyond counting words on pages and move towards an analysis that revels meaning and symbolic qualities of the text must be understood in their wider context (Krippendorff. This study entails a qualitative content analysis that would require a comprehensive methodical examination as well as interpretation of the tweets collected. Since many tweets were collected through taking screenshots this method has the ability to put a large amount of text into fewer content categories that represent similar meaning (Weber, 1990, cited in Hsieh, 2005). This is done through a process of breaking down and coding of the research material in order to identify the themes and meaning that occur (Berg, 2009). The analysis of data collected was conducted through a deductive content analysis meaning "the structure of analysis is operationalised on the basis of the existing theory" (Elo and Kyngas, 2008, pg, 109). This method of analysis will help towards the dissertation aim which is to provide an understanding of the contextual use of Twitter and its impact on political engagement whether these online activities could be viewed as a reinvigorating the public sphere of the internet.

The limitation of this study was that it was difficult to ensure that the sample was representative, especially with the fast flow of tweets being posted prior to the presidential announcement and many of the tweets posted were from non-American users.

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Ethical consideration

From an ethical perspective, social research is concerned in participant’s integrity and right of self-determination thus the harm of informal consent that could cause deception of privacy and confidentiality becomes a central concern whenever conducting research (Christains, 2000). However, when it comes to online research formal consent becomes difficult or impossible to obtain thus it is the role of the researcher to decide on whether the platform studied is ‘public enough’ to be researched without informed consent (Hine, 2000). The data used in this research was provided by Twitter which has a semi-public environment that is open to anyone in principle but membership/registration is required first. Users that participate on Twitter are aware that tweets could be accessed by anyone especially if their account is a ‘public’ but what they may not be aware of is that they have been selected to be part of a research conduct (Murthy, 2012). Nevertheless, this research was aware of ethical consideration raised by internet research and since no human participation was involved, thus the research was conducted without implying any ethical guidelines (Bryman, 2012).

Conclusion

This chapter concluded the methodological position of this study employed that correlates with the research question. The next chapter will aim to analyse the findings and discussion within the existing theoretical literature.

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