Tobias Escher at the OII

The Internet & Democracy workshop here in Oxford has been filled with very valuable presentations and discussions. Corinna di Gennaro, who was instrumental in setting this up, has a good summary on her blog.

I presented results from the recent evaluation of usage and users of WriteToThem.com, a website by mySociety that allows UK citizens to get in touch with their political representatives. This is part of my doctoral research into comparative political participation online and offline in both the UK and Germany. Here is a link to the presentation. The short summary is that the website suceeds in engaging people who would otherwise be inactive but it recruits those primarly from parts of the population that are traditionally more likely to participate politically (ie. higher education, higher income, etc).