(TheyWorkForYou.com is a website to get information about political representatives in the UK, while WriteToThem.com can be used to contact these representatives)

These reports are for you if you want to know:

• how popular the sites are: You get detailed usage stats dating back to the inception of the sites.
• who is using the site: We carried out a survey of users, comparing their demographic profile to that of the British (Internet) population.
• what the sites cost to build and maintain: There is a summary table, comparing the costs of the respective site to other mySociety projects.
• how the site came to be what they are: You find information on the history of the sites as well as some interesting stories around them.
• and much much more

Overall, these documents offer a comprehensive picture of two political websites that have hundreds of thousands of users every year. The official release post gives a good summary of the results, as do the executive summaries at the beginning of each report. What I wanted to share here briefly, is some background on the creation of these reports and my understanding of this research:

Several years ago, Tom Steinberg of mySociety asked me carry out an evaluation of the major mySociety sites. The aim was to create a framework with some key indicators that could be measured and compared across different websites of mySociety. At that time, it was not entirely clear what aspects such an evaluation should cover. We envisaged some value-for-money analysis, but what exactly was the “value” that the sites brought? We finally decided to focus on the people who use the site: Are these the usual political animals, or can the site engage people who are traditionally rarely involved in politics, such as people with a low income and/or without a degree from higher education. We carried out extensive surveys of users of these websites and compared their demographics with data from the British population. This reference data that was provided by our very own Oxford Internet Institute’s Oxford Internet Survey – Thank you very much!

But the reports are much more than that: They collect a vast variety of information about the sites, such as statistics on visitor numbers for the last years, popular content sections or the number of messages sent to MPs and other representatives (via WriteToThem), a history of the site, some interesting anecdotes as well as some background about the ecosystem in which these sites evolve. It has turned out that compiling this information has been a major task, as it entails collecting bits and pieces from various parts of the organisation. In the process we chose to apply a new web traffic analyser (Piwik), all in order to get consistent and comparable data from all the sites.

The reports are first of all important for mySociety itself, in order to create a better understanding of how the sites work and what users are looking for. Beyond this, these reports are intended for a wide range of audiences:

1. eDemocracy practitioners – to learn for their sites
2. researchers in online political participation – to get information on the performance of large-scale projects
3. journalists – as the reports show where the sites have made an impact in the political landscape
4. potential funders – to see what can be achieved

What I hope the research results show is that engaging citizens with the help of the Internet is neither simple nor impossible, and that there are few simple answers in relation to whether the Internet is good for democracy [my PhD focuses on this question in much more detail, using some of the data from this research]. In addition, I hope it encourages other projects in this area to open up their efforts to the same level of scrutiny. From my experiences, I know that it is often somewhat difficult for NGOs to engage in evaluation, for lack of money or time, and sometimes also for a lack of understanding of why this is useful. However, I firmly believe that it is crucial to do evaluation both to get some critical assessment of one’s own achievements – to help improve the site – as well as to give other initiatives in this space the chance to learn from the successes and failures of others.

In this regard, I hope the reports reach a wide audience. We very much encourage feedback, both on the results of the report as well as on the methodology applied. We decided to start with WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou, but the plan is to publish more reports on sites such as FixMyStreet.com, WhatDoTheyKnow.com, PledgeBank.com etc.

Disclaimer: mySociety gave me money to do this research, and they provided data, help and advice throughout the process. However, at no point did they interfere with the results or question my interpretation of the findings.

The story so far

The story itself is quickly told: Basically, an MP says “please remove my parliamentary e-mail address from your website as I only receive countless mass campaign emails from your site that prevent me from getting other stuff done such as answering real constituents’ queries“, and the response of the campaigning site is to accuse the MP of being unresponsive and unwilling to listen to the people, to urge its supporters to confront the MP and generally, to try to get as much publicity out of this as possible. The simple conclusion is:  It was not a very smart move by Dominic Raab (the MP) which provided the campaigning website with a golden opportunity to get some easy PR by bashing an apparently lazy MP, in particular as it was suggested that the amount of emails he was receiving averaged about two a day.

However, given this is an issue very much related to my PhD research, I do believe it illustrates a bigger paradox related to the role of the Internet for the constituent-representative relationship. That is, while I think that Dominic Raab had a right to complain, he was not right to actually do so. He had a right to complain as some features of the technology have put him in a difficult spot, and he was not right to actually do so as the technology would not allow him to control who is contacting him, even though it might help him in other ways. Let me explain

Did he have a right to complain? – YES

There can be little doubt that online communication has a great potential for making representatives more accessible to their constituents and for enabling them to receive more input on which to base their decisions. While access to the Internet remains an issue, emailing an MP is cheap and fast and there are now many websites that make it easy to find out the contact details of your MP or similar, even if you don’t know the name.

There is a flip-side of course and that is that sometimes sending these messages might be too easy. Now, mass-mailing campaigns are nothing new but with copy-and-paste it is considerably easier, cheaper and faster to send 5 emails than 5 postcards. This creates what American academic Bruce Bimber has called “the cheap-talk problem“.  While the capacity to talk, ie. send messages, expands vastly, the capacity to listen ie. deal with the messages, cannot keep up, despite a number of parliamentary initiatives such as the Communications Allowance. This general overload risks that there won’t be an adequate response to all constituents with queries. Worse, it might mean that only those will find help or an open ear who have the power of the masses behind them, even though it seems that currently that state of affairs is rather different in that mass emails have less chance of being picked up than what is perceived to be individual concerns. So writes Bimber that “members of Congress learned to recognize and discount centrally orchestrated communication” (Bimber, 2003: 108). Is this wrong? Well, while I would argue they should have any such issue on the radar, the amount of messages they receive is less a sign of the urgency of the issue than one of the class or success of mobilisation of the campaign.

There can also be no doubt that an MP has to deal with constituent concerns. As a matter of fact, most MPs in the UK, at least if they are backbenchers, do little else than being at the service of their constituents. By and large, the role seems to be accepted and if, for example, we look at some of the responsiveness statistics published  by the website WriteToThem.com, it seems that at least the majority of representatives does also actively pursue their constituency role and answer their constituents.

Still for the reason highlighted earlier, I believe Raab was right to complain. He was basically saying, I get a lot of stuff that I deal with but if I see this is just a rather simple copy-and-past campaign I delete it. So you might as well stop emailing me in the first place.

Was he right to complain? – NO

The paradox of the situation is that despite I believe in his right to complain, it was still wrong to actually do so. This is for two reasons. First of all, it allowed the campaigning website to bash him by using the familiar reflex of accusing the MP of not being up for what his constituents have to say. This is a simple message that works as it serves all the usual stereotypes about politicians (to which, admittedly, they themselves have contributed their fair share, the MP expense scandal being a case in point). The thing is that Raab (of whom I don’t know anything about apart from the few things I have read by now) seems to be a rather responsive MP as well as inclined to the Internet – he seems to rather regularly maintain a blog, can be contacted through his websites and has highlighted his responsiveness throughout the controversy. He was honest and regrettably, that was his problem: He should have continued to just delete the messages (as probably many others do) instead of openly complaining. That was mistake number one.

Mistake number two was that, in his quest for somehow controlling the communication that reaches him, he has started to demand withdrawal of his email address not just from the campaigning website – he even tries not to quote it anywhere, even suggesting people should phone his office to obtain the proper email address. This really seems like a fight against windmills as it really is impossible to hide your official email address if your are a Member of Parliament.

So Raab picked a fight he could not win: He was always bound to loose against public opinion (even if deliberately misled as I think was the case in this story) and for all his Internet affinity, he does not seem to have understood the technology completely. The smarter move would have been to make more effective use of email filtering or similar. In this way, the very technology that has created his problem could have helped him to cope with it.

References

• Bimber, Bruce A. 2003. Information and American democracy : technology in the evolution of political power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From the material available the app looks great and it is also a nice example of what stuff citizen can do when government data is publicly available as Jeff used datasets from the recently started data.gov.uk portal. The remarkable point I want to highlight is shown in the video below when Jeff was asked by Conrad Quilty-Harper if there is a political point to his app:

The answer is a passionate “No“. Can you believe it?

Now I was not totally surprised because some years ago I wrote my MA thesis on “Political Motives of Developers for Collaboration on GNU/Linux“. While I found that a majority of the developers in my sample did actually attribute a political relevance (whatever it might be) to their coding of GNU/Linux, it was also clear from my research and that of others, that most programmers are motivated by the fun of coding. The Free Software community of GNU/Linux might be a bit of an exception given its founding principles but it is certainly not totally defamatory to expect the bunch of Web developers for gadgets like the iPhone to be less principled.

Is there something wrong with this? On the danger of over-generalising a bit too much I would argue yes. A tool like the ASBOrometer which makes transparent how screwed up your area is – this is more than just a funny app because it shows where the government has failed its citizens. Now it won’t come as much of a surprise to most inhabitants of these areas but the app gives you simple and quick access to actual numbers and compare your situation with that of others. This might well be what triggers some people to stop accepting their fate and get up to do something about being let down by society. As much as I hate to refer to the Sun to state a point coverage of the ASBOrometer in broadsheets like these certainly emphasise that is has struck a cord with people – also underscored by the fact that within two days it achieved over 80,000 downloads. Finally, lets not forget the economic dimension (and you don’t have to be a Marxist to know that little could be more political than this) as the newspapers rightly point out that this could have a huge impact on house prices in these areas.

Of course in my opinion all this makes this app all the better but I believe it is important that the people putting stuff like this together have some idea of its potential relevance. Ideally they might have an aim for this as well (I mean one relevant for the public good, not just fun for themselves) but hey, you can’t change the world every day. But the naivety with which software developer go about their work at my best of times amazes me but at other times just outright scares me.

As it says in the Spiderman comics:

“With great power comes great responsibility”

In a world heavily shaped by information and its free flow in the form of bits and bytes, people with computing skills are a small elite, able to manipulate this flow and determine its outcomes. There are many examples in which our current technology vanguards are making use of their skills with the aim to create some benefits to citizens such as mySociety in the UK or Sunlight in the US to name just a few. But we need much more of this.

All of this comes back to the old debate about the ethics of science and to what degree scientists (as just one example of an expert elite) are responsible for what they do – a debate wonderfully illustrated in Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. Of course the ASBOborometer is no atomic bomb and I’m not in any way suggesting programming should not be fun or Jeff has anything but good (or no) intentions. But I really think it is time that even software developers understand that no tool is neutral and start to take responsibility for their creation – or at least try to understand its relevance. Because code is law, code is political!

In my doctoral research I look at the communication between constituents and their Members of Parliament. I was looking for a simple way to judge the relevance of the mail that MPs receive from their constituents. As I found, MPs tend to refer to their “postbag” in order to emphasize the importance of an issue as e.g. the Simon Hughes did in a recent debate on climate change (see video below):

So in order to judge how often that happens, I needed to have a look at Hansard, the written record of proceedings in parliament. Now the main online Hansard record at the UK Parliament website is rather difficult and does not provide a search functionality so I turned to TheyWorkForYou.com, one of mySociety’s projects that does not only provide detailed information on MPs but also offers a nicely formatted, searchable version of Hansard, now dating back to 1935 (!).

In this way it was a matter of seconds to find out how often MPs and Lords have mentioned their postbags in parliamentary proceedings since 1935 (it was 1,621 times). A multitude of options allow to filter your search accordingly so that now I know that the majority of these mentions were made during House of Commons debates (989) and that in the current parliament Conservative MP Mark Field leads the table (with 9 references to his postbags). Finally I could quickly produce a figure showing the development of references to their constituent mail:

btw the search is intelligent enough to look for the word “postbag” as well as similar words such as “postbags” or “post bag”

I cannot start to imagine how long it would have taken to produce this figure with the limited capabilities of the official Hansard and it would not have been possible at all at the time when all this data was really only a written record in the literal sense. Not saying that this particular piece of information is a world-changing discovery but it is a good example of how the availability of data in a structured and searchable format (!) can contribute to scholarship nevertheless. In this respect the various Open Data initiatives by governments offer a huge potential for social scientists with the appropriate statistical and computational skills to offer fresh insights. See for example the Guardian World Government Data Initiative that offers the datasets opened up by various different governments in a uniform format.

The Internet and the Representativeness of Political Participation

A comparison of citizen-initiated contacts with
Members of Parliament in Germany and the UK

This thesis explores the implications of the Internet for democracy, based on an understanding of democracy that emphasizes popular control and political equality of that control, re-evaluating the various claims and counter-claims that have been made for the Internet’s democratic potential. It does so by assessing whether the Internet gives a greater and more representative share of the population the opportunity to participate in the political process, thereby extending popular control and reducing political inequalities, focusing on one particular form of participation; citizen-initiated contacts with political representatives. This activity is examined over time in Germany and the UK, two stable liberal democracies with similar levels of Internet penetration and political participation but different political systems, institutions and cultures.

The research is based on analysis of survey evidence of political participation from the 1980s and today; new data collected through user surveys from two large-scale eParticipation projects that allow citizens to contact their MPs online in the UK and Germany (WriteToThem.com and Abgeordnetenwatch.de); and new surveys of and interviews with MPs and their staff to examine the practice and culture of communication between representatives and the represented.

The study assesses the Internet’s impact for political equality by measuring the degree to which those who participate online are descriptively representative of the population along politically relevant characteristics such as income, education and gender. It compares their representativeness across the two countries; with ‘offline’ participation today; and in historical perspective with participation in the pre-Internet era. If this study finds differences between the two countries then this design will allow to identify factors that shape these patterns. Should there be little differences in the findings between Germany and the UK then this would suggest that the observed effects may be sustained across parliamentary and federal systems and proportional and plurality electoral systems.

While the findings have a particular relevance to the activity of contacting, they will also allow to re-assess various claims made for the democratic potential of the Internet in the light of empirical evidence and could have important implications for the design of future online initiatives by identifying factors that can determine their success or failure.

In addition, a chapter outline is also available. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

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).

Of course this is not the first workshop on this topic but it brings together a brilliant array of speakers who are distinguished in this field. Yesterday we already heard Matthew Hindman (Googlearchy, The Myth of Open Source Politics) but he is joined by

• Stephen Coleman (the UK authority on eDemocracy),
• Jay Blumler (a very established Communications scholar),
• John Horrigan (from the Pew Internet & American Life project),
• John Kelly (who is mapping different language blogospheres),
• Andrew Chadwick (who is heading the New Political Communication Unit over at Royal Holloway)
• Rachel Gibson (who has done a lot of empirical work on eDemocracy).

Of course I have not done justice to any of the other great minds sitting at this very table. So did the day start off with a very valuable look to the situation of Internet use (for civic activities) in Eastern Europe and more is to come so stay tuned.

The truly amazing finding is that people who use the site are not the ones who are already politically engaged and organized. Those are using the site too but many have never before contacted their representative and most are not politically active at all – so here we observe a clear effect of engagement as the site activates people to participate politically who have not done so before.

Another interesting finding is that many citizens make very positive experiences when using the site to contact their representatives. Given a general climate of distrust between represented and representatives many user comments indicate a profound surprise at the respect and help they receive from their politicians. Crucially we can observe that the online experiences do at times translate into political participation offline e.g. in the form of voting as the quote below nicely illustrates:

“Mr [name of representative] went above and beyond what I expected to get, I thought I would just be totally ignored, this experience has made me decide to definitely vote in the next elections”

However, of course it also works exactly the other way around which should be a clear sign of warning for many of those politicians who do rarely reply to their constituents (see for example the MP responsiveness league table) as this participant makes clear:

“What’s the point when your councillor doesn’t reply? He’s not getting my vote in the next election, nor from any of my nuclear and extended families and I’ll tell everyone at work about my lack of a reply as well. 23 of them live in his constituency.“

For more details see the presentation (pdf, 2.6MB).

The results are based on a user survey I set up on behalf of mySociety as part of a bigger project that aims to evaluate the impact of many of their by now well-known eDemocracy websites (e.g. TheyWorkForYou.com or FixMyStreet.com). There is much more to come so keep an eye on this space. Also, if there are certain questions of particular interest to you in relation to mySociety projects that you think could/should/might be answered by this research, do drop me a line or comment below!

While this is mainly a summary of the problems, in the coming weeks I will talk about some of my own attempts to find answers to this question. For some time now I have been busy working for mySociety to evaluate the usage of their main sites (such as WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com) and I will be speaking about some initial findings from this work at the upcoming e-Democracy ’08 conference in London on 11 November and earlier at an academic conference in Germany. If you cannot make it to either of them stay tuned as there should be more information on this in the near future and I would love to get your views.

Last but not least the article in the E-Government Bulletin naturally does not carry any references but I owe some of my insights to these people below:

• Forss, K. (2005). Evaluating Public Participation in Policy Making. Paris, OECD.
• Macintosh, A. and S. Coleman (2007). eParticipation Research Direction based on barriers, challenges and needs, DEMO-Net Deliverable 12.3.
• Macintosh, A. and A. Whyte (2008). “Towards an Evaluation Framework for eParticipation.” Transforming Government: People, Process & Policy 2(1)

The participants did discuss a stunning array of eDemocracy projects that have already made a mark in their countries although maybe not all being as widely successful as they would deserve. It definitely helped to open my eyes to a world beyond some of the more commonly known projects such as theyworkforyou.com in the UK or abgeordnetenwatch.de in Germany and to learn about a variety of other efforts. For example, who would have thought that Romania has taken such a lead in holding government and parliament accountable to the extent that they sue their politicians every time information is not made available? Or the kind of interesting results you get if you can cross-reference the voting behaviour of an MP with data on its travels (seems like some politicians can be at multiple places at once). There is a good (and still growing) list of interesting sites available on our Wiki.

You can meet some of the participants in brief video interviews (the web site is in German but they interviews are in English) that hopefully convey some of the buzz of these two days. As this was an (un)conference it was difficult to say what the outcomes would be. This actually did work quite well: We came up with a long list of good practice for transparency sites that should be the first point of call for people thinking about setting up similar sites. Furthermore the collected wisdom of the experts did identify a number of projects that a crying out to be done by someone! Most importantly, however, it was an opportunity for all to network and to learn what is going on in Europe and also beyond as Andrea Thompson and Gilberto Buffara from democracia in Brazil joined us for a session via video call.