I would first note that none of the posts responded to the findings that the online townhalls reached people who do not show up to regular townhalls (based on demographics), where, notably, people who were frustrated with the political system were more likely to show up. Further, none of the criticisms deal with the findings that the people who participated were subsequently more engaged in politics, more likely to vote, increased their knowledge of the policy, more likely to follow the election. These are the parts of the report that actually have normative bite; clearly, approval of Members of Congress by itself is neither here nor there normatively. These may be things that the bloggers below do not value (in which case they should explain why) or actively ignored.
In any case, here is what they did say.
First, the Heritage post, in its words:
[referring to the fact that the research methodology called for offensive questions to be culled] CMF does not say what qualifies as offensive, but if this summer is any indication that definition would include anything that the Congressman did not want to talk about. In other words, this report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether by holding safe townhalls they can completely control. And what did CMF find where the results of these Potemkin townhalls?
The online town halls increased constituents' approval of the Member. Every Member involved experienced an increase in approval by the constituents who participated. The average net approval rating (approve minus disapprove) jumped from +29 before the session to +47 after. There were also similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities - such as whether they were compassionate, hardworking, accessible, etc. - of the Member.
The lesson: avoid your constituents' inconvenient questions and your approval ratings will rise. And this is a taxpayer funded study. Here is the grant from the National Science Foundation.
Congress is actually using your tax dollars to pay social scientists to find ways they can avoid actually talking to their constituents while improving their chances of reelection.
Response: as noted in the report, the possibility of screening anything as "offensive" was theoretical. We did not actually exclude any questions for this reason (we did state this in a footnote rather in the text). We had pretty high (low?) standards for offensive--e.g., we would not post questions that included expletives. It was part of our research protocols, and thus our instinct was to mention it.
That said, it is worth noting that the medium is potentially manipulable, and there is nothing to stop someone who is doing an online townhall from excluding difficult questions. (Of course, all communication media are manipulable in some way, so it is not obvious that this is an advantage or disadvantage of online townhalls.) We had a neutral moderator, and included all questions that time would allow, in the order that were posted. This included some that were pretty hostile to the Member. Our assessment (and recommendation) was that these very confrontations made the events more effective, because they reflected the authenticity of the event. In short, the Members approval ratings increased because they had done the right thing.
The National Science Foundation prides itself on making research grants that lead to path-breaking discoveries. So it seemed odd to Coburn, a physician known as the Senate's 'Dr. No,' that science foundation money was being used to show legislators how to exile angry town-hall mobs to cyberspace.
Response: It is unclear whether the blogger is speaking in her voice, or Senator Coburn's. In any case, the criticism that we were trying to eliminate traditional townhalls came up repeatedly through the blogs. We do not advocate this in the report (or elsewhere). But the online and tele-townhalls do allow Members to reach many more people than they can via traditional townhalls, and people they could not otherwise reach. Indeed, Senator Coburn himself has participated in many tele-townhalls, presumably without crowding out traditional townhalls.
From Fox (John Stossel's blog):
This summer's town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether.
[The rest is just derivative from the Heritage blog]
Response: All of the NSF funded data collection was conducted in the summer of 2006, three years before this past the town hall meetings of this past summer. Further, the participating members included some conservative Republicans, i.e., there was no partisan or ideological tilt in this research.
Otherwise, I'd note that name calling is a poor substitute for a persuasive argument. 'Nuff said.
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The more serious argument is the resource constraint argument that Coburn himself raises in the flyer below. Taxpayer dollars are wrested, involuntarily, from individuals who have worked hard for their money. Should these dollars be used to fund political science research, especially in these resource constrained times? Could these funds be used, for example, to help cure cancer (something that the Coburn amendment did not mandate, I should note). (NB: a useful fact, we currently spend more than 2000 times as much money on NIH than on the NSF political science program.) Does this research provide public value equal or greater than its cost?
This requires a more thorough answer than I can give here and now. The broad intellectual argument for giving even one penny for research from the government is that certain types of knowledge, for which there is no mechanism for intellectual property right protection, will be underproduced in our market system. And, to the extent it is produced, it might remain proprietary in a fashion that reduces its possible positive impact. For example, in the political arena, I am sure Senator Coburn (and every other Senator) has spent tons of money on politically related research by consultants, etc. (across all politicians, vastly more than is spent on the NSF Political Science Program). But little of that money is aimed at producing knowledge that might improve democracy, nor would any insights along those lines be made publicly available.
To take the boundary case for supporting political science research, say the authors of the Federalist papers, the inspiration for our research, had been drawing government salaries on the time that they were writing those foundational papers (if any readers of the blog can speak to this historical fact, I would be interested in knowing). Would Senator Coburn say that this had been a waste of taxpayer money?
So, in the case of our more modest research, we produced something of a model for how democracy could be done, with the Internet facilitating direct interactions between Members of Congress and citizens that they had, before, been unable to have a conversation with. We applied cutting edge scientific methods to test the effects--field experiments, with control groups, the whole nine yards. Any criteria you might throw out there regarding "scientific methods" we match-- rigor, research design, replicability, inferential power, etc etc. And we got some really compelling results from a normative point of view. I am not sure what the dollar value was, but I am happy for our report to be held out as a poster child for the public value that federally funded research for political science can produce. And on the more general issue, presumably enhanced understanding of the inner workings of democracy, the causes of war and peace, of the difficulty/challenges of institution building in damaged states, of the causes of the growth and decline of terrorist networks (all things that have been federally funded political science research) are all things that plausibly produce public value, and are worth more rigorous treatment than pundits and talking heads on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC might provide.
can be found at Progressive States:
Putting aside the small irony here, there is an interesting lesson here about being able to track the linkages among objects in digitized information, and, in turn, what those linkages reveal. More on that another day.
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(would be interested in the provenance of the picture, in case any readers know)
At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: "This summer's town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether." Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn's office (i.e., they weren't just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience. Here is a picture of the diffusion process to date:
Node colors correspond to dates (28: white, 29: light gray, 30: dark gray). Time flows left to right, where the variations within each day reflect publication time of day, but only in an "eyeballing" sense. Link weights are encoded white: explicit mention, black: shared text, grey: both. Arrows point from destination node to source
What one cannot see, but is certainly reflected here somehow is that there is an interpersonal network among these bloggers (and relevant nonbloggers). However, this micro case study does suggest ways that one might disentangle the informational ecosystem among blogs, by looking at shared text, link structure, and to look at it dynamically and by content. If you know of interesting papers along these lines, please feel free to post in comments. One relevant, freshly minted paper, is:
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Who Wants to Deliberate - and Why?
Michael A. Neblo
Ohio State University - Department of Political Science
Kevin M. Esterling
University of California, Riverside - Department of Political Science
Ryan Kennedy
University of Houston - Department of Political Science
David Lazer
Northeastern University - Department of Political Science; Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
Anand E. Sokhey
University of Colorado at Boulder - Department of Political Science
Interest in deliberative theories of democracy has grown tremendously among political theorists over the last twenty years. Many scholars in political behavior, however, are skeptical that it is a practically viable theory, even on its own terms. They argue (inter alia) that most people dislike politics, and that deliberative initiatives would amount to a paternalistic imposition. Using two large, representative samples investigating people's hypothetical willingness to deliberate and their actual behavior in response to a real invitation to deliberate with their member of Congress, we find: 1) that willingness to deliberate in the U.S. is much more widespread than expected; and 2) that it is precisely people who are less likely to participate in traditional partisan politics who are most interested in deliberative participation. They are attracted to such participation as a partial alternative to "politics as usual."
Kevin M. Esterling
University of California, Riverside - Department of Political Science
Michael A. Neblo
Ohio State University - Department of Political Science
David Lazer
Northeastern University - Department of Political Science; Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
Survey research on political knowledge typically measures citizens' ability to recall political information on the spot, and in these surveys most citizens appear appallingly ignorant. Deliberative theorists emphasize, however, that citizens' capacity to become informed when given a motive and opportunity to participate in politics is equally important for democratic accountability. We assess this capacity among citizens using two deliberative field experiments. In the summer of 2006 we conducted a field experiment in which we recruited twelve current members of the U.S. Congress to discuss immigration policy with randomly drawn small groups of their constituents. In the summer of 2008, we conducted a similar experiment using a large group of constituents interacting with Senator Carl Levin of Michigan on detainee policy. Using an innovative statistical method to identify average treatment effects from field experiments, we find that constituents demonstrate a strong capacity to become informed in response to this opportunity. The primary mechanism for knowledge gains is subjects' increased attention to policy outside the context of the experiment. This capacity to become informed seems to be spread widely throughout the population, in that it is unrelated to prior political knowledge.
Kevin M. Esterling
University of California, Riverside - Department of Political Science
Michael A. Neblo
Ohio State University - Department of Political Science
David Lazer
Northeastern University - Department of Political Science; Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
If ignored, non-compliance with a treatment and nonresponse on outcome measures can bias estimates of treatment effects in a randomized experiment. To identify treatment effects in the case where compliance and response are conditioned on subjects' unobserved compliance type, we propose the parametric generalized endogenous treatment (GET) model. GET incorporates behavioral responses within an experiment to measure each subjects' latent compliance type, and identifies causal effects via principal stratification. We use Monte Carlo methods to show GET has a lower MSE for treatment effect estimates than existing approaches to principal stratification that impute, rather than measure, compliance type for subjects assigned to the control. In an application, we use data from a recent field experiment to assess whether exposure to a deliberative session with their member of Congress changes constituents' levels of internal and external efficacy. Since it conditions on subjects' latent compliance type, GET is able to test whether exposure to the treatment is ignorable after balancing on observed covariates via matching methods. We show that internally efficacious subjects disproportionately select into the deliberative sessions, and that matching does not break the latent dependence between treatment compliance and outcome. The results suggest that exposure to the deliberative sessions improves external, but not internal, efficacy.
• The meetings increased engagement in politics. Participants in the sessions were more likely to vote and were dramatically more likely to follow the election and to attempt to persuade other citizens how to vote.
• The discussions in the town hall meetings were of high quality. By standards of deliberative quality (use of accurate facts to support arguments, respect for alternative points of view, etc.) the discussions were of a very high quality.
• The town hall meetings attracted a diverse array of people. These sessions were more likely than traditional venues to attract people from demographics not traditionally engaged in politics and people frustrated with the political system.
• The sessions were extremely popular with constituents. A remarkable 96% of participants said they would like to be included in similar events in the future.
• The online town hall meetings increased constituents' approval of the Member of Congress. Members experienced an average net approval rating jump of 18 points. There were similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities such as hardworking and accessible. The sessions also increased constituents' approval of the Member's position on the issue discussed.
• The online sessions increased the probability of voting for the Member. The probability of voting for the Member was 49% for control subjects and 56% for people who participated in a session, with a particularly dramatic impact on swing voters.
• The positive results were seen in small and large sessions. Most of the sessions were conducted by Representatives with small groups of 15-25 constituents. To test the scalability, the team conducted one session with a Senator and nearly 200 people. All of the major results were replicated with this larger group.
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I got fairly intrigued by the idea of dynamically modifying office layout to help deal with this situation, and recently for the Media Lab fall sponsor week my UROP Alex Speltz and I built a prototype of an augmented cubicle wall that changes based on the social context. Here's a picture:
The wall is a little over 2 meters tall and made of two plexiglass sheets with a wood frame. Inside the plexiglass sheets are window blinds that can be raised and lowered by an actuator mounted on the bottom of the wall.
The idea is that by detecting the stage of work for a worker (exploring vs. exploiting) we can determine if they need more face-to-face interaction or less for a certain period of time (probably at least a week). If someone needs to talk more with people around them, at night the actuator will pull down the blinds to create a window, making serendipitous interaction easier. If, on the other hand, the person is more in an exploit mode and needs to sit at their desk and work, the blinds are pulled up at night, and when they come in the next day it will give them more privacy. People can also specify their interaction preferences through a web-based system that my other UROPs Tim Kaler, Ernie Park, and Margaret Ding made, which allows us to further tailor the system output.
It's important to imagine an entire office outfitted with these, so if you knew that two groups were starting to work on a project together the barriers between those groups would disappear, while if someone was monopolizing the time of another group the barriers between them would increase. In effect, the augmented cubicle would become a social signal for availability. While people can control the blinds manually, in practice people stick with the defaults (I pulled down the blinds in my office two months ago and haven't gotten around to pulling them back up).
We're planning on deploying this in a real organization in the next few months as the design gets finalized to see if we can have a positive effect on the work environment, as well as productivity and job satisfaction. We're also currently making a demonstration video of the wall, which I'll post here as soon as it's ready.
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At first, Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's health-care address looked like a career killer. Members of both parties blasted him for his dramatic breech of decorum, and most Americans, regardless of ideology, reacted with disgust.
But the South Carolina Republican used the incident to build a massive audience that has helped him raise more than a million dollars in new campaign funds. He's arguably more influential than ever before.
Welcome to Twitter-era politics, where a moment of fame -- even one as inglorious as Wilson's -- can translate into political power.
The night Wilson shouted "you lie" at the President of the United States, he hired a new-media strategist, who went to work immediately.
Within 24 hours, the Congressman's Twitter account had sent out 50 new messages, and his followers had increased by an unprecedented 500 percent to over 10,000.
Without any sincere apology to the American people or to his fellow Members of Congress, Wilson managed to create friends or, in Web 2.0 lingo, "picked up people" wherever they were -- on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
He replicated the Campaign 2.0 success of his political foe, President Obama, and increased his fans on his congressional Facebook fanpage to more than 11,000.
At the same time, he also equipped his Facebook campaign page with a donation option and added the following pitch:
The result of the Congressman's breach of protocol and subsequent social-media broadcasts: Enormously enhanced name recognition and more than $1.5 million dollars in donations in the week following his outburst (and as of today $2.7 million).
What is most interesting here is how a whole new kind of message spin has emerged -- one that specifically focuses on targeting new media channels and is directed by a whole new kind of PR expert.
It's not just about talk radio and the Internet anymore. In the old days, Wilson's best course of action would have been to sincerely and thoughtfully apologize and then hope that his constituents would forgive him. Not any more: Today's messages are not about damage control but about turning a wrong into a right.
In other contexts, such misbehavior is not acceptable to anyone: Kanye West was shunned by his celebrity colleagues for jumping on stage at the VMA awards during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech; Serena Williams lost her match and received a fine of $10,500 dollars for insulting a line judge during the US Open finals on the same weekend.
Both found themselves in the dog house, both apologized profoundly, not only directly to the person they harmed, but also to the public. Their standings were arguably hurt by their behavior, while Wilson's appears to have been enhanced among those who share his views.
In a recent tweet, he says, "I will not back down from speaking the truth. Please stand with me.".
In Wilson's world, shouting at the president during an address to Congress is now called "speaking the truth." And by being able to communicate with thousands of followers directly on social networks, he can have his own version on the truth, unfiltered by journalists, academics, or pundits. He can directly spin the public, and doesn't need to worry nearly as much about spinning what we normally think of as the "opinion makers."
Democracy may well be better off as a result of the Internet's ability to build audience and supply that audience with direct, unfiltered communication. But as Wilson has shown, it is also a challenge for civil society, loosening norms of public behavior, and giving those who wish to cater to the extremes powerful new tools.
]]>Mayer-Schoenberger beautifully illustrates our society's transition from "biological forgetting to digital remembering". While for generations our efforts have concentrated on trying to remember events, actions, etc. and preserve them for posterity, in today's world we are facing the opposite problem: The digital memory is here to stay. However, the book argues, forgetting has its virtues, and needs to be reintroduced. The solution is simple: Put an expiration date on information.
The book is a great read (as soon as I got it, my non-academic spouse snagged it and took it on a business trip, which usually doesn't happen with the books I order), and I am not even close to doing it justice with this description, so if you find yourselves near any of the locations of the book tour, make sure to stop by and join the discussion.
Future stops (from here):
• Harvard's Berkman Center on October 7 at 6 pm
• Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on October 8 at 4.30 pm
• Town Hall Seattle on October 19 at 7.30 pm
• University of California Berkeley Law School on October 22 at 4 pm
Very, very cool. In advance of their new book. Networks are very, very cool..... as are Nicholas and James.
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I'm back, and promise to keep you entertained and informed.
I will also promise to cut the incessant barking!
(Of course, it's not really MY blog .... I am only a tiny little part. And I thank David for his patience.)
SW
Ben Shneidernman from the University of Maryland is giving the keynote, and friends of the blog Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo will also be speaking (along with myself). Hope to see many of you there.
]]>The concept is simple enough, but it turns out that coming up with precise mathematical definitions and algorithms for community detection is one of the most challenging problems in network science. Recently, a lot of the research in this area has been done using ideas from statistical physics, which has an arsenal of tools and concepts to tackle the problem. Unfortunately (but understandably) relatively few non-physicists like to read statistical physics papers.
Together with my colleagues Mason Porter (Oxford University) and Peter Mucha (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), we thought it would be useful to let others take a peek at some of this work. In an effort to put in context some of the hundreds of papers, we recently compiled an introductory review on some of our favorite approaches to community detection. While there are excellent existing reviews, our "Communities in Networks", published by Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), tries to make sense of this smorgasbord of methods and, hopefully, lets a broader audience get a flavor of this exciting field.
I hope to be making a couple of postings on community structure and community detection later on. In the meantime, you can see for yourself if we have succeeded by checking out the freely accessible article on the AMS website, or by going to arXiv or SSRN.
The largest connected component of a coauthorship network connecting physicists who have published together on networks. Each node is colored according to community membership.
WIN is a Social Networks Summit intended to foster collaboration and to build community. The increasing availability of massive networked data is revolutionizing the scientific study of a variety of phenomena in fields as diverse as Computer Science, Economics, Physics and Sociology. Yet, while many important advances have taken place in these different communities, the dialog between researchers across disciplines is only beginning. The purpose of WIN is to bring together leading researchers studying 'information in networks' - its distribution, its diffusion, its value, and its influence on social and economic outcomes - in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.