Complexity and Social Networks Blog

A while ago, I blogged about the complexity of government 2.0. I described the efforts by a group of people to create an open declaration on eGovernment in Europe in the coming years alongside the official declaration which will be presented during the 5th EU Ministerial conference in Malmoe, Sweden next week. To learn more about participation in the age of 2.0 I joined the group. It was neither easy to fit quality contribution time into ones schedule nor getting people to participate in the various stages of the creation of the declaration.

There are 6 days left to get another 800 [or more] supporters of the open declaration on European public services. If you like it, please endorse it by visiting this website and/or spreading the word through the channels available to you.

I will send updates directly from the conference in Malmoe next week.

Update: The official declaration's scope and structure might be as follows:

Common vision
"We, the ministers, agree to create an e-enabled European Union where citizens and businesses can easily access public services and public information all over the Union, enjoy true freedom of movement on the Single Market, and where administrations easily collaborate across boundaries in order to fulfill this goal."

Priority 1: E-government Empowering Citizens and Businesses
"We, the Ministers, agree to work pro-actively in order to make it easy for citizens and businesses to engage with government administrations at anytime and anywhere in the EU in order reap the benefits of the Union, have easy access to public information and feel secure that their integrity and information is protected when engaging with administrations over the Net."

Priority 2: E-government in Support of the Single Market
"We, the Ministers, agree to make it easier for European citizen to travel, study, work, retire and reside in all countries of the Union and make it easier for businesses to provide and procure services everywhere in the Union. Consequently appropriate legal and technical preconditions for cross-border e-services needs to be created and joint demand-driven e-government projects needs to be supported. Such projects should be centrally monitored in order to seek synergies and prevent overlap with other ongoing projects and to avoid the creation of new barriers in the internal market."

E-government Enabling Administrative Efficiency and Effectiveness
"We, the Ministers, agree to make it easier for public administrations in the EU to collaborate across boundaries by creating a European Common Area of e-Government. This new area of partnership and joint action between Member States should enable European public administrations to interact easily and connect intelligently with each other as well as with private actors in order to deliver personal and overall public value to society and facilitate the implementation of European Directives. Within this area experiences should also be shared on how to reduce the administrative burden, reduce the carbon footprint and facilitate organizational change."

The details would be described in an action plan.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There might be some interest in the scholarly papers undergirding some of the research in the aforementioned report. Below we list some of the papers from the online deliberative field experiments that we posted on SSRN.

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."

Means, Motive, & Opportunity in Becoming Informed About Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment with Members of Congress and Their Constituents

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.

Estimating Treatment Effects in the Presence of Noncompliance and Nonresponse: The Generalized Endogenous Treatment Model

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.

Posted by David Lazer at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You Lie 2.0: How disrespect can get you thousands of new friends and a million dollars

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:

"Washington Democrats and their liberal allies want to divert attention away from the concerns about the massive government takeover of health care. In fact, they have made me their Number One target -- already raising millions of dollars for my opponent. But I will not give up and I will not back down from our fight. We will not be muzzled. Will you please make a donation to help me fight back against these unwavering attacks? Thank you for standing with me in this fight.".

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.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)