Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page :”Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.
While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism –Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate) Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.
Each of these theoretical traditions has given rise to a large body of literature. Each is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence – some of it quantitative, some historical, some observational – concerning the importance of various sets of actors (or, all too often, a single set of actors) in U.S. policy making. This literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how American politics works and has helped illuminate how democratic or undemocratic (in various senses) our policy making process actually is. Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the diffe ring predictions of these theories against each other within a single statistical model that permits one to analyze
the independent effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.
Here – in a tentative and preliminary way – we offer such test, bringing a unique data set to bear on the problem. Our measures are far from
perfect, but we hope that this first step will help inspire further research into what we see as some of the most fundamental questions about American politics…”

Can Government Play Moneyball?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bornstein in the New York Times: “…For all the attention it’s getting inside the administration, evidence-based policy-making seems unlikely to become a headline grabber; it lacks emotional appeal. But it does have intellectual heft. And one group that has been doing creative work to give the message broader appeal is Results for America, which has produced useful teaching aids under the banner “Moneyball for Government,” building on the popularity of the book and movie about Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, and the rise of data-driven decision making in major league baseball. (Watch their video explainers here and here.)
Results for America works closely with leaders across political parties and social sectors, to build awareness about evidence-based policy making — drawing attention to key areas where government could dramatically improve people’s lives by augmenting well-tested models. They are also chronicling efforts by local governments around the country, to show how an emerging group of “Geek Cities,” including Baltimore, Denver, Miami, New York, Providence and San Antonio, are using data and evidence to drive improvements in various areas of social policy like education, youth development and employment.
“It seems like common sense to use evidence about what works to get better results,” said Michele Jolin, Results for America’s managing partner. “How could anyone be against it? But the way our system is set up, there are so many loud voices pushing to have dollars spent and policy shaped in the way that works for them. There has been no organized constituency for things that work.”
“The debate in Washington is usually about the quantity of resources,” said David Medina, a partner in Results for America. “We’re trying to bring it back to talking about quality.”
Not everyone will find this change appealing. “When you have a longstanding social service policy, there’s going to be a network of [people and groups] who are organized to keep that money flowing regardless of whether evidence suggests it’s warranted,” said Daniel Stid. “People in social services don’t like to think they’re behaving like other organized interests — like dairy farmers or mortgage brokers — but it leads to tremendous inertia in public policy.”
Beyond the politics, there are practical obstacles to overcome, too. Federal agencies lack sufficient budgets for evaluation or a common definition for what constitutes rigorous evidence. (Any lobbyist can walk into a legislator’s office and claim to have solid data to support an argument.) Up-to-date evidence also needs to be packaged in accessible ways and made available on a timely basis, so it can be used to improve programs, rather than to threaten them. Governments need to build regular evaluations into everything they do — not just conduct big, expensive studies every 10 years or so.
That means developing new ways to conduct quick and inexpensive randomized studies using data that is readily available, said Haskins, who is investigating this approach. “We should be running 10,000 evaluations a year, like they do in medicine.” That’s the only way to produce the rapid trial-and-error learning needed to drive iterative program improvements, he added. (I reported on a similar effort being undertaken by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy.)
Results for America has developed a scorecard to rank federal departments about how prepared they are to produce or incorporate evidence in their programs. It looks at whether a department has an office and a leader with the authority and budget to evaluate its programs. It asks: Does it make its data accessible to the public? Does it compile standards about what works and share them widely? Does it spend at least 1 percent of its budget evaluating its programs? And — most important — does it incorporate evidence in its big grant programs? For now, the Department of Education gets the top score.
The stakes are high. In 2011, for example, the Obama administration launched a process to reform Head Start, doing things like spreading best practices and forcing the worst programs to improve or lose their funding. This February, for the third time, the government released a list of Head Start providers (103 out of about 1,600) who will have to recompete for federal funding because of performance problems. That list represents tens of thousands of preschoolers, many of whom are missing out on the education they need to succeed in kindergarten — and life.
Improving flagship programs like Head Start, and others, is not just vital for the families they serve; it’s vital to restore trust in government. “I am a card-carrying member of the Republican Party and I want us to be governed well,” said Robert Shea, who pushed for better program evaluations as associate director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Bush administration, and continues to focus on this issue as chairman of the National Academy of Public Administration. “This is the most promising thing I know of to get us closer to that goal.”
“This idea has the prospect of uniting Democrats and Republicans,” said Haskins. “But it will involve a broad cultural change. It has to get down to the program administrators, board members and local staff throughout the country — so they know that evaluation is crucial to their operations.”
“There’s a deep mistrust of government and a belief that problems can’t be solved,” said Michele Jolin. “This movement will lead to better outcomes — and it will help people regain confidence in their public officials by creating a more effective, more credible way for policy choices to be made.”

The Transformative Impact of Data and Communication on Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Livingston at Brookings: “How do digital technologies affect governance in areas of limited statehood – places and circumstances characterized by the absence of state provisioning of public goods and the enforcement of binding rules with a monopoly of legitimate force?  In the first post in this series I introduced the limited statehood concept and then described the tremendous growth in mobile telephony, GIS, and other technologies in the developing world.   In the second post I offered examples of the use of ICT in initiatives intended to fill at least some of the governance vacuum created by limited statehood.  With mobile phones, for example, farmers are informed of market conditions, have access to liquidity through M-Pesa and similar mobile money platforms….
This brings to mind another type of ICT governance initiative.  Rather than fill in for or even displace the state some ICT initiatives can strengthen governance capacity.  Digital government – the use of digital technology by the state itself — is one important possibility.  Other initiatives strengthen the state by exerting pressure. Countries with weak governance sometimes take the form of extractive states or those, which cater to the needs of an elite, leaving the majority of the population in poverty and without basic public services. This is what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call extractive political and economic institutions.  Inclusive states, on the other hand, are pluralistic, bound by the rule of law, respectful of property rights, and, in general, accountable.  Accountability mechanisms such as a free press and competitive multiparty elections are instrumental to discourage extractive institutions.  What ICT-based initiatives might lend a hand in strengthening accountability? We can point to three examples.

Example One: Using ICT to Protect Human Rights

Nonstate actors now use commercial, high-resolution remote sensing satellites to monitor weapons programs and human rights violations.  Amnesty International’s Remote Sensing for Human Rights offers one example, and Satellite Sentinel offers another.  Both use imagery from DigitalGlobe, an American remote sensing and geospatial content company.   Other organizations have used commercially available remote sensing imagery to monitor weapons proliferation.  The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based NGO, revealed the Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2003 using commercial satellite imagery…

Example Two: Crowdsourcing Election Observation

Others have used mobile phones and GIS to crowdsource election observation.  For the 2011 elections in Nigeria, The Community Life Project, a civil society organization, created ReclaimNaija, an elections process monitoring system that relied on GIS and amateur observers with mobile phones to monitor the elections.  Each of the red dots represents an aggregation of geo-located incidents reported to the ReclaimNaija platform.  In a live map, clicking on a dot disaggregates the reports, eventually taking the reader to individual reports.  Rigorous statistical analysis of ReclaimNaija results and the elections suggest it contributed to the effectiveness of the election process.

ReclaimNaija: Election Incident Reporting System Map

ReclaimNaija: Election Incident Reporting System Map

Example Three: Using Genetic Analysis to Identify War Crimes

In recent years, more powerful computers have led to major breakthroughs in biomedical science.  The reduction in cost of analyzing the human genome has actually outpaced Moore’s Law.  This has opened up new possibilities for the use of genetic analysis in forensic anthropology.   In Guatemala, the Balkans, Argentina, Peru and in several other places where mass executions and genocides took place, forensic anthropologists are using genetic analysis to find evidence that is used to hold the killers – often state actors – accountable…”

Let’s get geeks into government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Fifteen years ago, Brett Goldstein seemed to be just another tech entrepreneur. He was working as IT director of OpenTable, then a start-up website for restaurant bookings. The company was thriving – and subsequently did a very successful initial public offering. Life looked very sweet for Goldstein. But when the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001, Goldstein had a moment of epiphany. “I spent seven years working in a startup but, directly after 9/11, I knew I didn’t want my whole story to be about how I helped people make restaurant reservations. I wanted to work in public service, to give something back,” he recalls – not just by throwing cash into a charity tin, but by doing public service. So he swerved: in 2006, he attended the Chicago police academy and then worked for a year as a cop in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods. Later he pulled the disparate parts of his life together and used his number-crunching skills to build the first predictive data system for the Chicago police (and one of the first in any western police force), to indicate where crime was likely to break out.

This was such a success that Goldstein was asked by Rahm Emanuel, the city’s mayor, to create predictive data systems for the wider Chicago government. The fruits of this effort – which include a website known as “WindyGrid” – went live a couple of years ago, to considerable acclaim inside the techie scene.

This tale might seem unremarkable. We are all used to hearing politicians, business leaders and management consultants declare that the computing revolution is transforming our lives. And as my colleague Tim Harford pointed out in these pages last week, the idea of using big data is now wildly fashionable in the business and academic worlds….

In America when top bankers become rich, they often want to “give back” by having a second career in public service: just think of all those Wall Street financiers who have popped up at the US Treasury in recent years. But hoodie-wearing geeks do not usually do the same. Sure, there are some former techie business leaders who are indirectly helping government. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL, has supported White House projects to boost entrepreneurship and combat joblessness. Tech entrepreneurs also make huge donations to philanthropy. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has given funds to Newark education. And the whizz-kids have also occasionally been summoned by the White House in times of crisis. When there was a disastrous launch of the government’s healthcare website late last year, the Obama administration enlisted the help of some of the techies who had been involved with the president’s election campaign.

But what you do not see is many tech entrepreneurs doing what Goldstein did: deciding to spend a few years in public service, as a government employee. There aren’t many Zuckerberg types striding along the corridors of federal or local government.
. . .
It is not difficult to work out why. To most young entrepreneurs, the idea of working in a state bureaucracy sounds like utter hell. But if there was ever a time when it might make sense for more techies to give back by doing stints of public service, that moment is now. The civilian public sector badly needs savvier tech skills (just look at the disaster of that healthcare website for evidence of this). And as the sector’s founders become wealthier and more powerful, they need to show that they remain connected to society as a whole. It would be smart political sense.
So I applaud what Goldstein has done. I also welcome that he is now trying to persuade his peers to do the same, and that places such as the University of Chicago (where he teaches) and New York University are trying to get more young techies to think about working for government in between doing those dazzling IPOs. “It is important to see more tech entrepreneurs in public service. I am always encouraging people I know to do a ‘stint in government”. I tell them that giving back cannot just be about giving money; we need people from the tech world to actually work in government, “ Goldstein says.

But what is really needed is for more technology CEOs and leaders to get involved by actively talking about the value of public service – or even encouraging their employees to interrupt their private-sector careers with the occasional spell as a government employee (even if it is not in a sector quite as challenging as the police). Who knows? Maybe it could be Sheryl Sandberg’s next big campaigning mission. After all, if she does ever jump back to Washington, that could have a powerful demonstration effect for techie women and men. And shake DC a little too.”

Politics and the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edited book by William H. Dutton (Routledge – 2014 – 1,888 pages: “It is commonplace to observe that the Internet—and the dizzying technologies and applications which it continues to spawn—has revolutionized human communications. But, while the medium’s impact has apparently been immense, the nature of its political implications remains highly contested. To give but a few examples, the impact of networked individuals and institutions has prompted serious scholarly debates in political science and related disciplines on: the evolution of ‘e-government’ and ‘e-politics’ (especially after recent US presidential campaigns); electronic voting and other citizen participation; activism; privacy and surveillance; and the regulation and governance of cyberspace.
As research in and around politics and the Internet flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Political Science series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing—and ever more complex—corpus of literature. Edited by William H. Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), the collection gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.
With a full index and comprehensive bibliographies, together with a new introduction by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Politics and the Internet is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as a database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For researchers, students, practitioners, and policy-makers, it is a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.”

Why Are Rich Countries Democratic?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “When Adam Smith was 22, he famously proclaimed that, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Today, almost 260 years later, we know that nothing could be further from the truth.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 shows how wrong Smith was, for it highlights the intricate interaction between modern production and the state. To make air travel feasible and safe, states ensure that pilots know how to fly and that aircraft pass stringent tests. They build airports and provide radar and satellites that can track planes, air traffic controllers to keep them apart, and security services to keep terrorists on the ground. And, when something goes wrong, it is not peace, easy taxes, and justice that are called in to assist; it is professional, well-resourced government agencies.
All advanced economies today seem to need much more than the young Smith assumed. And their governments are not only large and complex, comprising thousands of agencies that administer millions of pages of rules and regulations; they are also democratic – and not just because they hold elections every so often. Why?
By the time he published The Wealth of Nations, at age 43, Smith had become the first complexity scientist. He understood that the economy was a complex system that needed to coordinate the work of thousands of people just to make things as simple as a meal or a suit.
But Smith also understood that while the economy was too intricate to be organized by anybody, it has the capacity to self-organize. It possesses an “invisible hand,” which operates through market prices to provide an information system that can be used to calculate whether using resources for a given purpose is worthwhile – that is, profitable.
Profit is an incentive system that leads firms and individuals to respond to the information provided by prices. And capital markets are a resource-mobilization system that provides money to those companies and projects that are expected to be profitable – that is, the ones that respond adequately to market prices.
But modern production requires many inputs that markets do not provide. And, as in the case of airlines, these inputs – rules, standards, certifications, infrastructure, schools and training centers, scientific labs, security services, among others – are deeply complementary to the ones that can be procured in markets. They interact in the most intricate ways with the activities that markets organize.
So here’s the question: Who controls the provision of the publicly provided inputs? The prime minister? The legislature? Which country’s top judges have read the millions of pages of legislation or considered how they complement or contradict each other, much less applied them to the myriad different activities that comprise the economy? Even a presidential executive cannot be fully aware of the things that are done or not done by the thousands of government agencies and how they affect each part of society.
This is an information-rich problem, and, like the social-coordination challenge that the market addresses, it does not allow for centralized control. What is needed is something like the invisible hand of the market: a mechanism for self-organization. Elections clearly are not enough, because they typically occur at two- or four-year intervals and collect very little information per voter.
Instead, successful political systems have had to create an alternative invisible hand – a system that decentralizes the power to identify problems, propose solutions, and monitor performance, such that decisions are made with much more information.
To take just one example, the United States’ federal government accounts for just 537 of the country’s roughly 500,000 elected positions. Clearly, there is much more going on elsewhere.
The US Congress has 100 senators with 40 aides each, and 435 representatives with 25 aides each. They are organized into 42 committees and 182 subcommittees, meaning that there are 224 parallel conversations going on. And this group of more than 15,000 people is not alone. Facing them are some 22,000 registered lobbyists, whose mission is (among other goals) to sit down with legislators and draft legislation.
This, together with a free press, is part of the structure that reads the millions of pages of legislation and monitors what government agencies do and do not do. It generates the information and the incentives to respond to it. It affects the allocation of budgetary resources. It is an open system in which anybody can create news or find a lobbyist to make his case, whether it is to save the whales or to eat them.
Without such a mechanism, the political system cannot provide the kind of environment that modern economies need. That is why all rich countries are democracies, and it is why some countries, like my own (Venezuela), are becoming poorer. Although some of these countries do hold elections, they tend to stumble at even the simplest of coordination problems. Lining up to vote is no guarantee that citizens will not also have to line up for toilet paper.”

Rethinking Institutions and Organizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Royston Greenwood, C.R. Hiningsand Dave Whetten in the Journal of Management Studies: “In this essay we argue that institutional scholarship has become overly concerned with explaining institutions and institutional processes, notably at the level of the organization field, rather than with using them to explain and understand organizations. Especially missing is an attempt to gain a coherent, holistic account of how organizations are structured and managed. We also argue that when institutional theory does give attention to organizations it inappropriately treats them as though they are the same, or at least as though any differences are irrelevant for purposes of theory. We propose a return to the study of organizations with an emphasis upon comparative analysis, and suggest the institutional logics perspective as an appropriate means for doing so.”

Ten Innovations to Compete for Global Innovation Award

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Making All Voices Count: “The Global Innovation Competition was launched at the Open Government Partnership Summit in November, 2013 and set out to scout the globe for fresh ideas to enhance government accountability and boost citizen engagement. The call was worldwide and in response, nearly 200 innovative ideas were submitted. After a process of public voting and peer review, these have been reduced to ten.
Below, we highlight the innovations that will now compete for a prize of £65,000 plus six months mentorship at the Global Innovation Week March 31 – April 4, 2014 in Kenya.
The first seven emerged from a process of peer review and the following three were selected by the Global Innovation Jury.

An SMS gateway, connected to local hospitals and the web, to channel citizens’ requests for pregnancy services. At risk women, in need of information such as hospital locations and general advice, will receive relevant and targeted updates utilising both an SMS and a GIS-based system.  The aim is to reduce maternal mortality by targeting at risk women in poorer communities in Indonesia.

“One of the causes of high maternal mortality rate in Indonesia is late response in childbirth treatment and lack of pregnancy care information.”

This project, led by a civil servant, aims to engage citizens in Pakistan in service delivery governance. The project aims to enable and motivate citizens to collect, analyze and disseminate service delivery performance data in order to drive performance and help effective decision making.

“BSDU will serve as a model of better management aided by the citizens, for the citizens.”

A Geographic Information System that gives Indonesian citizens access to information regarding government funded projects. The idea is to enable and motivate citizens to compare a project’s information with its real-world implementation and to provide feedback on this. The ultimate aim is to fight corruption in the public sector by making it easier for citizens to monitor, and provide feedback on, government-funded projects.

“On-the-map information about government-funded projects, where citizens are able to submit their opinions, should became a global standard in budget transparency!”

A digital payment system in South Africa that rewards citizens who participate in activities such as waste separation and community gardening. Citizens are able to ‘spend’ rewards on airtime, pre-paid electricity and groceries. By rewarding social volunteers this project aims to boost citizen engagement, build trust and establish the link between government and citizen actors.

“GEM offers a direct channel for communication and rewards between governments and citizens.”

An app created by a team of software developers to provide Ghanaian citizens with information about the oil and gas industry, with the aim of raising awareness of the revenue generated and to spark debate about how this could be used to improve national development.

“The idea is to bring citizens, the oil and gas companies and the government all onto one platform.”

Ghana Petrol Watch seeks to deliver basic facts and figures associated with oil and gas exploration to the average Ghanaian. The solution employs mobile technology to deliver this information. The audience can voice their concerns as comments on the issue via replies to the SMS. These would then be published on the web portal for further exposure and publicity.

“The information on the petroleum industry is publicly available, but not readily accessible and often does not reach the grassroots community in an easily comprehensible manner.”

A common platform to be implemented in Khulna City, Bangladesh, where citizens and elected officials will interact on budget, expenditure and information.

“The concept of citizen engagement for the fulfillment of pre-election commitment is an innovation in establishing governance.”

The aim of this project is an increase in child engagement in governmental budgeting and policy formulation in Mwanza City, Tanzania. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.

“In many projects I have seen, children are always the perceived beneficiaries, rarely do you see innovations where children are active participants in achieving a goal in their society. It was great to see children as active contributors to their own discourse.” – Jury Member, Shikoh Gitau.

A ‘watchdog’ newsletter in Kenya focusing on monitoring the actions of officials with the aim of educating, empowering and motivating citizens to hold their leaders to account. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.

“We endeavor to bridge the information gap in northern Kenya by giving voice to the voiceless and also highlighting their challenges. The aim is an increase in the educational level of the people through information.”

Citizen Desk is an open-source tool that combines the ability of citizens to share eyewitness reports with the public need for verified information in real time. Citizen Desk lets citizen journalists file reports via SMS or social media, with no need for technical training. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.

“It has become evident for some time now that good technical innovation must rest on a strong bedrock of social and political activity, on the ground, deeply in touch with local conditions, and sometimes in the face of power and privilege.” – Jury Member Bright Simons.”

The Unwisdom of Crowds



Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Applebaum on why people-powered revolutions are overrated in the New Republic: “..Yet a successful street revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive, positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya. Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors. Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917.
The crowd may not even represent the majority. Because a street revolution makes good copy, and because it provides great photographs, we often mistakenly confuse “people power” with democracy itself. In fact, the creation of democratic institutions—courts, legal systems, bills of rights—is a long and tedious process that often doesn’t interest foreign journalists at all. Tunisia’s ratification of a new constitution earlier this year represented the most significant achievement of the Arab Spring to date, but the agonizing negotiations that led up to that moment were hard for outsiders to understand—and not remotely telegenic
Equally, it is a dangerous mistake to imagine that “people power” can ever be a substitute for actual elections. On television, a demonstration can loom larger than it should. In both Thailand and Turkey, an educated middle class has recently taken to the streets to protest against democratically elected leaders who have grown increasingly corrupt and autocratic, but who might well be voted back into office tomorrow. In Venezuela, elections are not fair and the media is not free, but the president is supported by many Venezuelans who still have faith in his far-left rhetoric, however much his policies may be damaging the country. Demonstrations might help bring change in some of these countries, but if the change is to be legitimate—and permanent—the electorate will eventually have to endorse it.
As we often forget, some of the most successful transitions to democracy did not involve crowds at all. Chile became a democracy because its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, decided it would become one. In early 1989, well before mass demonstrations in Prague or Berlin, the leaders of the Polish opposition sat down at a large round table with their former jailers and negotiated their way out of communism. There are no spectacular photographs of these transitions, and many people found them unsatisfying, even unjust. But Chile and Poland remain democracies today, not least because their new leaders came to power without any overt opposition from the old regime.
It would be nice if these kinds of transitions were more common, but not every dictator is willing to smooth the path toward change. For that reason, the post-revolutionary moment is often more important than the revolution itself, for this is when the emotion of the mob has to be channeled rapidly—immediately—into legitimate institutions. Not everybody finds this easy. In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, demonstrators found it difficult to abandon Tahrir Square. “We won’t leave because we have to make sure this country is set on the right path,” one protester said at the time. In fact, he should already have been at home, back in his neighborhood, perhaps creating the grassroots political party that might have given Egyptians a real alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood…”

After the Protests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekc in the New York Times on why social media is fueling a boom-and-bust cycle of political: “LAST Wednesday, more than 100,000 people showed up in Istanbul for a funeral that turned into a mass demonstration. No formal organization made the call. The news had come from Twitter: Berkin Elvan, 15, had died. He had been hit in the head by a tear-gas canister on his way to buy bread during the Gezi protests last June. During the 269 days he spent in a coma, Berkin’s face had become a symbol of civic resistance shared on social media from Facebook to Instagram, and the response, when his family tweeted “we lost our son” and then a funeral date, was spontaneous.

Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment….

But after all that, in the approaching local elections, the ruling party is expected to retain its dominance.

Compare this with what it took to produce and distribute pamphlets announcing the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, and a few students sneaked into the duplicating room and worked all night to secretly mimeograph 52,000 leaflets to be distributed by hand with the help of 68 African-American political, religious, educational and labor organizations throughout the city. Even mundane tasks like coordinating car pools (in an era before there were spreadsheets) required endless hours of collaborative work.

By the time the United States government was faced with the March on Washington in 1963, the protest amounted to not just 300,000 demonstrators but the committed partnerships and logistics required to get them all there — and to sustain a movement for years against brutally enforced Jim Crow laws. That movement had the capacity to leverage boycotts, strikes and demonstrations to push its cause forward. Recent marches on Washington of similar sizes, including the 50th anniversary march last year, also signaled discontent and a desire for change, but just didn’t pose the same threat to the powers that be.

Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change. That’s one reason the same-sex marriage movement, which uses online and offline visibility as a key strategy, has been so successful, and it’s also why authoritarian governments try to ban social media.

During the Gezi protests, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Twitter and other social media a “menace to society.” More recently, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law greatly increasing the government’s ability to censor online content and expand surveillance, and Mr. Erdogan said he would consider blocking access to Facebook and YouTube. It’s also telling that one of the first moves by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia before annexing Crimea was to shut down the websites of dissidents in Russia.
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.”