Internet enables Deeper, Wider Participation

Political organisations' use of the internet is producing an expansion or widening, and also deepening or intensification of political participation. While the members and mass opinion surveys show that the online political environment is heavily colonised by the already active, they also reveal that internet-based politics is also managing to attract new people into participation that might otherwise not bother with the offline variety of politics. Balancing the potential emergence of the 'super-activist' - who adds IT know-how to their repertoire of skills - there are also the political 'newbies', generally younger people, who are just beginning to explore the possibilities of the technology, says a new ERSC report.

Overall, there were no radical changes. While all organisations are showing signs of interest in participatory uses of the new technologies, perhaps not surprisingly the most innovative uses of the technology come from the less institutionalised forms of organisation.

The ESRC project "Participation political organisations and the impact of the internet" led and written up by R Gibson and S J Ward at University of Salford was established to assess how far a range of political organisations in the UK were using new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote greater participation by their members and the wider public. In order to do this, over thirty organisations were identified and studied using a combination of methods that included in-depth interviews, random postal surveys of members, content analysis of websites, and a national face-to-face opinion survey of a representative sample of the UK population. These methods enabled the gathering of a wide range of data that permitted assessment of what the organisations themselves were doing to facilitate participation with new ICTs, and also how their members and the wider public were responding, or not, to them.

The project remained open to the possibility that change and innovation with these new technologies might result in more negative outcomes for the quantity and/or quality of participation. A central issue, points out the report, is who has the resources to access the net and whether this raises additional barriers for certain groups to become politically involved. 'In addition, the anonymity and indirectness of internet communication could mean that people’s involvement in politics becomes more individualised and superficial, further eroding the civic and public sphere.'

The organisations that were studied covered the four major types: parties, pressure groups (public interest, professional and trade unions), new social movements and protest/campaign networks. The sample was selected to provide variance on criteria such as size, resources, ideology/policy orientation, and level of institutionalisation. This diversity allowed for a comparative assessment of whether, within the bigger picture of changes to the amount and nature of participation with new ICTs, certain kinds of organisation were proving more adept in using them to stimulate participation.

Evidence was sought from the organisations themselves, their members, and the broader public about different types of ICT-related opportunities for participation, who used them and how extensively. This was gathered using traditional methodologies (postal and web questionnaires, interviews) and a new methodology developed for the project measuring the content and functions of political organisations websites, and new indicators of the new forms of internet-based participation. These datasets allowed for an extensive analysis of the impact of new ICTs on participation from both the 'top down' and 'bottom-up' perspective.

Associated Link: The report

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