| Preface |
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| Chapter 1 The Interdisciplinary Fields of Political Engineering, Public Policy Engineering, Computational Politics, and Computational Public Policy |
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This chapter describes four interdisciplinary fields originated and defined by Ashu M.G. Solo in 2011 called political engineering, public policy engineering, computational politics, and computational public policy. |
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Political engineering is the application of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science to solving problems in politics. |
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Computational politics is the application of computer science or mathematics to solving problems in politics. |
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Political engineering and computational politics include, but are not limited to, principles and methods for political decision-making, analysis, modeling, optimization, forecasting, simulation, and expression. |
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Public policy engineering is the application of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science to solving problems in public policy. |
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Computational public policy is the application of computer science or mathematics to solving problems in public policy. |
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Public policy engineering and computational public policy include, but are not limited to, principles and methods for public policy formulation, decision-making, analysis, modeling, optimization, forecasting, and simulation. |
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The chapter describes the scope of research and development in these fields, provides examples of research and development in these fields, and provides possible university curricula for academic programs in these fields. |
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| Chapter 2 Type-One and Interval Type-Two Fuzzy Logic for Quantitatively Defining Imprecise Linguistic Terms in Politics and Public Policy |
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During a presidential forum in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the moderator, Pastor Rick Warren, wanted Sen. John McCain and then-Sen. Barack Obama to define rich with a specific number. |
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Warren wanted to know at what specific income level a person goes from being not rich to rich. |
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The problem with this question is that there is no specific income at which a person makes the leap from being not rich to being rich. |
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This is because rich is a fuzzy set, not a crisp set, with different incomes having different degrees of membership in the rich fuzzy set. |
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Similarly, middle class and poor are fuzzy sets. |
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Fuzzy logic is needed to properly ask and answer Warren's question about quantitatively defining rich. |
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Similarly, fuzzy logic is needed to properly ask and answer queries about quantitatively defining imprecise linguistic terms in politics and public policy like middle class, poor, low inflation, medium inflation, and high inflation. |
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Type-one or interval type-two fuzzy logic can be used for quantitatively defining imprecise linguistic terms. |
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This chapter shows how to use type-one fuzzy logic and interval type-two fuzzy logic for this purpose, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. |
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Imprecise terms in natural languages should be considered to have qualitative definitions, quantitative definitions, crisp quantitative definitions, fuzzy quantitative definitions, type-one fuzzy quantitative definitions, and interval type-two fuzzy quantitative definitions. |
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| Chapter 3 A Research Design for the Examination of Political Empowerment Through Social Media |
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The chapter presents a research design for examining social media use in political contexts, framed as the methodology community case study. |
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The main difference from a traditional case study is that the focus is on online communities rather than single organizations. |
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The chapter presents the case study methodology along with the individual methods that have been applied in community case studies: interviews, stakeholder analysis, the Delphi method, social network analysis (and other digital methods), document, and genre analysis. |
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The chapter concludes by discussing possible types of insights gained through applying these methods, and presenting a few example findings from previous research. |
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The design has been successfully applied in the author's PhD thesis and later work, and is presented here in the hope that it might provide aid and inspiration for graduate students facing similar research problems. |
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| Chapter 4 Political Campaigning by Super PACs in the Computer Age |
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Video communication during political campaigns is undertaken on television and on the internet. |
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The landscape of videos on television is familiar to all - a sprawling field of brief ads. |
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The differences between television and the Internet mean that different sources of video communication might be favored depending on the medium. |
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In this chapter, the sources of the most popular videos in contemporary political campaigns on the internet will be examined. |
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Specifically, the study examines the sources of the most visible campaign videos on YouTube during the 2018 Senate elections in the United States. |
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Special attention is paid to the relative prominence of Super PACs as a source of campaign videos. |
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| Chapter 5 The Wisconsin Spring After Two Gubernatorial Elections |
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Eight years have passed since the original Arab Spring in Tunisia took place in January 2011. |
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It has been almost six years since the impact of the Wisconsin Spring on Scott Walker's attempts at policy changes in the state occurred. |
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At that time, the effect of social media on public awareness and public participation in political events was considered new and innovative. |
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Since then, Walker won a recall election and a re-election. |
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He made a run for the Presidency and lost. |
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In November 2018, Scott Walker was unseated in the gubernatorial race by Tony Evers. |
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This chapter updates what has transpired since then and the impact of social media on the events in Wisconsin, determining whether social media impacted public opinion, political participation, and electoral outcomes in the state. |
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| Chapter 6 Fake News, Hate Speech and Nigeria's Struggle for Democratic Consolidation: A Conceptual Review |
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Adamkolo Mohammed Ibrahim |
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In addition to looking at the ongoing election campaigns in Nigeria, past election campaigns both locally and globally (especially since Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the 2016 presidential election in the United States) have highlighted how fake news and hate speech can be used to cause political instability in society. |
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Ever since, fake news and hate speech issues and their impacts on democratic processes have gained widespread research attention. |
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Hence, an urge exists to not only further understand the concepts of fake news and hate speech but also to define them based on empirical and critical literature. |
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This chapter intends to clearly provide further understanding about the definition of fake news through a redefinition of the concept based on a critical review of literature. |
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Also, critically discussed in this chapter are the impacts both fake news and hate speech can have on the consolidation of democracy in Nigeria. |
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Some policy recommendations are offered. |
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| Chapter 7 Digital Campaigning in France, a Wide Wild Web? Emergence and Evolution of the Market and Its Players |
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In-spite of the extensive media coverage of election technologies, the market and its players remain largely unknown. |
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What are their strategies? |
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This chapter leverages new empirical data to answer these questions, drawing in particular from a series of interviews with providers of political technology in France. |
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We show that the sector is heterogeneous and that its boundaries are fluid, including actors who provide wildly different services and initially embraced different economic and technological strategies. |
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We also show that the nature of the services provided as well as the partisan dimension of each company depends on its target customers. |
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However, due to economic constraints, the sector is undergoing a radical restructuring. |
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The laborious implementation of "elections 2.0" in France is continuing with an increasing professionalization of its players, leading the sector to become more homogeneous and internationalized. |
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| Chapter 8 Personalization Online: Effects of Online Campaigns by Party Leaders on Images of Party Leaders Held by Voters |
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Research on the increasing importance of party leaders in elections has observed that party leaders maintain personal websites, blogs, and social networking sites in order to personalize the image of themselves by mixing personal and professional matters. |
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This chapter examines whether these efforts affect the party leader character impressions by voters in a positive way. |
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The chapter presents two experiments that examine the impact of exposure to authentic personal websites and, as a form of social media, blogs of party leaders on voters' perceptions regarding various traits of party leaders during a Finnish election campaign. |
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The perception of one leader was significantly enhanced by exposure to his website as well as his blog. |
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Moreover, exposure to the blog by this politician resulted in an enhanced assessment of his personality traits whereas exposure to his website had positive effect on the evaluation of his professional traits. |
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In making sense of the findings, web and social media approaches, and participant expectancies are discussed. |
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| Chapter 9 Preaching to the Choir: Coordinating Strategic Voting on Facebook During the 2018 Hungarian Election Campaign |
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A main topic of the 2018 election campaign in Hungary was strategic voting, seen as an opportunity for opposition parties to remove the governing coalition from power. |
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Strategic split-ticket voting was incentivized by the political context and the electoral system and was further facilitated by a limited cooperation between opposition political forces. |
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Nonetheless, demand-side coordination was indispensable in this aspect. |
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While social media was an important channel during the campaign, it was not crucial for strategic voting as it was mostly used to reinforce the positions of candidates among their own supporters, "preaching to the choir". |
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The influence of strategically split ballots can be measured in seat shares by modeling what would have happened if there was no coordination and cooperation at all. |
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Results indicate that strategic votes transferred a total of 15 seats from the governing parties to the opposition political blocs, however this was not enough to prevent the decisive victory of the Fidesz-KDNP and another two-thirds supermajority in the Hungarian National Assembly. |
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| Chapter 10 Political Campaign Communication in the Information Age: Some Difficulties With Basic Concepts |
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According to scholars, the use of mediatization could be understood as communicative representation of politicians. |
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From this perspective, the concept of mediatization in politics is not an automatism, it is a functional principle of media, more preferably the social media. |
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To understand this activity of politicians on social media, the online attributes of broadcasting media could be conceptualized as self-mediatization of politics. |
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The chapter will look through some of the most used concepts in political communication that aim to interpret the communicative nature of politicians in online campaigns. |
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The used communication techniques on social media set the focus of analysis on the insufficiency of above-mentioned concepts). |
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Besides presenting the main difficulties of basic concepts, this chapter aims to introduce the phenomenon of attention-based politics as a possible solution to research on political campaign communication in information era. |
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| Chapter 11 The Use of Twitter During the 2013 Protests in Brazil: Mainstream Media at Stake |
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Nina Fernandes dos Santos |
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2013 was an important year for the Brazilian political life, as citizens took to the streets against the increase of public transport fare. |
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The demonstrations revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with the Brazilian political system and the traditional media did not escape the criticisms. |
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This chapter focuses on how discourses about mainstream media were articulated on Twitter during Brazilian protests. |
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Our corpus has 6,580 tweets that directly mention 12 Brazilian mainstream media. |
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The goal was to understand how these discourses were translated into the practice of using Twitter in this specific context which mixes the possibility of participation and expression in a digital and social environment and the context of protest. |
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Results show that at the same time that the major media continue to be important elements guiding the political discussion in social networks, the speeches towards them are extremely critical. |
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Although Globo is the main target, the tone is almost homogeneous between different media, which shows a general mistrust towards the communication system. |
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| Chapter 12 Can Revolutionary Media Be Made Online? |
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This chapter presents Mosireen, a non-profit media collective and an alternative media outlet founded by a group of activists, writers, journalists, and filmmakers in the midst of a political change in Egypt. |
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This group developed a special interpretation of the concept of "revolutionary media," and for more than two years have been executing their ideas on the ground. |
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Thus, Mosireen is a case to study the instrumentalization of the Internet in political activism, and the revolutionalization of the use of digital and social media at the time of struggle against the regime. |
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| Chapter 13 #M5S (Five Star Movement) and the National Political Campaign: New Media and Old-Fashioned Trust |
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In 2009, a new political movement was born in Italy. |
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It is called "Five Star Movement" (M5S) and it was positioned as a new voice of Italian people: alternative, populist, against elites, and against the traditional "way of doing" politic in the First and Second Republic Age. |
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The power of this new political subject is linked with the use of social media platforms to communicate and share information, opinions, and positions with its "base" in a participative democracy perspective. |
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In the last national political campaign, the M5S obtained 32% of the votes with a peak in the South of Italy. |
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The chapter aims at presenting the main results of an empirical research focused on Sicilian voters of the East coast, in order to verify if and how digital communication helped in obtaining this success. |
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Data show evidence about the relevance recognized to social media as first direct sources for collecting political information. |
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The respondents express a large consent for traditional media that maintain in the public opinion a strong reputation in construction and share the public-sphere. |
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| Chapter 14 Identifying Influential Users in Twitter Networks of the Turkish Diaspora in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany |
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This study investigates how members of the Turkish diaspora connected online using Twitter as a social medium during the Gezi Park protests and how those connections and the structure of the resulting Twitter network changed after the protests ended. |
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Further, the authors examine respondents' online influence and their roles in the movement, using social network centrality measures and Tommasel and Godoy's (2015) novel metric. |
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The authors utilize data from Twitter to determine the connections between 307 distinct users, using both online and offline surveys. |
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The findings reveal that Turkish diaspora members' use of Twitter provided the impetus for larger structural changes to the Twitter network. |
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Moreover, results indicate that users' influence was not related to the frequency of their re-tweets or the number of their Twitter followers. |
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Rather, users' influence corresponds to other factors such as their ability to spread information and engage with other users and also to the importance of their Twitter content. |
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| Chapter 15 Rise and Fall of Digital Activism in Mexico From 2000-2019 |
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Political activism is more alive than ever. |
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After the scandal of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, online social media platforms restricted the distribution of content to privacy laws. |
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But populism disruption in many countries fosters political discontent. |
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Online protests and everyday claims are rising. |
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Add to this context environmental problems and an absence of an ideological framework. |
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All these conditions foster the use of digital activism. |
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But this field of research has studied single cases, losing connections with societies and history. |
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The aim of this chapter is to explain the evolution of digital activism in a long period of time. |
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To achieve such purpose, the author analyzes 11 Mexican events that took place from 2000 to 2019 and provide a classification framework to understand how digital activism transforms over time. |
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| Chapter 16 Intermediality and Critical Engagement in Nigerian Twitter Memes |
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The ingenious deployment of the digital media by online users in Nigeria offers opportunities in this chapter to monitor the trajectories of rietizens' engagement with public dialogues on Nigerian Twitter. |
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By exploring the dimensions of intermedial exchanges (i.e., intermediality), this study will analyzes how digital users explore innovative digital media tools such as Twitter memes in reinstating their views on critical discourses in the Nigerian polity. |
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The author adopts a mixed methods design, which includes quantitative content analysis, discourse and semiotics analyses. |
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Two prominent Nigerian Twitter accounts-@ KraksTV and @I_pissVodka-are purposively selected for this chapter, and the author will evaluate memes posted between April 2018 and May 2018 by paying close attention to the themes and issues propagated. |
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The author concludes that intermediality promotes a dynamism of opinion characterized by technological innovation, in which Twitter meme is categorized, enabling the expression of political agency and furtherance of critical engagement. |
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| Chapter 17 Organizing With Self-Organization? The Ramifications of the Strategic Use of Facebook in Informal Civic Activism |
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This chapter aims at exploring the ramifications of the strategic usage of Facebook in informal civic activism against the yet-to-be-studied case of an African third wave democratic country. |
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Focusing on the emergence of Sokols up to the unprecedented 2017 street demonstration in Cape Verde, it reviews findings from a multidimensional empiric-holistic method that addresses the associated role of Facebook. |
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The study confirms the existence of a heterarchical and distributed leadership alongside a horizontal and collaborative decision-making arrangement in a Facebook-mediated civic activism movement. |
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While corroborating the tendency of grassroots activism in adopting a hybrid blend of online and offline, it concludes that Facebook was used in support of the largely self-organized Sokols movement and the loosely structured street demonstration held in Sao Vicente. |
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However, besides not necessarily changing the fundamental structures of the civic activism movement-including organization, leadership, decision-making and protest staging-Facebook only supplemented the offline practices. |
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| Chapter 18 Context, Frame, Opportunity, and Resource: Contemporary Portuguese Anti-Austerity Social Movements With a View to Social Media |
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Social media have become an important tool in our interactions and networks. |
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Studies around social movements focused on these platforms' potential for becoming a new public sphere given their nature and features. |
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However, an address of their influence on social engagement can't overshadow they're used by social actors themselves as part of a greater social frame. |
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In this light, a qualitative characterization of Facebook's role on Portuguese anti austerity social movements "Geracao a Rasca" and "Que se lixe a troika!" is presented through discourse analysis of the testimony of several of their founding members. |
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While it may be unquestionable Facebook had an important role in these movements, it wasn't the only tool used or the most relevant: face-to-face and direct mobile phone interaction were essential tools for this end, along with traditional media whose gaze the movements capitalized on for reach. |
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Thus, the question in this chapter is whether these technologies represent a new way for us to communicate, or constitute an additional forum for that end? |
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| Chapter 19 Anything New Under the Sun? Social Movements and Virtual Social Networks in Comparative Perspective |
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The most recent technologies of production, transmission, and access to information have made it possible, under appropriate conditions, to change the visibility of national and international concerns, as well as the protest movements many helped stimulate. |
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Different countries have been faced with a multiplicity of movements articulated online that surpass virtual world barriers and (re) assume presence on the streets. |
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In this chapter, drawing from several examples with different claim bases, authors discuss virtual social networks' role in political participation. |
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However, as it happens in so many initiatives in this field, this is not affirmed from an underestimation of the role of Traditional Means of Communication or that of the trenches in the access and use of digital means. |
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| Compilation of References |
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| About the Contributors |
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| Index |
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