Essay by Dana Fisher

This essay is one in a series of responses to A Working Hypothesis, Internet and Politics 2008: Moving People, Moving Ideas

Additional responses include: The New Activism: Why Volunteering Declined in Campaign 08, by Ari Melber, Participation and Polarization in the Networked Public Sphere, by Henry Farrell, A Response to Working Hypothesis for Internet and Politics 2008, by Sunshine Hillygus, The Revolution of the Online Commentariat, by Peter Daou, and Not the Digital Democracy We Ordered, by Matthew Hindman.

During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, both parties aimed to mobilize volunteer armies of supporters to help get their candidates’ elected.

The campaigns ran “meetup-style” components of their Websites for volunteers to take action: McCain Nation and MyBarackObama.com (which was termed “MyBo” by supporters). This election was the first time that such e-tools were made available through a national campaign to mobilize and engage local people. Although both campaigns aimed to enhance participation, the differences between the specific components of the sites had an effect on the functionality and usability of each site. In particular, the McCain site was much less usable and not as transparent for users who wanted to get involved. For example, if you wanted to participate in an Obama-related event, you could pull up all events taking place within five miles of your location, get information about the organizer, and register to participate in the event. Then, you received an automatic e-mail confirmation that you had signed up and soon thereafter, the organizer usually got in touch.

Getting involved in a McCain-related event was harder: participants could only pull up events within a wider radius, and when they tried to RSVP for an event, the request was sent out into the ether of cyberspace. Only rarely did organizers respond to requests from supporters to participate in events. There is no question that the differences between these sites had an effect on the ways individuals got involved in each campaign, as well as the degree to which they participated.

Perhaps in part due to the differences in the ways the campaigns used the Internet to connect with their base, many more Obama supporters reported giving money online. Based on research conducted at the public debate watching events in New York City during the first Presidential Debate, more than half of the participants at all of events reported donating money to their respective campaigns. Among those who gave money, 82% of the Obama supporters had donated money online and 64% of the McCain supporters had donated money online. It is likely that the constant email appeals to donate money to the Obama campaign along with the campaign’s connection to younger voters also contributed to these differences.

Beyond the technology, when we look at the people who participated in the campaign events, the differences provide insights into the diverse approaches that each campaign took with regard to reaching out to, and actively involving local people.

The people who participated in these events in New York City were very different. As one might expect, Obama supporters were much more diverse. Participants at the McCain events were predominately white males. More than half of the participants at the Obama events were women (59%). Seventeen percent of them self-identified as Latino and 44% of them self identified as being non-white. Given the demographics of Internet use in the US, it is likely that the Obama campaign was able to mobilize such a diverse group through the participants’ social networks, along with the campaign website.

The supporters were also very different in terms of their levels of civic engagement, as defined in part, by their previous voting records. While 90% of the McCain supporters had voted in the 2004 Presidential election and 70% had voted in the midterm election in 2006, only 80% of the Obama supporters had voted in the 2004 Presidential election and 57% had voted in the 2006 mid-term election. In addition, participants at the McCain events had much more political experience: 59% reported having worked for a political campaign (versus only 26% of the Obama supporters). McCain supporters were also more involved in the campaign: for those who said that the debate event was not their first involvement in the campaign (48%), they reported on average having attended 12 campaign events prior to the first Debate (versus 6 events for those Obama supporters who said that the debate event was not their first involvement in the campaign).

Overall, these differences indicate that the Obama campaign’s strategy of mobilizing people through their personal connections that capitalized on their personal stories, combined with a campaign Website that included components to channel people into events, was extremely successful in getting people plugged into the campaign in innovative ways.

Dana R. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on political decision-making, grassroots activism and civic participation. Within her work, she explores the role that the technologies of the Internet play in grassroots mobilization and how they compare to more traditional forms of political mobilization. Her second book, Activism, Inc. (Stanford University Press 2006), analyzed the grassroots tactics of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the 2004 Presidential election. For more information, go to www.columbia.edu/~drf2004/

Essay by Matthew Hindman

This essay is one in a series of responses to A Working Hypothesis, Internet and Politics 2008: Moving People, Moving Ideas

Additional responses include: The New Activism: Why Volunteering Declined in Campaign 08, by Ari Melber, Participation and Polarization in the Networked Public Sphere, by Henry Farrell, A Response to Working Hypothesis for Internet and Politics 2008, by Sunshine Hillygus, The Revolution of the Online Commentariat, by Peter Daou, and From the Bottom-Up: Using the Internet to Mobilize Campaign Participation, by Dana Fisher.

Without the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been elected President of the United States. But even as information technology has assumed unprecedented importance in American democracy, its effects on the public sphere and on campaign practice remain misunderstood.

Let us start with the obvious: Obama raised $500 million online. Without the infusion of online cash, Obama would almost certainly have lost to Hillary Clinton in the primaries. And while Obama might have won the general election without boatloads of money, his campaign organization and overall strategy would have looked radically different.
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Yet Obama’s fundraising success owed much to the fact that online audiences are not, in fact, highly fragmented. Forget the Internet caricatures offered up by journalists, campaign staffers, and even the candidates themselves. The contemporary media environment many not be as concentrated as it was in the Cronkite era, but online news audiences are far more concentrated than (rapidly declining) newspaper readership.

Moreover, as the 2008 campaign ramped up, online audience concentration—already potent—increased substantially. The largest news organizations, along with the largest left-leaning political sites, were the biggest beneficiaries.

The increase in traffic to top sites coincided with greater institutionalization and commercialization in the online public sphere. Media organizations both old and new—from The Atlantic and Time to Politico and The Huffington Post —have rounded up stables of bloggers that function much the way op-ed columnists have long functioned at elite papers. The individual blogs that got most political traffic in 2004 seem quaint by comparison.

What we did not see in 2008, though, was the professionalization of the blogosphere. That is because professionalization was present from the very start. There was never a moment—never—when the majority of blog traffic didn’t go to highly-educated professionals with degrees from Ivy League-caliber schools.

Institutionalization of blogging has brought some benefits, particularly in making the blogosphere marginally less male and less white. In much the same way that many newspapers seem to have a “quota of one” for female and minority voices on their op-ed pages, several top online publications have been forced to expand beyond one gender and a single ethnicity.

Institutionalization has also inspired some prominent efforts to dilute the elitist character of online discourse, though with only mixed success. The Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” project, for example, has consistently produced quality content. A close look at the bios of those participating, though, suggests that these new voices are not the sort of folks who bring a lunch pail to work.
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The increase in financial resources available to campaigns is inseparable from another shift. In addition to all of the other firsts it involved, the 2008 cycle will be remembered for taking database-driven campaigning far beyond previous heights.

Both campaigns constructed statistical models of turnout and partisanship for every voter on the rolls in every swing state. While this was not unprecedented, the Obama campaign’s dedication to information-centric campaigning was a difference in degree so profound that it became difference in kind.

Every aspect of the campaign information infrastructure was dramatically better than 2004. Data from myriad sources—state voter files, the candidates’ Web sites, field contacts, private information vendors—was integrated into a single system. In just a couple of presidential cycles, the statistics used to model voter attitudes and behavior have gone from rudimentary cross tabs, to the same sorts of cutting-edge learning algorithms Amazon and eBay use to predict consumer behavior.

As the election approached, the Obama campaign constantly pushed the latest models back out to field staff, and even the volunteers knocking on doors and manning the phones. And the models worked. As DNC chair Howard Dean told the National Press Club, “We can predict with 85 percent accuracy how you’re going to vote based on your credit card data without bothering to see what party you’re in.”

In truth, Dean’s claim oversimplifies the power of these models (and glosses over some key weaknesses). But his comments do force us to ask some uncomfortable questions.

Campaign databases improve with every election cycle, and the voter models get better every year. If 85 percent is the correct number this year, at what point will the number be 95 percent? How do voters feel about having their political leanings inferred from their subscription to Golf Digest, or—hypothetically—their purchase of condoms at the local pharmacy?

Whatever the implications for democratic theory, there is no denying that database-driven campaigning represents an enormous shift at both the tactical and the strategic level. For any campaign, the key metric is dollars per vote. Information-centric campaigning allows campaign professionals to measure and track the return on their spending almost in real time.

Better information on voters also allows use of the old school techniques that are most effective at getting people to the polls. Databases can provide knowledge about voter preference that neighbors, ward captains, and shoe leather provided in an earlier era. Campaigns can mobilize their base without also energizing their opponents.

Such database-driven campaigning has complex, even contradictory, implications for citizenship. The more predictable the leanings of a voter, the greater the incentive one campaign or the other has to get him or her to the polls. Better modeling of partisanship, turnout, and campaign tactic effectiveness should result in a large and durable increase in voter participation.

Yet more information can also produce new forms of digital redlining. Obama improved over Kerry’s performance partly by being able to reach solidly blue voters in otherwise red parts of swing states.

Now instead of unfriendly counties or regions being ceded to the opposition, it is the unpredictable voters—those for whom data are sparse, or for whom the models don’t predict well—who are being ignored.

Long term, this means that true swing voters are likely to shrink as a portion of the electorate. Among other things, information-centric campaigning is a recipe for increased political polarization.

For some, the notion of political candidates keeping extensive data on every citizen is alarming and creepy. Though a few safeguards exist (particularly with the use of credit information), there remains potential for abuse. Some worry that microtargeting might be Orwellian in its effectiveness, and that telling citizens exactly what they want to hear crosses the line from persuasion to manipulation.

Such fears are, as of yet, overblown. Thus far it is much easier to predict a voter’s preferences than to convince her to change them.

But the single most important thing about information-centric campaigning is that it provides a framework for constant, incremental improvement.

Statistical models of voter behavior will continue to get more accurate with each passing election. This is certainly progress, of a sort. But it is becoming increasingly clear that database-driven citizenship is not exactly the digital democracy that many have been expecting.

Matthew Hindman is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. His first book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, has just been published by Princeton University Press.

Essay by Henry Farrell*

This essay is one in a series of responses to A Working Hypothesis, Internet and Politics 2008: Moving People, Moving Ideas

Additional responses include: The New Activism: Why Volunteering Declined in Campaign 08, by Ari Melber, A Response to Working Hypothesis for Internet and Politics 2008, by Sunshine Hillygus, The Revolution of the Online Commentariat, by Peter Daou, Not the Digital Democracy We Ordered, by Matthew Hindman, and From the Bottom-Up: Using the Internet to Mobilize Campaign Participation, by Dana Fisher.

Public intellectuals interested in American politics have spent much of the last two decades agonizing over low participation and the poor state of public debate among Americans. Their arguments have been transformed by the advent of the Internet. Some – such as Yochai Benkler – have argued that the Internet offers the potential to transform participation and debate in America, by creating a ‘networked public sphere’ of civic argument and activity. Others – most prominently Cass Sunstein – have been more skeptical, claiming that new forms of debate on the Internet are liable to problems such as erroneous information cascades and balkanization of different groups into separate universes of discourse.

This debate began before the data had properly begun to come in; the wheels of social science research grind exceedingly slowly in Internet time. But we are now beginning to assemble a clearer picture of how the networked public sphere may work – and how it may indeed be transforming American society. The best data we have is on blogs – both how blogs connect to each other through hyperlinks, and what kinds of people read blogs.

At first, this data seems to support Sunstein’s view. We see good evidence of balkanization among blogs. Left wing blogs tend overwhelmingly to link to other left wing blogs; right wing blogs to other right wingers. Only around 12-16% of links cross the partisan divide. The data on blog readers is perhaps even starker. Very few people indeed read both left wing and right wing blogs. The vast majority of blog readers read only left wing or only right wing blogs. Furthermore, there is strong evidence of ideological polarization – when we scale blog readers’ views on various ideological issues, they clump together at the left and right extremes of the scale. Blog readers are far more polarized than viewers of network news, including Fox News.

Yet if we look at the data more closely, we see some evidence of a tradeoff that isn’t really considered by Benkler and Sunstein – one between participation and cross-cutting ideological debate. Political scientists such as Diana Mutz have argued that discussion between people of differing ideological persuasions tends to depress participation in politics. While we don’t have direct evidence that this is happening, we do see that readers of political blogs are significantly more likely to participate in politics than non-readers, and that readers of leftwing blogs are especially likely to participate.

We have to be careful with this kind of data (it doesn’t tell us much about causal relationships), but one plausible interpretation is that people who are more exposed to political information that supports their own ideological biases are more likely to get involved in politics, and that people who are exposed to the kinds of movement politics that we see among left-wing netroots blogs are especially likely to get involved. In short – the kinds of polarization that we see among blog readers may have positive consequences as well as negative ones. In particular, it may make these readers more likely to participate in politics in a variety of ways.

What does this have to tell us about the relationship between the networked public sphere and US elections? Three things. First – that at least part of Benkler’s argument is right. We are likely to see a major increase in political participation, especially among activists, as a result of the Internet. Nor is there any good reason to believe that this will be confined to the left wing. We may expect to see more mobilization taking place on the right, as they adopt new tools to their own particular purposes and circumstances.

Second, this surge in participation will be strongly partisan in nature. What evidence we have suggests that the people who are getting more involved in politics are far more partisan and more ideological than the average American citizen. Some may see this as a problem – American political elites tend to like bipartisanship and moderate consensus. But there are real political advantages to stronger partisan divisions – as a minor strain of American political thought has argued, they provide voters with real choices in a way that different flavors of centrism cannot.

This furthermore has interesting possible consequences for the Obama administration (I have a piece forthcoming on this in the next issue of The American Prospect). Obama’s governing philosophy is one of pragmatist consensus and civic participation. But the party machine that he has created may help spur further partisan mobilization, both on the left (as people continue to stay involved in politics) and the right (as Republicans begin to try to emulate the Democrats in order to start winning elections again).

Third, we are likely to see a growing division between partisan activists, who will participate actively in politics, and moderate non-activists, who will turn out only at elections, if at all. Markus Prior has argued that media choice is leading to a differentiation between the apathetic and moderate majority who have little interest in consuming political news, and intense partisan minorities, who are voracious consumers of information. This phenomenon may have knock on consequences for elections. We are plausibly going to see increases in participation among both apathetic moderates and engaged partisans, but in very different ways. Apathetic moderates will turn out in greater numbers at the polls (because of better GOTV technologies, social pressures from partisans etc) but will otherwise remain unengaged. Intense partisans, in contrast, are not only likely to vote, but to engage in a variety of other activities. We’re likely facing into a new age of American politics, dominated by partisan activists. It’s going to be interesting.

* This note builds on results reported in Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kaine, “Cross-Ideological Discussions among Conservative and Liberal Bloggers, Public Choice (January 2008) and Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides, “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics,”. Eric and John deserve full credit for the underlying research, but should be in no sense held accountable for errors or overblown claims in this note.

Henry Farrell is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the George Washington University, where he is affiliated with the Center for International Science and Technology Policy. Previously he was Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. In addition to a book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, Professor Farrell has authored or coauthored eighteen peer reviewed articles for journals including International Organization and Comparative Political Studies and non-academic articles for Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, the Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation and The American Prospect. He blogs at Crooked Timber and The Monkey Cage.

Essay by Ari Melber

This essay is one in a series of responses to A Working Hypothesis, Internet and Politics 2008: Moving People, Moving Ideas

Additional responses include: Participation and Polarization in the Networked Public Sphere, by Henry Farrell, A Response to Working Hypothesis for Internet and Politics 2008, by Sunshine Hillygus, The Revolution of the Online Commentariat, by Peter Daou, Not the Digital Democracy We Ordered, by Matthew Hindman, and From the Bottom-Up: Using the Internet to Mobilize Campaign Participation, by Dana Fisher.

Yes, we reached the turning point. This is the first time a presidential candidate successfully used the web to: upset a frontrunner in the primary; recruit broad-based support in the general election; route around traditional media on a national scale; completely obviate the post-Watergate campaign finance system; and foster novel forms of activism to stimulate people not only online, but across the three screens that mediate modern life.

Obama’s aides applied the Internet as a platform to relentlessly simplify, atomize and promote volunteering, activism and political expression. While organizing is often considered ideologically neutral, the campaign cultivated an organizing ethic that valued grassroots labor, energized supporters and reinforced the candidate’s message of reform and change. The campaign encouraged a new, rich range of activism for supporters, from posting grassroots events to downloading phone-banking lists at home to promoting the candidate across viral networks.

We know that many of these efforts were popular and effective. Recent data on web fundraising, email lists, ObamaMobile, social networking, YouTube and new media penetration bear this out. (See, e.g. TechPresident.com) There is one exception, however.

The national volunteering rates for this presidential campaign actually dropped compared to last cycle. The share of voters who say they “volunteered” on a presidential campaign fell compared to 2004, from nine to seven percent, in Pew’s post-election survey. (“High Marks for the Campaign, a High Bar for Obama,” Pew, Sept. 13, 2008 ). So is this year’s mass activism actually a mirage?

No, quite the opposite, for reasons that suggest our model (and discourse) of political engagement is in flux.

Here is one hypothesis: It is precisely the success and accessibility of new, alternative activism opportunities that create the appearance of a decline in volunteering. In fact, only traditional volunteering is receding.

Traditional volunteering, such as registering to help in person at a local field office, has dipped slightly (at least as a proportion of the voting public). Meanwhile, a new range of decentralized volunteering and online activism is catching on. It simply does not register in traditional survey questions.

Activists themselves may not perceive that they are “volunteering,” even though they are contacting voters for a candidate, or acting with encouragement from a campaign. (See, e.g. “The Obama Campaign: A Great Campaign, Or The Greatest?,” Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, Nov. 30, 2008.) Forwarding political messages — whether by email, text or video — is essentially a volunteer act designed to impact the election. It spreads a candidate’s message to persuade or mobilize potential voters, just like calling voters off a list at the local office.

(See, e.g. “Obama’s Wired Tuesday Push,” Ari Melber, The Nation. Also note that from 2004 to 2008, the share of voters who received campaign email spiked from 14 to 24 percent, according to Pew, while 53 percent of voters said they received campaign phone calls.)

Voter contact based on preexisting relationships and social networks is especially valuable for electoral politics — as a supplement to organized field programs. Obama’s field operation, for example, designed an iPhone application on the premise that people are more influenced by friends than cold calls. (See, e.g. “Obama’s Web-Savvy Voter Plan,” Ari Melber, The Nation, Oct 8, 2008. ) So as citizens explore different ways to engage and support a campaign or cause, some may favor the new activism over traditional volunteering. Why lick envelopes when you can make your own campaign commercials?

For the question facing our conference, these shifts in how people conceive and practice politics present a turning point for digital politics. An open, interactive spirit animates the activism that so many citizens are engaging in today. Open source politics can fulfill old promises and ideas from American life, from the progressive era’s emphasis on transparent government to the civil rights movement’s call for more participatory democracy. Internet politics can even aspire to the very founding vision of America: An open frontier where everyone has an equal voice, superficial differences recede, and citizens are empowered to debate and govern their future together.

Ari Melber is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation and a writer for the magazine’s blog. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent.

Melber is also a columnist at Politico and a contributing editor at the Personal Democracy Forum. Previously, he served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign.