Interpreting Hashtag Politics

Policy Ideas in an Era of Social Media

S. Jeffares

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137357748
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Why do policy actors create branded policy ideas like Big Society and does launching them on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book reveals how policy analysis can adapt in an increasingly mediatised to offer interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.

1

Policy Ideas and Hashtag Politics

Hashtag politics is the practice of naming policy ideas, thereby giving them a life and, ultimately, a death. Here are three British examples of hashtag politics:

1. In February 2001, Birmingham City Council adopted ‘Flourishing Neighbourhoods’ as a strategic priority. During the 12 months of 2002, over 80 different organisations and initiatives aligned with Flourishing Neighbourhoods. In October 2004, questions were asked in the council chamber about why Flourishing Neighbourhoods had been ‘scrapped’.

2. In April 2009, the British Government announced an initiative called Total Place, designed to examine public spending and local leadership. In February 2010, Sir Michael Bichard published his report on the 13 official pilot projects and related activity across the country. In December 2011, the Coalition Government were said to have ‘torn up Labour’s Total Place programme’.

3. In November 2009, soon-to-be Prime Minister David Cameron stated his desire for a ‘Big Society’. In UK broadsheet newspapers, 33 articles mentioned the phrase, its merit and related activities. During the 12 months of 2010 this rose to 1,708, growing to 2,293 in 2011 and reducing to 1,377 in 2012 and 680 in 2013. In April 2012, the Daily Telegraph suggested the policy idea was ‘dead’.

This book is about the practice of creating and discussing policy ideas: those purposive, often branded initiatives of policy-makers, that, in the space of less than a thousand days are coined, fostered, launched, discussed, written about, adopted, critiqued, subverted, derided, ignored, forgotten and replaced. Policy ideas are policy instruments that express deeper ideas, an imagined future couched in a unique, memorable, searchable, branded identity. Despite their taken-for-granted position in policy-making, they are largely overlooked, in contrast to broader political ideas such as ‘democracy’ or ‘neoliberalism’. They are, by some, deemed too narrow to be interesting (Berman, 2009) their visions nebulous, with claims of novelty dismissed as old wine in new bottles; to many they are much-hyped brands that are too easily tarnished. As such, policy actors and researchers ignore them. This book argues that not only are policy ideas worth researching, but that the increasing speed and growing volume of discussion surrounding policy ideas through social media presents a new challenge for both research and policy practice and, therefore, it has never been more important to understand policy ideas.

The widespread adoption of mobile communications and social media channels offers a new environment for policy-making. With social media, never has it been cheaper, easier or quicker to coin and disseminate an idea. Similarly, never has it been easier to expedite the demise of a policy idea, or to mobilise an alternative viewpoint. But also, never has it been easier to ignore a policy idea, amid such noise and information overload.

This book seeks to understand the theory and practice of making policy ideas. Its three aims are to conceptualise policy ideas, to theorise their lifecycle and to understand them in an era of social media. This book provides the first comprehensive conceptualisation of these curious mainstays of policy-making. It offers a new theorisation of the motivation and lifecycle of policy ideas. It draws on a decade of primary empirical research, with examples of policy practice in a range of UK policy initiatives. It shows how our understanding of policy ideas can be illuminated through interviews, observation, policy documents, newspaper archives and social media data.

The book argues that policy ideas are important but underacknowledged tools of modern policy practice. And in an era of social data, where communication is rapid and voluminous, practices and methods are evolving. The book argues that policy ideas are the mechanism by which aspirations, initiatives and projects are expressed. Considerable resources are invested in their development and launch. For policy actors, deciding whether and when to engage or disengage with policy ideas can be a precarious judgement call. Considerable attention is levelled at the latest and loudest. Then the circus moves on and the policy idea is forgotten. Yet despite the centrality of policy ideas in the process of policy-making, current work tends to overlook their importance.

There are several reasons why policy ideas are currently neglected. Political scientists interested in ideas tend to take a macro perspective on broader political ideas. Policy scientists focus on fads and fashions of leadership, rather than specific and, it is argued, narrow and uninteresting programmes or policy instruments. Others seek to understand why agendas take hold during a window of opportunity (Kingdon, 1995). The visions and fantasies expressed in policy ideas designed for broad appeal suggest nebulous managerial jargon and are judged unworthy of detailed study. Policy ideas are associated with the marketisation of political discourse, where selling the message and brand management are more important than the content of the policy (Eshuis & Edwards, 2012; Needham, 2011). The resulting fragmented conceptualisation of policy ideas maps over into how they are understood over time. While most policy ideas are forgotten as quickly as they appeared, when they are reflected upon they are often viewed as old wine in new bottles, or as technical innovations diffusing over time.

The widespread adoption of social media among policy communities means that policy ideas compete for attention and reputation within a voluminous and transient environment, and all the while leaving a digital footprint. The search for this digital footprint finds social scientists, market analysts and computer scientists developing tools to capture, index and visualise, in order to research sentiment, intent and trends. They are seemingly motivated differently: while some wish to predict market fluctuations, others are interested in election outcomes or understanding social mobilisation. So far, efforts to measure the impact of social media on political discourse have relied on crude sentiment meters, designed to cut through the noise to understand the subjectivity of a policy idea.

By highlighting the importance of policy ideas the book explores possibilities for adaptation in the methods and techniques that are used to capture a sense of the fast-moving environment in which policy ideas are communicated. It would be easy for this form of analysis to remain the preserve of IT mavens or quantitative analysts, but this book acknowledges and responds to the argument that it is not enough to simply capture huge ‘massified’ social media datasets (Neuhaus & Webmoor, 2012); the book explores the possibility of developing techniques to systematically extract subjective expression and evaluate its shape, and develops new methods of understanding the subjective trajectory of the policy idea, its appeal and its eventual demise.

The book investigates how new generations of interpretive policy researchers, ethnographers, discourse theorists, linguists and policy-makers can add real-time subjective analysis of policy ideas to their analytic repertoire. The book speaks to those seeking to go beyond merely separating the signal from the noise and counting it (Silver, 2012). There have recently been calls for a generation of policy actors and researchers who are able to interpret the qualitative aspects of big data (Kim et al., 2013); to that end, this book is offered as one such primer.

This book is based on a decade of research focused on policy ideas, and offers a rich account of published thinking alongside theoretically grounded and methodologically innovative primary research. It draws together disparate literatures to offer a rich conceptualisation of policy ideas, and uses discourse theory to understand their lifecycle. It pulls together literatures on social media from commerce, social movements, electoral politics and professional practice. A particular focus of the book is its methodological offering, including in-depth qualitative analysis, Q methodology and social media text analytics. The arguments draw on rich empirical accounts of policy ideas including the Big Society; Birmingham’s Flourishing Neighbourhoods; an idea about area-based budgeting – Total Place; and the 2012 campaign to elect local Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), as well as discussion of reforms in nursing (Compassionate Care) and housing benefit (known as the Bedroom Tax).

These British examples are offered to illustrate a broader movement in policy-making globally, whereby policy actors are adapting to the opportunity of new forms of communication and an increasingly congested and multi-platform environment. The thinking in this book is intended to outlive many of the examples herein. It is hoped the concepts and methods it introduces will offer a means for readers to identify examples within their own expertise or locale.

Three challenges for policy ideas

Challenge 1: ‘But surely these are not new, we have had policy ideas of the kind you suggest for many years?’

When Franklin D. Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination for the US presidency in 1932, he set out his policy idea of a New Deal. For the next three years a bewildering series of programmes, reforms and laws were passed to respond to what Roosevelt framed as a ‘war against the emergency’ following the Great Depression. This chain of activities, including agricultural and banking reform, work programmes, civil service wage and pension reforms and the end of prohibition, was labelled as part of a New Deal for the American public, and has since been labelled as a three-year-long New Deal part 1. This careful and consistent branding provided a rallying cry not only for its supporters, but also for its detractors, as Roosevelt acknowledged during one of his regular ‘Fireside chat’ radio broadcasts:

A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.

(Roosevelt, 1934)

Roosevelt communicated his emerging definition of the New Deal – what it meant and what it didn’t – through radio and public information films, and the American public wrote him letters expressing their views.

New Deal is a policy idea because it takes two words and joins them to create a unique compounded term, a vehicle by which to communicate a programme of public policy. Illustrated through a range of examples, this book explores how we attach a range of labels to these policy ideas that give them, at once, ideational, instrumental, visionary, container and brand-like characteristics. With the example of New Deal in mind, it is clear that policy ideas are by no means new as a mechanism. However, more thinking is needed to understand how such mechanisms operate in a modern communications environment.

Challenge 2: ‘Surely there’s nothing new under the sun, we just keep on recycling the same ideas over and over?’

When asked about policy ideas and where they come from, one of Robert Kingdon’s respondents, quoted in his seminal text on Policy Agendas, replied that ideas are like perennials that lie dormant and then flower again (1995, p. 141). Another added that ideas are nothing new: ‘We are resurrecting old dead dogs, sprucing them up, and then floating them up to the top’ (1995, p. 173). For long-established public servants, ‘new’ policy initiatives seldom appear new. When prompted to discuss a new policy idea, they might well start with a story of how it was tried previously 20 years ago. But importantly, not all have this memory or make these associations: a colleague of those who make the ‘dead dog’ association may well view a scheme as something completely fresh and new, and attach a different set of subjective associations. This rather simplistic reasoning gives a glimmer of insight into how a ‘new’ idea can be both old and novel.

For some this prompts the question, ‘where do ideas come from?’ But asking such a question must also be paired with the question, ‘how do ideas die?’ In other words, what happens to all of the emotional attachment and sentiment directed at a policy idea that in many cases can occupy a central part of a civil servant’s role for two or three years? So a core theme of this book is to explore not only what these policy ideas are, but how they are conceived and are born, how they live and, importantly, how they die.

Challenge 3: ‘Surely the partial and shallow use of Twitter and Facebook offer just that: a partial and shallow discussion of policy issues?’

Benjamin Disraeli wrote of One Nation in 1845; Roosevelt of a New Deal in 1932; Harold MacMillan talked of a Middle Way in 1938; and Tony Blair of the Third Way in 1994. All these came before an era where people could publish their thoughts on a policy using a device in their pocket. David Cameron’s Big Society from 2009 was introduced in press conferences and discussed on Twitter as #bigsociety (Cameron, 2009). As of June 2013, 487,000 tweets mentioning ‘Big Society’ and 47,000 mentioning ‘#bigsociety’ had been published on the internet. Although the character limit on Twitter is less than 140 characters, to overlook what is happening within these data is short sighted.

Those sceptical of using social media data in policy analysis will commonly follow up with a question such as ‘yes, but what proportion of the general public is active on Twitter?’ When discussing public policy, the response needs to be a question back: ‘what proportion of think tanks, columnists, politicians, senior civil servants, journalists, newspapers, media organisations, social scientists, bloggers, researchers, lobbyists and consultants are not on Twitter?’ And of those not regularly tweeting or posting their views on other platforms, what proportion read tweets online or as quoted in their daily newspaper articles or mentioned by radio interviewers and TV presenters? In terms of those working on the frontline, what proportion of employers’ organisations, unions, professional organisations and trade magazines do not have a Facebook page? What proportion of frontline NHS workers did not view the viral YouTube video attacking Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms or read some of the 2,500 comments below it (NxtGen & Gee, 2011)? Answers to questions of how policy is debated online remain somewhat unknown. This book joins the many other projects investigating the role of social media, bringing a particular focus on the ‘social lives’ of specific policy ideas.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at academic researchers and postgraduate research students with an interest in policy analysis. Most readers will be drawn from the policy or political sciences; however, methods involved will be of interest to business analysts and psychologists. Although the author and many of the examples are based in the UK, the developments, methods and the concepts discussed are intended for an international audience. The contemporary and practice-focused subject matter means this book is likely to be of interest to policy practitioners and to the growing numbers of people interested in how to separate the signal from the noise in social media data, and the life and trajectory of ideas.

The methodological focus of the book will be familiar to those engaged with the interpretive policy analysis community and its associated annual conference. In particular, those interested in the principles underpinning political discourse theory will recognise this as an empirical application of this work. The focus on Q methodology will be of interest to the multi-disciplinary community of scholars and practitioners who use this method, particularly those interested in using Q in policy research and administering Q sorts online. The book is also relevant to social scientists interested in digital and text analytics, particularly the qualitative analysis of social media text and ways to overcome the challenges that arise in this type of work.

Although this is a research monograph rather than a text book per se, its focus on methods would be of interest to postgraduate research and doctoral training programmes.

Structure of the book

The book has eight chapters. Chapter 2 explores how policy ideas are conceptualised in different ways. It is based on five accounts or streams of literature. The first focuses on ideational accounts, ranging from Kingdon (1995) and his idea of perennial ideas, along with the political ideas (Braun & Busch, 1999; Gofas & Hay, 2012), to ideas in good currency (Schön, 1963), magic concepts (Pollitt & Hupe, 2011) and policy issues (Downs, 1972; Peters & Hogwood, 1985). It includes discussion of key symbols (Lasswell, 1949), labels (Edelman, 1977), keywords (Williams, 2013) and fuzzwords (Cornwall, 2007), and whether ideas are more akin to viruses, rather than products to be sold (Dudley & Richardson, 2001; Gofas, 2009; Richardson, 2000).

Importantly, Chapter 2 argues that there are four other accounts that require attention. First, the instrumental role of policy ideas as discourse (Schmidt, 2010), or ideas as roadmaps (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993) or purposive smokescreens (Reich, 1990). A second account focuses on the visionary qualities of policy ideas, like visions in urban planning (Shipley & Newkirk, 1999), the pursuit to coin a memorable phrase and the role of visions in energising and creating meaning and creative competition between narratives (Nanus, 1995). A third account focuses on the policy idea as a container concept that at its extension takes us into political philosophy, political discourse and empty signifiers (Laclau, 2005). Fourth, the policy idea as a brand – a slogan; as a compound (Benczes, 2006), but also as a brand that adds value, that is marketed, that diffuses, or perhaps follows the hype cycle of modern technologies. Illustrated through the case of the Big Society, the chapter argues that policy ideas can sustain all five kinds of label and have until now eluded definition.

Chapter 3 explores the lifecycle of policy ideas. It starts by considering the challenge of identifying the death and demise of policy ideas and, in doing so, revisits the policy science literature on policy termination. It sets out four models for measuring the life of a policy. The first is characterised as ‘policy as activity’, whereby a frequency graph measures fluctuation of discussion over time, as reflected in policy issues/policy cycles, newspaper citations and more recently search engine indexes, such as Google Trends (Choi & Varian, 2012). Although the ‘policy as activity’ metric predominates, this chapter discusses three alternative measures for the Y axis. For those interested in diffusion and growing market share, a ‘policy as diffusion’ model measu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Policy Ideas and Hashtag Politics
• 2. Theorising Policy Ideas
• 3. The Lifecycle of Policy Ideas
• 4. Identifying Policy Viewpoints
• 5. Social Media and Policy Practices
• 6. Capturing the Digital Footprint of Policy Discussion
• 7. Interpreting Social Media Data
• 8. The Future of Hashtag Politics
• 9. Appendix
• References
• Index