Defining Democracy in a Digital Age

Political Support on Social Media

B. Lutz, P. Toit

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137496195
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The internet has created a new social base where governments are ever more critically examined and measuring public sentiment expressed on social media is crucial to gauging ongoing support for democracy. This book illustrates a methodology for doing so, and considers the impact of this new public sphere on the future of democracy.

1

Democracy in the New Digital Age

Abstract: Chapter 1 introduces the two main intertwined themes of the book. Our first theme joins up with a long list of analysts who note the current doubts about the viability of democracy as a system of rule. The second follows from that. If democracy is to be secured in the twenty-first century, then its practices and institutions will have to be compatible with the communications technology of the Internet, especially social media, which has already shown its power as an instrument of political mobilisation in the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, along with the Occupy Wall Street. But democratic durability also needs forces of social cohesion, and here social media, in our view, can also be decisively influential. We conclude by presenting the central question addressed in the book: can digital media, including social media, contribute to creating new, durable imagined communities favourable to the re-construction of the social base of democracies?

Keywords: digital social media; imagined communities; social requisites of democracy

Lutz, Barend and Pierre du Toit. Defining Democracy in a Digital Age: Political Support on Social Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137496195.0006.

Two intertwined themes are elaborated in this book. The first is the concern with democracy as a system of government. With the start of the Third Wave of democratisation in Portugal in 1974, and especially with the impetus provided by the end of the Cold War in 1989, optimism peaked about the prospects of extending this type of regime to more and more societies hitherto under authoritarian rule of some or other type. By the end of the century, however, concern about a Third Reverse Wave appeared to be taking shape. It was with this wave that doubts about the global prospects of democracy began to surface.

The Global Financial Crisis, which took off in 2008 in the United States and impacted rapidly on the global economy, added another measure of doubt about democracy. This time the concern was not just about the viability of democracies at the edges of the democratic zone in the developing world, but also about the quality of democracies at the centre – such as the United States and some members of the Eurozone – and especially about the economic base of these democracies. Yet another layer of doubt was added by the so-called Arab Spring, which started with the overthrow of autocratic rules in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, and was followed by Libya shortly after. Initially it was thought by many that another wave of democratisation was sweeping the Arab world, hence the notion of ‘Spring’. Yet, in none of the three Arab states mentioned earlier has democracy been stabilised, nor has it spread elsewhere into the Arab world with success.

These three distinct historical episodes and their concerns about democracy as a system of rule do not stand alone. They form part of a thread of thought that goes far back into the history of democracy and the history of thought about the viability of democracy. What makes this ‘politics of doubt’ in the twenty-first century different from anything that existed before is the increasingly active role played by the new Internet-based communications technologies.

This leads to the second theme of this book. Communications technologies, such as the plethora of social media platforms available, stand at the apex of a wave of technological innovation that has been compared to that of the Industrial Revolution. Driving this wave is the exponential increase in computing power, usually expressed in what is now called ‘Moore’s Law’. This is the observation made by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, which states that the number of transistors that could be fitted onto a computer chip has doubled every 18 months from the time that the chip was invented up to the time of his writing in 1965.¹ This rapid growth has not only led to multifaceted changes in the established capitalist societies, but also in the developing world. Computer-driven machines are increasingly taking over mostly middle-class jobs, with concomitant declines in job security and lower employment levels. These destabilising changes were not limited to the economic base of established democracies, but also spread to the social base to undermine the social cohesion democracies need to function as stable and durable regimes. A screen culture has become omnipresent in those societies with saturation levels of penetration by the Internet. Such a culture affects social life in a fundamental way as it changes how people communicate and otherwise engage with one another. Digital social media, with Facebook, WeChat, Twitter and YouTube as leading examples, have become major global channels of communication, with ramifications for established democracies and their social bases – some positive, others disruptive.

One of the ways in which social media enhances democratic participation is through the potential global connectivity of this technology. Individuals also gain almost complete control over the content of the statements they release on the Internet. Individual self-expression, a key component of democratic participation, is therefore presented into the public space more efficiently than ever before. It should be noted, however, that this capacity is a double-edged sword as it can also work to the detriment of democracy. There is, as yet, no effective way of converting such articulate mass self-expression by individuals into coherent forms that can mesh with established democratic institutions to serve as effective demands capable of shaping public policies. In short, these expressions lack structure: they have yet to be ordered into categories and have yet to be ranked in order of preference. Until such structure is attained, it is argued, throughout this book, that social media is likely to continue to inhibit the maintenance of social cohesion in these societies.

The aim here is to examine the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on the social base of democracies by using a conceptual framework that is located within political science rather than the related fields of communication studies and the sociology of social movements. The social requisites of democracy, as presented in the authoritative political science literature from the late 1950s onwards, have been referenced by the authors of this study to consider the impact of these technologies on society. This means that when the political impact of social media is interpreted, the key concepts from political systems analyses are used, such as demand generation and the conversion processes of interest articulation and interest aggregation. When the impact of these technologies on the social cohesion of democracies is interpreted, Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities² is drawn on, as well as the core concepts of a Civic Culture and of social capital. From this conceptual framework the following question is presented: can digital media, including social media, contribute to creating new, durable imagined communities favourable to the re-construction of the social base of democracies?

The approach here to answering this question is to address this lack of structure. This is done by presenting original data analysis methods with which a quantitative sentiment analysis is conducted from a large dataset from Twitter. With this it will be demonstrated that sentiment about a specific issue can be aggregated into categories – a crucial first step in creating structure.

Today there is an explosive increase in online data: blogs, social networks, web pages, digitised books and articles, and many other forms of electronic documents – all of which mean that there is much more information available. At the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2012, ‘Big Data’³ was heralded as a new type of valuable economic asset.⁴ The sentiment rife in the academic and business world alike is that Big Data and the rapidly advancing ICT using Big Data can and will ‘open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions’.⁵ However, this rise in the quantity of information necessitates more efficient, automated methods of data analysis.

Within the field of computer science there are already a number of automated content-analysis applications which are well-suited for computer science purposes. We, as authors, believe, along with others such as Hopkins and King before us, that these applications can and should be adapted to fit social sciences better.⁶ In this study, this function of a content-analysis programme will be paramount as it will be used to highlight the information that is relevant to the chosen topic of democracy.

Within blogs and microblogs (such as Twitter) a large number of people are voicing their opinions on various issues. One could view these opinions as visible public expressions of opinion or interest articulation, which might be more valuable to political scientists than attitudes and non-attitudes expressed in traditional survey responses.⁷ Not all scholars, however, agree with the opinion that these visible expressions of opinion are more valuable than the poll data. For instance, in a critical review of Ginsberg’s book The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power,⁸ Smith highlights some of the problems such as over-emphasised opinions of certain actors or strong views and the inability to determine whether an opinion comes from a knowledgeable person. With regard to this discussion on the preference of polling or visible expression methods of measuring public opinion, it is important to remember that neither of these techniques is infallible. It is, however, encouraging to see that, as O’Connor et al. noted: ‘[E]xpensive and time-intensive polling can be supplemented or supplanted with the simple-to-gather text data that are generated from online social networking’.⁹

The O’Connor et al. study focussed on comparing public opinion measured from polls with sentiment measured from text. They correlated sentiments gathered from Twitter during 2008–2009 with traditional approval polling and consumer-confidence polling results for the same period. Using this Twitter data, their findings show that, even with a relatively simple sentiment detector, the results are comparable to much more time-intensive (and expensive) polling methods.

This book adds to the new methods of measuring social realities which are constantly being developed. The focus, however, is on Twitter, the second biggest online social network, after Facebook, which contains a mass of user-generated data from around the globe. By taking advantage of specific technological advancements in the field of automated content and sentiment analysis, it might be possible to gain a deeper understanding of certain important aspects of political and social life. Within the academic field of political culture, there exists the belief that the functioning and persistence of democracy and democratic institutions is integrally linked with dominant mass tendencies in individual-level attitudes and value orientations.¹⁰ What these studies show is that what people think about democracy and democratic institutions is important to the functioning of democracy as a political system of governance.

The rationale for the link between opinions of citizens and the functioning of a democracy is based on the idea of a public sphere. This idea will be further elaborated, but in brief it refers to a physical or virtual space where the public can meet to discuss, debate and deliberate on public affairs. The public sphere lies between state and society and is an essential component of socio-political organisation. It provides a form of legitimacy and accountability to a government and a space for citizens to participate in public affairs.¹¹

The social media site, Twitter, will be examined as a type of public sphere in this study. Within this public sphere, global citizens are constantly discussing a multitude of issues. One of these issues that receive constant discussion on Twitter is democracy. If one can measure public expressions on democracy, one could, in theory, be able to gain deeper insights into the health of democracy. There are, however, various ways in which public expressions on democracy can be gauged, as will be shown in Chapter 2. In the past, most studies that attempted to measure expressions or opinions about democracy have used surveys consisting of rigid, standardised questionnaires. The rationale of this book is to develop the methodology for measuring public expressions on democracy from Twitter which will be built upon, tested and expressed through a descriptive analysis of expressions (Tweets) on democracy from Twitter for the period of 1 May to 31 July 2012.

In selecting the issue to be analysed, one returns to the first concern: the persistent question about the global support for democracy as a system of rule. The Tweets that will be examined are all about democracy, but since many bear on both positive and negative expressions on democracy, the overall sentiment will be analysed. This measu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Democracy in the New Digital Age
• 2  Twentieth-Century Democracy and Its Social Base
• 3  The Development of Methods for Measuring Expressions on Democracy
• 4  Measuring Support for Democracy on Twitter
• 5  New Imagined Communities in the Digital Age
• Bibliography
• Index