Here are the details of my paper (co-authored with James Stanyer) to be presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, later this week…
Political Communication in Transition: Mediated Politics in Britain’s New Media Environment
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London
James Stanyer, Loughborough University
Abstract
Since the mid-2000s, Britain’s political communication environment has undergone rapid change. During the 2010 election campaign, television continued its dominance as the most important medium through which the British public acquires its political information, as Britain’s first ever live televised party leaders’ debates received saturation coverage for almost the entire campaign. But over the previous half-decade the growing mainstream popularity of the internet has started to undermine some broadcast-era assumptions regarding strategic news management, both in government, and on the campaign trail. This new, hybrid, environment, one characterised by a complex intermingling of the “old”, the “new”, and the “renewed” creates particular uncertainty for “old” news media, established politicians, and political parties. The old media environment, dominated by media and political elites working in traditional television, radio, and newspapers, remains significant for British politics, but politics is increasingly mediated online. The internet is creating a more open, fluid political opportunity structure – one that increasingly enables the British public to exert its influence and hold politicians and media to account. The origins of this current hybridity can be traced back over the last couple of decades, but since the mid-2000s, the pace of change has quickened, and the stage on which the drama of British politics unfolds is in the process of being redesigned, partly by political and media elites, and partly by ordinary citizens. This paper provides an overview of this changing political communication environment and its consequences for British politics. The first part draws on the latest data to illustrate key developments in new media usage in Britain. Part two explores the way in which news, so central to an informed citizenry, is changing. Part three examines the parties’ news management strategies and how they have sought to use a blend of old and new media to boost their popularity. The paper then moves on to explore the role of media during the momentous 2010 general election campaign.
Download the full paper here (pdf).
Inkling - Interactive textbooks for iPad -
Interesting. As always, whether it will sink or swim will depend on the content they can sign up.
(Via Minimal Mac.)
Coalition's first crowdsourcing attempt fails to alter Whitehall line - The Guardian -
“Simon Burall, director of Involve, a group advising bodies on consultation, said: ‘You have to give the government some credit for trying to do this, but badly designed consultations like this are worse than no consultations at all.’”
Sunlight Foundation's Party Time! -
Satirical but serious. The Sunlight Foundation is excellent for exposing mundane aspects of political elites’ behaviour.
About time too, though there are arcane regulatory hurdles to much of what the BBC does in this area.
This is one of the few news apps to have a well thought-through landscape mode.
Who Sent the "Yes We Can" Video Viral?
ChronoSync “is the complete data management utility that allows you to efficiently synchronize or backup files and folders from one disk location to another. There are hundreds of settings available within each Synchronizer document to customize your synchronizations. You can synchronize or backup files to almost any device. ChronoSync will even automatically mount other computers. Create as many documents as you need to handle all the synchronization and backup scenarios you have.”
I find it very useful for keeping multiple computers in sync, where the amount of data prohibits use of online services such as Dropbox.
(Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.)
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Volume 7 Issue 2 & 3 2010
Kevin Wallsten’s article is free to non-subscribers. Here’s the lineup:
GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States — Michael Xenos
RESEARCH PAPERS
Congressional Candidates’ Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale — Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati and Christine B. Williams
The Sidetracked 2008 YouTube Senate Campaign — Robert J. Klotz
YouTube Politics: YouChoose and Leadership Rhetoric During the 2008 Election — Scott H. Church
Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization? — David Karpf
“Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon — Kevin Wallsten
Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election — Scott P. Robertson, Ravi K. Vatrapu, and Richard Medina
A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates — LaChrystal Ricke
REVIEW ESSAY
The Obamachine: Technopolitics 2.0 — Cheris A. Carpenter
WORKBENCH NOTE
Supporting Research Data Collection from YouTube with TubeKit — Chirag Shah
KEYNOTE LECTURE
Internet Research: The Question of Method: A Keynote Address from the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference — Richard Rogers
Caffeine. If you have a laptop and take it to meetings or use it to give conference presentations, this is an invaluable tool. You can keep your default screen saver and sleep settings for conserving battery while mobile, but override them when you don’t want to be interrupted.
“Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.”
(Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.)
Right Zoom changes the default behaviour of the green “zoom” button on the Mac so that it always maximizes the current window. It runs in the background and you can set a modifier key to activate it only when you want to.
An invaluable tool for new Windows to Mac switchers.
Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.
Name Mangler: Batch renaming of files and folders with just about every logical possibility covered.
Part of the mini-series: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.
Part two of a mini-series of posts: a miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.
TrashMe: a new, free, intuitive application for simply and easily uninstalling applications, widgets, and preference panes.
Part one of a mini-series of posts: a weird miscellany of tools and software for the Mac.
The new Safari 5 added support for native extensions yesterday. Apple promise a directory later in the summer, but a few have already emerged.
I’m not too keen on extensions per se. My experience with Firefox was constantly ruined by crashing and out of control CPU and memory usage. Can Apple improve on this? The odds are good, though don’t expect a huge ecosystem of extensions to emerge as they did with Firefox. Maybe that’s a good thing.
GoMBox: “With this extension installed, clicking on Google Image Search results brings up a lightbox viewer rather than taking you to the page (and away from your search).”
Works well.
[Not the usual sort of content for this blog, but British politics is moving through extraordinary times at the moment. This is a response to Philip Cowley’s blog post from earlier today.]
Phil’s post raises many interesting questions and there are all sorts of potential issues that will only be worked out when we see the detail.
I’m in favour of fixed term parliaments (of four years), but as I posted on Twitter yesterday, the biggest political problem with the proposal, and the reason why there is so much disquiet, is its jettisoning of the established convention that there is a link between a 51% vote of no confidence and the dissolution of Parliament.
Of course, as with all things in the British constitution, conventions are there to be broken, as they were in 1924 when Labour placed a no confidence amendment to the King’s Speech, leading Baldwin to stand down and MacDonald to take over with a minority government without the holding of a general election. That was slightly different from the normal no confidence scenario, though, because it was essentially about resolving the outcome of the December 1923 general election, held a few weeks earlier. But the overall point is that many, many generations of British politicians have had it in their bloodstream that a lost vote of confidence = dissolution = an election.
Though it’s open to abuse by the executive, there’s a certain democratic purity to the opposition being able to trigger an election on a simple majority basis in a no confidence vote, even in a fixed-term parliament system. These are all old arguments, I know, but they bear being restated.
Deciding who benefits most, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems, from this constitutional “lock-in” much depends on who you read. But it seems certain that there’s one group that will not benefit from the new rule at least in the medium term: the opposition. In this current context, the 55% proposal therefore has a whiff of naked self-interest about it.
Finally, as Phil says, this will be introduced by statute. In the absence of a written constitution with proper mechanisms for legitimising important constitutional changes like this, it sets the precedent that future hung parliaments will be able to legislate different thresholds depending on the specific balance of power between coalition partners at the time.
Better to establish constitutional rules as openly and as legitimately as possible, then let parties interact in the new environment, as has occurred in Scotland and Wales, where there were huge new constitutional settlements ratified by referendums. The 55% proposal gets it the wrong way round: it takes the current parties’ balance of power and establishes a new constitutional rule based upon this.
There’s an interesting post comparing the 55% proposal with the Scottish context here.
News Publishers Realizing: Paywalls Won’t Work -
“Readers will not pay to consume general news on the web” say the Daily Mail. Murdoch press looking increasingly isolated.