Politics and government in the age of the internet

Citation

Auty, C. (2005), "Politics and government in the age of the internet", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 57 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ap.2005.27657daa.001

Politics and government in the age of the internet

Let’s start with some statistics and comparisons. Think back to October 1994 when the Labour Party put its conference proceedings on the web, leading the party to claim it was the first UK political party with an internet presence. Now, ten years on, the online political landscape has changed dramatically. In 2005 it is inconceivable that a political party would not have an internet site; in fact, one of Britain’s newest political parties (the People’s Alliance) actually launched itself online (Happold, 2003). Similarly, MPs with web sites were a rarity ten years ago, so much so that no official statistics exist. Even in 2000, Ward reported that only around 16 per cent of MPs were on the net (Ward, 2000). Today, the results are vastly different. Epolitix.com hosts web sites for MPs and also links to those who choose to host their site elsewhere; currently around 63 per cent (416 out of 659) of Westminster MPs have a personal web site.

The party breakdown is also interesting:

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  97 out of 163 (59.5 per cent) Conservative MPs have a web site;

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  258 out of 407 (63 per cent) Labour MPs;

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  48 out of 55 (87 per cent) Liberal Democrat MPs;

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  four out of four (100 per cent) Plaid Cymru MPs;

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  three out of five (60 per cent) SNP MPs; and

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  both independent MPs (Dr Richard Taylor and George Galloway) are on the web. (Figures calculated by the editor based on party strengths on December 11, 2004 and according to Epolitix web site on that day.)

Continuing in this vein, Tony Blair was the first Prime Minister to receive a petition by e-mail. He also appointed the UK’s first E-envoy in the E-government Unit at the Cabinet Office, charged with improving the delivery of public services by joining up electronic government services. Local councils now have e-targets and all council services (where appropriate) are expected to be online by the end of 2005, thus making £1.2 billion of efficiency savings for the Government (Arnott, 2005). Citizens can now log on to their local authority and submit planning applications, check their benefit entitlement and apply for school places. Oxford University has a professor of e-democracy and even political consultations are held online (for example, the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Inquiry into hate crimes gathered evidence at www.tellparliament.net/hatecrime/).

These trends in e-politics and e-government are not confined to the UK alone. In 2003, 50,000 French expatriates in the US were able to vote over the internet for members of the Conseil Superieur des Français de l’Etranger (CSFE; Upper Council for French Expatriots). In fact, commentators in the States have even attributed an election win to use of the internet by a candidate: Jessie Ventura’s gubernatorial run in Minnesota in 1998 when a third party candidate with a low budget won a presumed two-horse race with a huge swing.

In June 2000 Bill Clinton became the first President to conduct an internet address and the first to appoint a press secretary solely to deal with the internet (Mark Kitchens, appointed as Director of Internet News). The Canadian government has won Accenture’s e-government award for the last four years: Ottowa regularly surveys its citizens to ask what local and federal services they’d like to see online and builds them into a single e-government portal. All evidence of good progress, but on the negative side Jessica Cutler lost her job as a junior staffer to Senator Mike DeWine for detailing her (sex) life on Capitol Hill in a blog that was picked up by The Washington Post.

But this is only one side of the e-equation. Interactivity, commentators have stressed, is the crux of e-politics and e-democracy. There is clearly no point in parties, councils, governments and political players using new technology if the population at large remains unconnected. However, here too the signs are encouraging. According to the latest estimates from the Office of National Statistics:

In the second quarter of 2004, 52 per cent of households in the UK (12.8 million) could access the Internet from home, compared with just 9 per cent (2.2 million) in the same quarter of 1998 (Office of National Statistics, 2004).

It is highest in the 16 to 24 age group (83 per cent) used Internet in last 3 months (Office of National Statistics, 2004).

As this applies only to those who have internet access at home, a much greater percentage of the population presumably has access either at work or via public libraries. Nielsen-netratings.com collates data on internet usage in over 70 countries worldwide, and the same encouraging trends are evident. Take these examples from the US political arena:

At home traffic to Democrats.org jumped to 574,000 unique visitors as 43 percent of online surfers flocked to a Web page titled “Take Action: Stop the Right-Wing Smears Against John Kerry,” which asked voters to sign a petition against the Sinclair Broadcasting Group for airing anti-Kerry programming.

At work traffic to Democrats.org increased to 1.1 million unique visitors, up from 568,000 the prior week, as 41 percent of the viewers also visited the same Web page (Dierkes, 2004).

And, during the period of the National Conventions:

The Republican National Convention (RNC) boosted at home traffic to the Bush-Cheney Website by 50 percent, as compared to a 191 percent jump in home visitors to the John Kerry for President Website during the week of the Democratic National Convention (DNC).

The DNC helped Kerry’s Website climb to its highest number of weekly home visitors, or 771,000 unique audience, during his campaign, while Bush’s Website attracted 438,000 unique visitors during the start of the RNC (see Tables 1 & 2). The Bush-Cheney Website reached the highest number of home visitors, or 622,000 unique audience, during the week ending June 27 (Fan, 2004).

The fact that the Office of National Statistics has only gathered this type of data since 1998, and that now whole companies exist to measure global internet audiences indicates how use of the net has grown. This obviously impinges on a variety of political and governmental areas, and the articles within this Special Issue, written during the electoral campaigns in the US and Iraq and published to coincide with the UK general election[1], cover some of these topics in greater detail. Each of the contributors was approached on the basis of their expertise in a specific sphere of e-politics or e-government and it was considered important to have contributions from abroad in order to reflect the international nature of politics and government on the Internet. Short resumes of our contributors and their articles follow.

Adrian Cunningham has held the position of Director, Standards and Initiatives at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) since 1998. Adrian is also Secretary of the International Council on Archives (ICA) Committee on Descriptive Standards, Convenor of the Australian Society of Archivists Descriptive Standards Committee, Chair of the AGLS Metadata Working Group and a member of Standards Australia’s Committee IT/21, Records Management. Adrian was President of the Australian Society of Archivists, 1998-2000.

Margaret Phillips is Director of Digital Archiving, National Library of Australia (NLA) and managed the development of the NLA’s PANDORA Archive of Australian Web publications. She is involved in establishing policy, procedures and infrastructure for ensuring long-term access to Australian Internet publications.

Cunningham and Phillips address the key and often overlooked subject of archiving digital formats, an area where the National Library of Australia and National Archives of Australia have made great progress but other countries have yet to catch up. They examine e-government and the role of archives and libraries have in recording and indexing digital formats, and question why this kind of information is so vulnerable.

Chris Pond brings a wealth of experience to the journal. An honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and an associate Member of the Institute of Public Relations, Chris is Head of Reference and Reader Services at the House of Commons Library, where he has worked for 30 years. He lectures and writes regularly on Parliament and parliamentary history, and government publishing and information. He has a special interest in historical, as well as current, sources in this area and sits on the Standing Committee of Official Publications. He has been involved in electronic publishing since 1978 and has been keen to explore means of electronic information dissemination. As Town Mayor of Loughton, he also takes an interest in local government publishing and information. Chris’s article covers the rise of the end user and electronic information provision in a unique setting – the House of Commons Library.

A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, Janet Seaton is a parliamentary reference specialist who worked at the House of Commons Library for over 20 years. In October 1998 she was seconded to the Scottish Office to set up a research and information service for the Scottish Parliament. Janet took up the post of Head of Research and Information Services at the Scottish Parliament on December 1, 2000, and is part of the Parliament’s Senior Management Team. She is also a member of the Study of Parliament Group. She has a degree in political science, and has written articles and contributed to books on parliament and politics.

The Scottish Parliament has always seen the internet as one of the major mechanisms for engaging Scottish citizens in the Parliament’s business and activities. Its most successful initiatives have been the e-petitioning system, the webcasting of proceedings, the discussion forums and our MSP video diaries. Janet’s article describes these initiatives and assesses the prospects for future developments.

Continuing in this Parliamentary vein, Caroline Auty has worked for five years in information services at the House of Lords Library answering reference enquiries from Peers on a variety of subjects. She is currently part-way through a year-long secondment to the Parliamentary IS-IT Change Programme, a major programme that is seeking to set up a unified ICT (information and communication technology) service to cover both Houses of Parliament. Caroline writes for CIBER at University College London. She has had work published on different aspects of e-politics including political parties’ use of the internet, the web sites of London mayoral candidates and political hacktivism. She has also written about football fans’ use of the internet and is a closet football hack at heart. Her contribution this time examines weblogs of MPs, in particular whether they compensate for some of the commonly made criticisms of MPs’ web sites. The role of weblogs in fostering genuine interactivity between elected representative and their constituents is examined.

Professor Richard Rogers examines the contribution of blogs to news on the internet and the relationship between news and the internet in general. Richard is a university lecturer in New Media at the University of Amsterdam, recurrent Visiting Professor in the Philosophy and Social Study of Science at the University of Vienna, and Director of the Govcom.org Foundation (Amsterdam). Previously, he worked as Senior Advisor to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental Information Society initiative. He earned his PhD and MSc in Science Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and his BA in Government and German at Cornell University. Over the past five years, Rogers and the Govcom.org Foundation have received grants from the Dutch Government (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science), the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. Rogers is author of, amongst other things, Information Politics on the Web (Rogers, 2004).

Finally, Charlotte Steinmark, MA in History and Computer Science, has worked with the issues of electronic documentation of the public sector and its work processes since 1993. In 1997 she was affiliated with SLAIS for three months while working on her PhD thesis. The thesis investigated the legal issues of electronic documentation of the public sector in seven European countries including the UK, and how the legislation affected the cooperation between the public archives and the authorities. Since 2002 she has been working on the FESD project to provide a framework contract for the whole public sector in Denmark covering the purchase of an EDM system, technical and organisational consulting for implementation and organisational change. Charlotte has profound experience from both the private and public sectors and is presently working for the interest organisation Local Governments Denmark, which represents the local governments towards the central administration and does consulting work for the local governments on all issues. Charlotte describes her involvement with the FESD project in this case study and details the benefits of a mutual procurement framework for the public sector in Denmark.

As this issue went to press, William Hill quoted odds of 1/20 on May 5, 2005 to be the date of the next General Election.

Caroline AutyCIBER, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London, London, UK