For those who are interested, here is the Prezi that we used for several of the events:

Here is the stream that was recorded at the National Democratic Institute:

Here is the interview video with Dr. Marc Lynch (@abuardvark) for his POMEPS podcast program:

Here is the podcast interview of Muzammil Hussain by Heath Brown for New Books in Political Science.

Here is the stream that was recorded at George Washington University:

@evgenymorozov @ericschmidt there are no countries where tech diffusion rates high and authoritarianism worsened.will graph it again for u

— Phil Howard (@pnhoward) April 18, 2013

It was then picked up by Cory Doctorow and given a punchline for BoingBoing.  Then nice debate about what “the internet” and the “situation” meant with @sivavaid, @sjschultze, @sarahkendzior, @arjenkamphuis, @dgolumbia, @tjl, and Richard Stallman.  Then caught the attention of Andrew Sullivan.)

Are there countries whose situations worsened with the arrival of the internet?  I’ve been arguing that there are lots of examples of countries where technology diffusion has helped democratic institutions deepen.  And there are several examples of countries where technology diffusion has been part of the story of rapid democratic transition.  But there are no good examples of countries where technology diffusion has been high, and the dictators got nastier as a result.  Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, opined the same thing.  Evgeny Morozov, professional naysayer, asked for a graph.

So here is a graph and a list.  I used PolityIV’s democratization scores from 2002 and 2011.  I used the World Bank/ITU data on internet users.  I merged the data and made a basic graph.  On the vertical axis is the change in percent of a country’s population online over the last decade.  The horizontal axis reflects any change in the democratization score–any slide towards authoritarianism is represented by a negative number.

Change in Percentage Internet Users and Democracy Scores, By Country, 2002-2011

Look at the raw data.

Are there any countries with high internet diffusion rates, where the regime got more authoritarian?  The countries that would satisfy this condition should appear in the top left of the graph.  Alas, the only candidates that might satisfy these two conditions are Iran, Fiji, and Venezuela.  Over the last decade the regimes governing these countries have become dramatically more authoritarian.  Unfortunately for Morozov, their technology diffusion rates are not particularly high.

This was just an hour’s work, and much more could be done with this data.  Some researchers don’t like the PolityIV scores, and there are plenty of reasons to dislike the internet user numbers.  Missing data could be imputed, and there may be more meaningful ways to compare over time.  Some countries may have moved in one direction and then changed course, all within the last decade.  Some only moved one or two points, and really just became slightly more or less democratic.  And there are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries.  But do these add up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having political parties, journalists, and civil society groups using digital media to reach their audiences? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. But the evidence on this point is here.  There are still no good examples of authoritarian regimes that got noticeably tougher through internet diffusion.

Here is a link to the raw data Compromised Personal Records as an Excel Spreadsheet.

It has been 15 years since the last wave of democratization. But as a region, North Africa and the Middle East were noticeably devoid of popular democracy movements—until the early months of 2011. Democratization movements had existed long before technologies like mobile phones and the Internet came to these countries. But with these technologies, people sharing an interest in democracy built extensive networks and activated collective action movements for political change. What might have made regimes more susceptible than others to these uprisings, and what might explain the relative successes of some movements over others? What role does information technology have in the modern recipe for democratization? Weighing multiple political, economic, demographic, and cultural conditions, we find that information infrastructure—especially mobile phone use—consistently appears as one of the key ingredients in parsimonious models for the conjoined combinations of causes behind regime fragility and social movement success. To understand the successes and failures of contemporary political protests, we must also assess how civil society leaders and authoritarian security forces treat communication technologies as democratically consequential.

Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard. 2013. “What Best Explains Successful Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring.” International Studies Review (15) 1, pp 48-66. DOI: 10.1111/misr.12020.  Liberated from paywall (free).

The 2008 election season will be dominated by the most colorful, attractive astroturf campaigns we’ve yet seen. For the most lush astroturf social movement that is the envy of the your block, read on for tips on how to seed, cultivate, and harvest a successful, high-tech, web-savvy campaign.

During the 1996 presidential campaign season, managers treated the internet as a publicity tool. During the 2000 campaign season, new media technologies became an important organizational tool. By the 2004 campaign season, these information technologies were deeply integrated into the system of political communication in the United States: they structured both unique content and the content of traditional mass media; they were used purposefully as organizational tools; and they were used for aggressive data mining (Howard, 2006). In 2008, we can expect ideal climate conditions for a bumper crop of issue-based and candidate astroturf campaigns on both sides of the fence.

My research has demonstrated that the nature of social movements and citizenship itself is changing in the United States, that these changes are promoted by political campaign managers, and that they are made possible by new information technologies.

What is an Astroturf Campaign?

An “astroturf” social movement is one started around the board room table, not the kitchen table. Many wired grassroots movements have successfully projected new ideas onto the national agenda, and engaged networks of family and friends in political discussion. But many wired astroturf campaigns work by fragmenting publics, and grow best when you sequester the production and consumption of political culture (Howard, 2005).

Astroturf campaigns are carefully composed of citizens who have shared grievances, but these citizens do not have an endogenously formed collective consciousness. They have been exogenously prompted to join a loose affiliation in which they do not meaningfully interact.  With a little research into credit card histories and some strategically placed online banner ads, you too can cultivate a group of people who will be responsive to your calls for action. Most important, these people will echo your message with only a little prompting (Howard, 2003).

Keeping Your Astroturf Healthy

Healthy astroturf movements have several key features. First, their members don’t actually get to interact much with each other, though they can interact with your software avatars or committed volunteers at campaign headquarters. Second, a healthy astroturf movement must have a digital infrastructure with email and website content that is tailored to particular users. Third, the healthiest astroturf movements are made up of older citizens, who are more susceptible to provocative campaign messages and are more responsive to activation.

Astroturf campaigns do best under highly controlled environments. They grow best when citizens are lured to a URL through well-placed TV ad buys, direct mail, and online banner ads. Regular email updates help your members interpret news reporting they might have encountered. Ideally, you’ll design your website portal so that it becomes their news service and links up with other affinity groups. There are different approaches to linking:  more liberal groups link to affinity groups and new stories that support their analytical frame; more conservative groups prefer to keep website users on site and will quote (and edit) supportive news stories without linking to the original story. NRANews.com or the Christian Coalition’s www.cc.org are great examples of how your issue-specific website can become a news portal.
Like many gardens, the astroturf campaign is made up of carefully composed elements. It’s important to find ways of recruiting volunteers to generate content for your website, and it’s great if they can be trusted to generate content for the latest online fad software encourage them to blog or post home-made videos to YouTube.

The Secret to Controlled Growth:  Diets of Data

Astroturf movements must be fed a steady diet of data—not simply polling data, the rather blunt instrument that measures attitudes, but data on behavior that comes from membership organizations, credit cards, and private data mining services.

Non-response rates are making telephone polling more expensive, the correlation of non-response with respondent characteristics is undermining the pollster’s sample frame, and the proliferation of mobile phones is eroding the industry’s long-held bulwark assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between telephone numbers and households (Witte & Howard, 2002).  So an exclusive diet of polling data is risky, and today’s astroturf campaign must have a mixed diet of both demographic and psychographic data.

To stay healthy, give members tools for expressing themselves in fixed, directed ways. If it’s a sensitive time for your campaign, such as during election season, give members spontaneous push polling questions or have them sign on to low-impact e-petitions. If the timing is right, you can till this energy by activating your members to make phone calls and generate telegrams using your own scripts.

For many lobbyists, it isn’t really necessary to have your astroturf campaign flower on election day, because having campaigns bear fruit at the right point during a legislative session may be a strategically better point at which to influence policy outcomes. But for an astroturf campaign to bloom on Election Day, be sure to use the latest automated alert systems so that each member gets a phone call reminding them when and where to vote. Splurging on a prerecorded message from a political personality excites members.  The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 64 percent of registered voters received robo-calls in 2006, so for 2008 it’s worth the extra touch to have a pre-recorded message.

Planting Citizens

And don’t worry if the phone bank is still cycling through your membership lists on Election Day. Regulatory oversight of the political applications of new information and communication technologies is always a bit behind the times. If you fear that the competition is crowding out your astroturf campaigns, hire a hacker to launch denial of service attacks on your competitor’s websites. Creative campaign consultants can always come up with interesting ways to interfere with a competitor’s high-tech astroturf campaign. In 2002, Republican National Committee official James Tobin did a great job of jamming Democratic phone banks on election day (though he was later sentenced to 10 months in prison for telephone harassment).

Like many endeavors, growing astroturf movements can be done on the cheap and can be done in deluxe style. Several thousand dollars will get you started with a good campaign, some in-depth data on your neighbors, and a little fancy design work for a website to help you manage your citizens. If you have significantly more financial resources, you’ll find that all of the major advertising firms now have in-house teams for managing political campaigns. But nobody in your social movement need know that their “shared grievances” aren’t really shared, or that their “collective consciousness” is actually managed out of an advertising agency!

The Rise of Political Omnivores?

There is some evidence that people become more sophisticated citizens the more they use the internet.  Over time, internet users become more sophisticated at online research, even controlling for demographics and education (Howard & Massanari, 2007). Citizens are becoming more “omnivorous” in their consumption of political culture, choosing ever more diverse news sources and news media as their internet use grows (Howard & Chadwick, forthcoming). Will 2008 be the last good growing season for astroturf social movements?

Beyond the 2008 campaign season, it may get harder and harder to grow astroturf issue and candidate campaign.  There’s talk of expanding federal do-not-call registries and beginning do-not-spam registries, which might impact how such important resources as the RNC’s VoterVault and the DNC’s Datamart collect new intelligence on citizens.  Even more worrying would be comprehensive regulation of the commercial data mining industry.  Door-to-door canvassers used to be able to show constituents tailored campaign ads on PDAs, political content that was unregulated by the FCC or FEC—this too may change.  If there’s too much public oversight of campaign spending, or the valuable 527 shelters are taken away, future election seasons may not have the right climate conditions for managed citizenship.

Philip Howard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington.

REFERENCES

Howard, P. N. (2003). Digitizing the Social Contract:  Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media. The Communication Review, 6(3), 213–245.

Howard, P. N. (2005). Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship:  The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597(1), 153-170.

Howard, P. N. (2006). New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Howard, P. N., & Chadwick, A. (forthcoming). Conclusion:  New Information Technologies and the Rise of Political Omnivores. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.), The Handbook of Internet Politics. London: Routledge.

Howard, P. N., & Massanari, A. (2007). Learning to Search and Searching to Learn:  Income, Education and Experience Online. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12(3).

Witte, J., & Howard, P. N. (2002). The Future of Polling:  Relational Inference and the Development of Internet Survey Instruments. In J. Manza, F. L. Cook & B. I. Page (Eds.), Navigating Public Opinion:  Polls, Policy and the Future of American Democracy (pp. 272-289). New York: Oxford University Press.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jOo8ooJlQO1JJegyGHyt0EfG4kiA?docId=CNG.2f0283cf2a3e62330d534900dcb74d83.171

Singapore likes to promote itself as a business-friendly country where the government has a soft touch. But by firing a professor known for criticizing the government’s censorship strategies, ruling elites have demonstrated that they still have a firm hand in controlling political conversation. It should make U.S. universities rethink their research partnerships with universities in Singapore, because such relationships actually help launder the regime’s reputation.

As one of Singapore’s most high profile censorship critics, Cherian George is guilty of several things. In his teaching, he is guilty of corrupting several cohorts of young journalism students with ideas about press freedoms. In his role as a public intellectual, he is guilty of helping to organize and inform the country’s growing community of independent bloggers and citizen journalists.

Through his research, Cherian George has long demonstrated how subtle and sophisticated censorship strategies by Lee Kwan Yew, the 89-year-old father of modern Singapore who ruled for 30 years and still holds considerable influence, allowed the country become “sustainably authoritarian.” Singapore’s elites, journalists, and democracy advocates have long known about these tricks. But George documented and demonstrated it, with good research and poignant comparisons to Malaysia and other neighbors. And he updated his findings as other figures moved into power within the ruling People’s Action Party. Alas, his home base, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), just decidednot to give George the protections of tenure. This means his contract will not be renewed, and he will lose the support that comes with his institutional affiliation.

This is actually the second time there has been high level interference with his career trajectory. In 2008, he helped lead a coalition of democracy advocates to lobby for more internet freedoms in Singapore, and helped lead a workshop to teach bloggers about their (lack of) rights. The regime ordered NTU to have nothing to do with the efforts, though that did not stop George from moving ahead on his own energy. The National University of Singapore’s Law School had originally offered to host the blogger workshop, but they too were instructed to stay clear. But George helped pull the event off anyway. The next year, his case for promotion moved smoothly up the ranks within the University, but was quashed with little explanation by the University’s President.

George is known for a string of investigative books and articles on how politicians in Singapore and Malaysia use the media as a tool for social control. He is Singaporean, has (had) a job in the Communication Studies department at NTU, and his career track has been derailed by the political elites he has disparaged. In 2009 he was promoted to associate professor without tenure, meaning he could have a bump in pay but not the support of a permanent job at the university.

It is difficult to dismiss George on the basis of academic merit. With degrees from Cambridge, Columbia, and Stanford, his pedigree is admirable. He has three books under his belt: the eviscerating “Air Conditioned Nation“, the evocative “Freedom From the Press” and a scholarly tome comparing independent online journalism in Singapore and Malaysia that was actually published at home bySingapore University Press. George has been equally critical of the government and the press, so it is not surprising that the country’s journalists have not rushed to his defense. He’s had positive teaching evaluations. It is unlikely that he does not meet the academic standards of the university.

Such protections are important in every country, and a good measure of how open and democratic political life is. In the United States, for example, it was with the protection of tenure that prominent media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan was able to call out the misguided maneuverings of the University of Virginia’s trustees. Indeed, through tenacity and eloquence he demonstrated to the entire country that business leaders could make surprisingly bad management decisions for public universities.

Singapore has clearly failed a test. But what should such a failure mean for all the Western universities looking to build research partnerships there? The number of partnerships between universities in North America, Europe, and universities in authoritarian countries are growing. And the internet makes this all the more complex, because universities increasingly form virtual relationships that allow for the exchange of content without requiring investment in physical campuses. But not all universities are created equal, and many universities in authoritarian countries are tasked with serving the government rather than advancing knowledge. Singapore’s universities—including NTU—invest big money research partnerships and in importing foreign academics. Such co-branding might reassure some that the government respects academic freedoms and values ideas and debate. But perhaps we need a kind of international “fair trade” program for academics. No universities with reasonable promotion and labor practices should make deals with universities that don’t have reasonable promotion and labor practices.

George’s treatment should raise serious questions for the future of Singapore’s research partnerships. Yale now has a significant project in Singapore. NTU alone claims it has over a dozen partnerships with universities like MIT, Caltech, and the University of Washington. Local academics suspect that both the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technical University have personnel decisions informally vetted by the government. Will the government have veto power over Yale’s hiring decisions as well? Since most Western universities—including Yale—have committed to respecting Singapore’s laws, will Yale’s personnel decisions involve the same informal approval process?

Global partnerships can be great things for universities. Researchers learn to approach problems in new ways, and students are presented with ever more opportunities to learn about the world. But it can be tough for academic in one country to understand the rules, norms, and patterns of behavior for academic in other countries. And for even mildly authoritarian regimes, collaborating with Universities in the West can be a way of laundering their reputation.

In not giving George tenure, Singapore has demonstrated the obvious—that its universities are not like our universities. When an authoritarian government punishes its critics we need to take note. And when an authoritarian government punishes its scholars at home, Western universities have an opportunity to weigh in. Oddly, the Communication Studies undergraduate program at NTU is now entirely led by non-Singaporeans. We should not assume that Western academics can help erode authoritarian tendencies when they build research partnerships with universities in tough regimes. Instead, bringing in Western scholars and firing any local trouble makers may be the safe bet for tough regimes.

Philip N. Howard is professor of communication, information and international studies at the University of Washington. Currently, he is a fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. His writings appear at http://philhoward.org and tweets from @pnhoward.

Did digital media really “cause” the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy’s fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world’s most entrenched dictators. Howard and Hussain find that the complex causal recipe includes several economic, political and cultural factors, but that digital media is consistently one of the most important sufficient and necessary conditions for explaining both the fragility of regimes and the success of social movements. This book looks at not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the deeper history of creative digital activism throughout the region.

Click here to for the codebook, raw data, and additional information about the Digital Activism Project.