Citizens' and political actors' perceptions of technology-driven tools in politics and policy

Abstract

Technology has always played a significant role in politics, but its relevance has significantly grown since the digital revolution. The widespread of the platform society (van Dijck and Hacker 2018) has accelerated the use of new technologies by institutions and governments leading to the emergence of digitally enabled solutions such as institutional platforms, online apps, or algorithms and artificial intelligence to promote the development of smart cities, new forms of e-government or even online voting (Ceron 2022). Political actors have benefitted from using these new technologies in different ways. For example, they have improved their political competition by using more sophisticated strategies based on big data or micro-targeting tools (Roemmele and Gibson, 2020). Political parties have used new technologies to build their internal participation platforms and to organise their internal decision-making mechanisms (Gerbaudo, 2019; Barberà et. al. 2021). Social movements have also benefitted from online tools for communication purposes or cyberactivism (e.g., Carty and Reynoso Barron 2018). This trend of digitalization escalated even further during the COVID pandemic when in-person forms of interaction between citizens or members of political organisations and institutional or political actors had to be replaced by online tools. However, while researchers have focused recently on assessing the widespread digitalisation, less attention has been paid to how or if citizens have managed to adapt to these changes. Indeed, the accelerated pace of such digital transformation raises relevant questions on the potential inequalities arising from citizens, political organisations and political elites’ adaptation to the widespread use of new technologies in politics and how citizens perceive the growing relevance of the online environment. So far, the research on this field is just emerging and we cannot yet be certain of its impact both on the functioning of our democracies and on citizens’ and political actors’ perceptions of this change. For instance, recent research shows citizens’ opinions about artificial intelligence are not clearly positive or negative but mixed (Konig 2022). The panel welcomes both theoretical and empirical papers exploring the perceptions and attitudes vis-à-vis the use of technology-driven tools in policy-making, public administration and/or political advocacy and campaigns either by citizens or by political actors and/or elites (or both).

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