Transforming Democracy And Politics In The Digital Age

The digital revolution has radically transformed social life and political cultures, as many forms of political activity have moved online and new forms of media have enabled new forms of political engagement. Many argue that these revolutionary transformations, such as peer production mechanisms like social media, offer new possibilities for digital democracy. Digital innovation from its origins has been closely tied to a democratic imaginary that seeks maximum user control, flexibility, participation, and modification in a collaborative (open source) sharing context. As participatory digital tools have developed they have inspired a number of projects that explicitly seek to increase democratic participation of citizens, whether that be within smaller communities that might also meet face to face (such as Loomio) or within much larger political communities such as the tool developed for voting within Plaza Podemos (in Spain) or the participatory tools used in Taiwan by the activists hacker community g0v. These tools are also being proposed as means for other ways of regenerating democracy such as controlling corruption, improving citizen information, defending human rights, empowering marginalized groups , and exposing government wrongdoing (such as Wikileaks, or Filtrala).

The project will focus on exploring the relationship between digitally enabled participatory tools and democracy, including such dimensions as citizen demand, state power, collective action and mobilization, and culture. They will focus on the possibilities and challenges facing the digital transformation of politics in a specific arena and case study.

Students will need to be familiar with the digital and/or new media platforms or software that they will be drawing on for their case studies and have a background in sociology, politics, media studies or related discipline.

This is just one example of the sort of project that might be available in this research group.