Abstract
Technology and political organizations are intimately connected to each other. Every time communications technology changes, so do political organizations. The printing press itself allowed people to coalesce around manifestos. The digital technologies of the twentieth century have allowed political parties in Western countries to innovate. In the 1970s, mass mailing, a crucial tool for fund-raising and party communication, was made possible by computerized databases of voters. Later, social media continued to revolutionize political organizations. Multiple scholars have documented how social media allowed recent presidential campaigns to reach out to voters and recruit voters in higher numbers than before. Social movement scholars have also documented the profound effect of social media on protest organizations. Social media allows small, poorly capitalized protest groups to clandestinely meet online and organize their protest. Twitter itself, one of the titans of modern social media, sprang from the world of activism. The idea of communicating via brief messages on cell phones emerged from discussions among Bay Area activists about the need to communicate quickly as events “on the ground” unfolded.
David Karpf’s Analytic Activism is the latest book to contribute to the scholarly understanding of how technology impacts political organization. The central observation of Analytic Activism is that social media platforms create a feedback loop between political organizations and their audiences. This has substantial implications. For example, organizations can now, in “real time,” assess what is effective in terms of communication and fund-raising. Much like modern marketers, political organizations can now instantly run experiments to assess how websites, blog posts, and tweets generate traffic. These experiments now become a core technology of the political organization. In this way, social media and related technologies have allowed political groups to evolve. Previously, political organizations had very limited knowledge of what worked or relied on the firsthand knowledge of activists and volunteers. Now, the most sophisticated organizations have transformed themselves into “algorithm-centric” structure. As the leadership develops its goals, they then execute their goals with various online strategies (e.g., online petitions), obtain “big data” about the audience response, and then adjust their actions.
This new algorithmic politics is the main focus of Analytic Activism. The book delves into history and practice of big data use in political organizations. It surveys the different ways that algorithms have enable organizational change. For example, the ability to quickly deploy and assess online petitions has allowed some organizations to adopt the role of the broker within the world of political interest groups. There is a fascinating section in Analytic Activism that describes how MoveOn.org became a sort of clearing house for a wide range of interest groups. By virtue of their central position in the field of interest groups, they are able to shape and sort the types of petitions and fund-raising efforts that manage to be successful.
There is more interesting empirical work reported within Analytical Activism, and it is a book that is very much worth reading. Here, I want to discuss some of the implications of the developments discussed by Karpf. First, the rise of algorithmic political action represents an important reshaping of the field of interest groups. It allows new types of people to be at the center of politics. No longer are people required to work through brokers, like lobbyists or party officials, rather, they can work with technical professionals whose job it is to develop and manage these platforms for influence. Second, these technologies induce a massive increase in the speed and efficiency of political action. Thus, the practice of analytical activism relies on new types of political workers who operate in a much more fluid environment, one that is not always well integrated into the traditional political structures. Still, this might be the way that politics is done and might well become the mainstream.