LIST OF PANELS

One of the latest digital innovation to enter the political arena is big data, i.e. the computational and analytic processes keyed to large quantities of information about citizens, politicians, parties as well as policies and policy processes compiled from multiple sources and by various advanced computational methods.

Web-based platforms, online services and social media have fundamentally impacted upon political processes and behaviour. Since the Arab Spring, there is no doubt that they are key to mobilizing political activists, but also facilitate both conventional and unconventional forms of participation, such as e-Voting and e-Petitions. The vast possibilities of online communication change and shape political participation as they are becoming strategic means to influence policy-making by groups and individuals alike. Moreover, mobilisation and interest aggregation create new types of individual and collective (political) actors who increase the pool of participants in policy-making processes. This raises questions as to how web-based platforms, online services and social media can meet and enhance democratic demands such as transparency, accessibility and equality.

Additionally, governments, administrations, political institutions and actors make increasing use of ICT to embrace new online services (such as e-Taxing), to facilitate internal processes or to increase transparency via open-data and open-government. Political parties and candidates, too, compete fiercely in the online sphere which subsequently transforms into an arena where elections, especially in the U.S. but also in Europe, and referenda, such as Brexit, may be decided. Thus, governments’ and politicians’ actions are increasingly driven by digitalisation, social computing and the data harvested online. It is crucial to identify the key techniques and features of these new modes of governing, policy-making and electioneering and investigate their implications for societies at large, not to forget privacy issues of big data analytics in policy making.

Finally, all of these political events, processes and activities produce massive amounts and different types of data that can be wrangled, traced, combined and analysed via advanced computational methods. During the last ten years, new techniques to collect and analyse (behavioural) data have enriched political science massively. Moreover, through computer science and computational social science, we also get access to data and information that was not available in systematic fashion before, e.g. by methods to transform (un-)structured text into machine-readable and analysable data. Furthermore, we can use a broad array of computational methods, including big data analytics, knowledge representation, machine learning or deep learning. Thus, technological progress also opens up room for new insights in old information or phenomena by pre-processing and analysing them in a new fashion.

The panel seeks to promote a theoretically informed and empirically sound discussion along these strands of reflection: the value of big data for studying politics, policy-making and political behaviour but also the impacts of computational methods on the discipline of political science. To that end, it welcomes papers dealing with the potentialities and limitations of using massive-scale datasets in political science from a broad array of methodological lenses, in different contexts, or fluidly across the online-offline-boundary.

The transformation of politics in connection with the internet does not seize to astonish, empower and challenge. One of the latest digital innovation to enter the political arena is big data, i.e. the computational and analytic processes keyed to large quantities of information about citizens, politicians, parties and policy-makers as well as policies and policy processes compiled from multiple sources and by various advanced computational methods.

First, social movements and activists increasingly rely on social media platforms and internet services for mobilization purposes. Thereby, they produce big data flows that – together with related methodical practices – broaden researchers’ tools to inquire about and leverage our understanding of political participation and activism in the digital era. This gives rise to several questions: How do social media and online services change and shape political participation? How can they meet and/or enhance democratic demands such as transparency, accessibility and equality? What is the value of open-data, open-government and co-creation processes in this process?

Second, digital social behaviours and especially social media communication and interaction are becoming fundamental components in electoral campaigns, governmental and legislative processes, as well as in the relationships and interactions between party members and between political leaders and their constituencies. Simultaneously, politicians and policy-makers draw on online public discourse to track evolving public opinion and political trends. They can boost the salience of issues in their favour and strike while the iron is hot. Scientifically we are confronted with various questions such as: What are the key techniques, features and implications of the new mode of electioneering and public policy-making? What institutional frameworks exist to control and monitor these new forms of campaigning and decision-making? How can we address privacy issues and ethical challenges resulting from the reduction of citizens and their will to objectified data-assemblages that are mechanically treated rather than constructively accounted for?

Third, beyond civil and political entities, political scientists, too, can draw upon the advances in computer science and computational social sciences. They may use innovative techniques to collect and analyse vast amount of novel data or gain insights into already existing yet too complex information that is now accessible thanks to big data analytics, knowledge representation, machine learning or deep learning tools among others. Yet, questions arise such as: What are the challenges and what are new computational developments in political science? What are innovative examples of the interplay between computer science and political science?

The panel offers a forum to critically assess the nexus between big data and political science and reflect upon its value for political behaviour and communication as well as policy-making. Contributions should focus either on the potentialities of computer science and advanced computational methods for the discipline at large or the use of big data and advanced computational methods by political and civil actors and their impact on policy-making and political processes. The panel expects theoretically informed and empirically sound papers along these strands of reflection.