Software is eating the world, but we know technologies are not value-free or neutral. They are windows to the designers’ and developers’ values, ideologies, and politics. Increasingly, scholars and the public acknowledge that current technologies embed biases, maintaining and create new instances of discrimination, racism, and abuse of power. Furthermore, governmental information systems mediate and automate decision making and reconfigure roles and power dynamics in organizational settings. It seems that software, apps, and information systems can become political tools too. However, limited research exists that examines how societal power is currently being infused and reconfigured into technologies. In this workshop, we will explore how social and political factors (including values, ideologies, and politics) are shaping technologies and their effects on society at large. We hope to ask how political scientists can tackle this new territory and imagine what kind of novel methods may be needed in this task. This is a multidisciplinary workshop, we welcome participants from all disciplines, including critical computing studies, e-government research, human-computer interaction, and political science. We invite paper manuscripts focused on social and political factors in shaping technologies, as well as reflective or provocative suggestions on how political scientists ought to engage this new territory.
Language: fi/en
Chairs:
Victoria Palacin (victoria.palacin@helsinki.fi)
Matti Nelimarkka ( matti.nelimarkka@helsinki.fi )
Papers
The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves: Applications of Data Feminism in Political Science Research
Laura-Elena Sibinescu Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarization, University of Helsinki laura.sibinescu@helsinki.fi
The innovative power of big data in political science is undeniable: it has enabled new, much broader insights into similarly new socio-political phenomena, further elevated by adapting methodologies from data science. However, as enchantment with the possibilities of big data grows among political scientists, a more critical view of its limitations also becomes necessary. Not only does research centred on big data carry the risk of sacrificing depth by prioritising breadth, but, without a thorough critical examination, such research inevitably reproduces the biases inherent to the means by which the data was produced. Current research incorporating these critical views has been conducted on topics such as law enforcement, workplace discrimination and housing policies, but is still sparse in the more traditional areas of political science. The aim of this paper is to examine the potential methodological impact of data feminism on political science. This recently introduced analytical framework sees data (big or otherwise) both as a form of power and as a tool for examining and challenging power. It proposes several principles, from which I address three: attention to context, rethinking binaries and hierarchies, and synthesising multiple perspectives, including local and experiential knowledge. Thematically, I discuss these by looking at ways in which citizens may use technology to address a disconnect between institutions promoting democratic values on a discursive level and their commitment to protecting these values. As examples, I outline three under-developed research topics in the EU context, that challenge its prevailing narrative of fairness and inclusivity: the mobilising power of social media affordances in protesting gendered violence; the potential of social media platforms as agora where marginalised groups can construct their own vision of citizenship; and the use of technology and social networks to collect and link personal stories about invisible migrant labor.
Democratic Interpretations – Rise of Civic Hacktivism in Taiwan
Sami Kotiranta sami.kotiranta@helsinki.fi
Taiwan has gone through a civil society driven shift towards a more transparent and participatory system of governance. Social unrest that grew out of widespread frustration towards the secretive elitist political culture led to weeks-long mass protests and the occupation of the Legislative Yuan in 2014. The so-called Sunflower Movement was a watershed moment in Taiwanese politics that made the transformative agenda of hacktivist communities a key component of the ongoing public governance reform. Building on the deliberative theory of civil disobedience by the William Smith, I aim to illustrate how different ways of legitimising civic disobedience has shaped the aim and the methods used by Taiwanese civic hacktivists. Particular focus is put on the use and development of open source civic technology and how in Taiwan this has contributed to a transformative process that moves through stages of civic action, from empowerment to engagement to establishment.
Energy transition in Finnish parliamentary debates 2008-2020
Juri Mykkänen, Petteri Repo, Kaisa Matschoss juri.mykkanen@helsinki.fi
Responses to climate change increasingly accentuate the need to accomplish low-carbon energy transitions, i.e., a fundamental shift in energy production and consumption. From a scant body of research, we know that governments’ ideological composition may affect what legislative actions are taken towards energy efficiency (Chang et al. 2015) or low-emission policies (Ćetković & Hagemann 2020). Energy transitions require political action (e.g. Meadowcroft 2009, 2011; Langhelle et al. 2019), and while there are several studies discussing policy and power in transitions, it is surprising how little the connection between politics and transitions have been studied in sustainability transitions literature. For instance, the spreading of right-wing populism has been observed to promote local citizen resistance to sustainable energy transformation (Fraune & Knodt 2018). On the other hand, the green parties across Europe have been successful proponents of renewable energy forms (Debus & Tosin 2021). At the same time, we have learned that national political dynamics, together with economic crises, have resulted in reversals of renewable energy development (Prontera 2021). Indeed, the transition toward sustainable energy production and use is a profoundly political process. In this study, we look into the heart of the political process of energy transition, that is, the parliamentary debate. We identify how parliamentary debates approach energy choices and indicate differences between party representatives of the Centre Party, Finns Party, National Coalition Party, Swedish People’s Party, Greens, Social Democratic Party and Left Alliance. We use excerpted data from the transcribed plenary sessions of the Finnish parliament from 2008-2020, model 10 topics in the data by applying latent Dirichlet allocation on the textual corpus (Blei et al. 2003), and review the development of topics across time according to party background and changing policy context.
Why do innovations fail? Lessons learned from a digital democratic innovation
Jenny Lindholm, jenny.lindholm@abo.fi, Åbo Akademi University Janne Berg, janne.berg@abo.fi, Åbo Akademi University
Democratic innovations, “designed specifically to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process” (Smith, 2009, p. 1), have been brought forward by political scientists and practitioners as a response to worrying democratic deficits. The widespread use of diverse types of democratic innovations might counteract declining political trust and voter turnout, but in the scientific reporting of these innovations there is a positivity bias (Spada & Ryan, 2017). When analyzing empirical studies, only 4 % investigate initiatives reported as failures, and overall, the use of democratic innovations is portrayed as a best practice. Moreover, articles emphasizing challenges and failures are not published in top-ranking journals (Spada & Ryan, 2017). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate challenges connected to the use of digital democratic innovations. We do this firstly, by theoretical development of the concept of failure in relation to democratic innovations. Secondly, we study a democratic innovation in the form of a mobile application for following local politics. This paper reports on the implementation of the first version of the app in a small municipality and analyzes the reception of the app among its main target groups: municipal employees, politicians, and younger citizens. Data is collected using two surveys and a workshop in an upper secondary school. As such, the paper functions as a case study of the implementation of a digital democratic innovation and the challenges of doing so successfully.
Commercialization of citizenship and the corporate form: The case of Estonian e-residency
Matti Ylönen matti.ylonen@taltech.ee
The proliferation of investor visas and golden passports have generated lacunae in scholarship on the commercialization of citizenship. I argue that this debate has focused too narrowly on citizenship-related rights of natural persons, in a situation where conducting international business in corporate form has become increasingly commonplace also for individual citizens. Given that even small entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures and access to major markets, we need to broaden the debate on the commercialization of citizenship to residency-specific rights of legal persons. I illustrate this dynamic with a case study of the Estonian e-residency, which allows non-residents to establish and manage a company in Estonia online. While e-residency does not commercialize the traditional core aspects of citizenship, it does commercialize important rights related to the ability to conduct business in Estonia and in the European Union (EU). Furthermore, e-residency provides entrepreneurs an access to key digital infrastructures in the contemporary global economy, such as Paypal. The findings call for more nuanced analysis on the range of rights and duties associated with citizenship and residence in the contemporary global digital economy.
+ a paper by Veikko Isotalo: veikko.isotalo@helsinki.fi