PLEAD '13最新文献

{"title":"Privacy, accountability, and access in the age of the personalized campaign","authors":"Tarun Wadhwa","doi":"10.1145/2508436.2508460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2508436.2508460","url":null,"abstract":"In the last eight years, there has been little progress made on updating our nation's outdated and ineffective privacy laws. While the cost of data has plummeted and entire new industries have been created around storing, analyzing, and sorting large sets of data, our legislators have done little to ensure that regulation has kept up with the pace of technological progress. Instead, they have harnessed these powerful tools to advance their own interests by transforming the way they run their campaigns.\u0000 The age of the \"personalized campaign\" is here - and voters, whether they like it or not, are now being aggressively courted based on their attributes, habits, and behaviors. There are major implications ahead for the future of the quality of our nation's democracy. As both parties engage in an arms race to gather the most information and the most sophisticated data analytics technology, a public increasingly disillusioned with politics doesn't seem to have any meaningful way to \"opt-out.\"\u0000 Without any real legal obligation to disclose what they know and how they use the personal information they collect, campaigns have successfully been able to argue that their activities constitute \"political speech.\" A term that was once a critical and valuable protection for free speech is now used as cover for political operatives to act in a non-transparent manner. Many of the same actions used by advertisers that we see as invasive or creepy are now used by the very people we trust to govern our society.\u0000 Campaigns have reasonably argued that if they were to reveal their tactics, they would be giving away a competitive advantage that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. But this raises larger questions as what new types of barriers to entry this creates for candidates. There are serious questions as to how this will effect those who are not permitted access to these vast troves of information and those who are not able to afford the types of technology needed to now compete in a modern election. It remains to be seen how this will empower incumbents or damage third party challengers outside of the mainstream of the political process.\u0000 The \"filter bubble\" that has created a world online where each of us sees different content and information has now come to our political process. While this can allow people to hear about the issues that an algorithm thinks they care about most, it can also serve to isolate us even further along partisan lines. When politicians are only focus on telling us the things that we want to hear, it may further degrade the integrity of the entire voting process.\u0000 Four years is a long time in the world of computing, and the technological capabilities of campaigns in 2016 are sure to dwarf what we saw in the most recent election. There are new opportunities to connect with voters while trying to identify what they care about most that can lead to a more engaging, fulfilling election -- and there are ways to make voting","PeriodicalId":237974,"journal":{"name":"PLEAD '13","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130485977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multi-cycle forecasting of congressional elections with social media","authors":"M. Huberty","doi":"10.1145/2508436.2508439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2508436.2508439","url":null,"abstract":"Twitter has become a controversial medium for election forecasting. We provide further evidence that simplistic forecasting methods do not perform well on forward-looking forecasts. We introduce a new estimator that models the language of campaign-relevant Twitter messages. We show that this algorithm out-performs incumbency in out-of-sample tests for the 2010 election on which it was trained. That success, however, collapses when the same algorithm is used to forecast the 2012 election. We further demonstrate that volume-based and sentiment-based alternatives also fail to forecast future elections, despite promising performance in back-casting tests. We suggest that whatever information these simplistic forecasts capture above and beyond incumbency, that information is highly ephemeral and thus a weak performer for future election forecasts.","PeriodicalId":237974,"journal":{"name":"PLEAD '13","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122148041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The representative's problem: how legislators use communication to secure constituent support","authors":"Justin Grimmer","doi":"10.1145/2508436.2508461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2508436.2508461","url":null,"abstract":"In a representative democracy elected officials face what I call the representative's problem. Elected officials work in Washington to provide representation, yet constituents lack the incentive and capacity to track what their representative does in office. Worse yet, challengers and media may portray an elected officials' work negatively to constituents.\u0000 In this presentation, I show how legislators use communication to overcome the representative's problem, how this affects constituents' evaluations, and how this matters for US politics and political representation. To characterize what legislators say to constituents I apply and develop text as data methods to analyze press releases, floor speeches, newsletters, and media coverage. This reveals the diverse way legislators characterize their work in Washington to constituents and how members of Congress use rhetoric to ensure they receive credit for government actions.\u0000 Based on this analysis of legislators' rhetoric, I use a series of experiments to analyze how constituents respond to legislators' messages. I show how legislators ensure they receive credit for favorable actions the government does, even when the legislator's actual connection to the expenditure is only indirect. Together, this presentation shows how representation works in American politics and how computational tools can examine previously difficult to study features of politics.","PeriodicalId":237974,"journal":{"name":"PLEAD '13","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123692321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Partisan alignments and political polarization online: a computational approach to understanding the french and US presidential elections","authors":"Alexander Hanna, Chris Wells, P. Maurer, Lewis A. Friedland, Dhavan V. Shah, Jörg Matthes","doi":"10.1145/2508436.2508438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2508436.2508438","url":null,"abstract":"With the advent of Twitter and the ability to collect large datasets from this technology, researchers have the opportunity to analyze political participation in cross-national electoral contexts. This paper capitalizes on this capability to examine political polarization and citizen engagement during the US and French presidential campaigns. We use the Twitter Gardenhose collection to filter tweets based on keywords around a 50-day window, from March 19, 2012 to May 8, 2012 for the French election and September 19, 2012 to November 8, 2012 for the US Election, particularly focusing on on engagement during the US and French presidential debates on October 3, 2012 and May 2, 2012, respectively. From these data, we constructed partisan alignments based on hashtag usage and retweet networks. We found evidence of more stark political polarization in the French case, while the US case demonstrated less partisan division. This study elaborates commonalities and contrasts in the use of a major social medium by citizens in contexts that differ in political culture and language but feature similar ideological divides, electoral politics, and campaign contexts. We conclude by discussing the implications of computational social science and \"big data\" in communications, comparative politics, and political sociology.","PeriodicalId":237974,"journal":{"name":"PLEAD '13","volume":"149 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114896604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tweets and votes, a special relationship: the 2009 federal election in germany","authors":"Andreas Jungherr","doi":"10.1145/2508436.2508437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2508436.2508437","url":null,"abstract":"As the microblogging service Twitter becomes an increasingly popular tool for politicians and general users to comment on and discuss politics, researchers increasingly turn to the relationship between tweets mentioning parties or candidates and their respective electoral fortunes. This paper offers a detailed analysis of Twitter messages posted during the run-up to the 2009 federal election in Germany and their relationship to the electoral fortunes of Germany's parties and candidates. This analysis will focus on four metrics for measuring the attention on parties and candidates on Twitter and the relationship to their respective vote share. The metrics discussed here are: the total number of hashtags mentioning a given political party; the dynamics between explicitly positive or explicitly negative mentions of a given political party; the total number of hashtags mentioning one of the leading candidates, Angela Merkel (CDU) or Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD); and the total number of users who used hashtags mentioning a given party or candidate. The results will show that during the campaign of 2009 Twitter messages commenting on parties and candidates showed little, if any, systematic relationship with subsequent votes on election day. In the discussion of the results, I will raise a number of issues that researchers interested in predicting elections with Twitter will have to address to advance the state of the literature.","PeriodicalId":237974,"journal":{"name":"PLEAD '13","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131470464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}