Hi, Join us for the Change Seminar tomorrow - Tuesday 25th February 2020 at noon.
When: Tuesday 1/28, 12pm-1pm Where: CSE2 271 (Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Building). *Title:* "How Technology Shapes the Crowd and Protects Electoral Integrity: Digital and Real-World Political Participation in Emerging Democracies." *Who:* James D. Long, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Washington (with Clark Gibson, Karen Ferree, and Craig McIntosh--UC-San Diego & Danielle Jung--Emory University) *Abstract:* How does technology shape political participation and electoral integrity in emerging democracies? By lowering costs, new information and communications technology (ICT) draws new participants into politics. Yet lower costs also shift the composition of participants in politically important ways by attracting more extrinsically motivated individuals and a crowd that is more responsive to incentives (``malleable'') and sensitive to costs (``fragile''). We illustrate these dynamics using VIP: Voice, a multi-channel ICT platform we built to encourage both digital and real-world forms of participation in South Africa's 2014 election. VIP: Voice allowed citizens to engage in campaign activities via low-tech mobile phones and high-tech social media, randomized incentives for different types of participation, and generated a corps of citizen election monitors deployed to provide checks on the integrity of vote counts. VIP: Voice generated engagement in over 250,000 South Africans but saw large attrition switching from low to high-cost forms of engagement, and attrition was particularly large for extrinsically motivated participants. ICT-enabled citizen monitoring also worked effectively to provide low-cost cost-effective independent checks on the integrity of the electoral process that also guard against electronic hacking. Best, Samia Ibtasam <http://samiaibtasam.com/> PhD Student Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington
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