Google and Democracy: Politics and the Power of the Internet by Sean Richey & J Benjamin Taylor

Author:Sean Richey & J Benjamin Taylor [Richey, Sean & Taylor, J Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media & Internet, Political Science, Political Process, American Government, General
ISBN: 9781351658720
Google: CFgPEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38368584
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hypothesis 1 concerns the ability of participants to actually learn from usage. Importantly, the null hypothesis—that Google searches on ballot measures have no educational effect—is a real possibility, for the reasons previously listed and outlined by the prior pessimistic scholarship (see Carr 2011; DiMaggio et al. 2004; Zillien and Hargittai 2009). Additionally, subjects may not read the top-ranked sites in depth, or pertinent, valuable content may not exist online on a given area of dense political information. A likely scenario is that good information is obscured by poor information, or simply that learning is difficult. Regardless of the reason, the point has never been empirically tested with actual search behavior from Internet users. By having users search for information on ballot measures using Google in real time, capturing their search history, and having relevant demographic and attitudinal measures, we are able to make validated claims about the normative benefits of Internet searches in politics for the first time.

Aside from knowledge simply being acquired, we predict that knowledge generated from searching the Internet will be temporally resilient. Because subjects who are using Google are agents rather than passive recipients, we expect to see political knowledge that withstands the passage of time. Hypothesis 2 is important because subjects may be more likely to notice information about the issue in the news or their life after the experimental exposure to the ballot measure and politics generally. Thus, being in this experiment may conceivably prime subjects to be more cognizant of our subject matter. If experimental subjects in the treatment still show higher levels of knowledge one-week post-experiment, we can attribute these gains to the experimental Internet research process demonstrating this kind of behavior generates robust, long-lasting effects on political knowledge.

Despite the fact that ballot measures are usually low salience, the ballot measures we use were extremely salient during the time of our study, making it difficult to find evidence for our theory. The salient nature of our ballot measures may have created conditions in which the public generally had high levels of knowledge, which could obscure significant differences between the treatment and control groups. As evidence for this salience, the mean political knowledge score for both T-SPLOST and charter school control conditions was quite high, and the minimum wage measure—while not particularly high—had significant amounts of national press coverage.

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