CITIZENS AND ACTIVISTS

Abstract

Much has been said about the use of email and other information and communication technologies by online activists to communicate their message to the general public, to recruit and mobilize fellow advocates, and to reach the mass media. However, largely absent from the literature are studies exploring the use of email by the public to communicate and interact with campaigners. This paper investigates why citizens email campaigners and whether email exchanges between the public and activists inform campaigning tactics. The data used in this article include the results of content analysis of the archive of an email list, participant observation, and informal interviews with the grassroots activists of a Dutch single-issue campaign against black box electronic voting. The research shows that the possibility for citizens to communicate with a grassroots campaign has been beneficial for both the civic writer and the activists.

Keywords:

• civic writing
• weak supporters
• grassroots activism
• email content analysis
• campaign strategy

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge support for this research from the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship Programme, contract number MEIF-CT-2006-041676.

Notes

In this paper we define political participation as both the conventional and unconventional activities (voting and elections, interest groups, social movement activity, and protest behaviour) undertaken to influence political decision-making (O'Neill 2006, p. 5).

Examples of concrete action and labour by the active supporters were delivering apple pies to 500 polling stations in Amsterdam, adding information to the wiki, and working on the hack of a voting computer.

The campaign website carried all the relevant legal and technical documents the group could get their hands on, newspaper articles dating back to 1993, and all the documents obtained with a number of extensive FoIA requests.

Available at: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Persberichten (4 July 2009).

An example of such shocking data was the blackmail threat from the head of the main e-voting supplier to the Dutch government. Emails revealed under FoIA requests showed him threatening to cease all activity if one of the WVSN activists was appointed to an independent review committee. He then proposed that ‘The ministry buys the shares of our company at a reasonable price, […] and we will still cooperate during the next election (the Dutch 2007 provincial elections to be held March 7th)’. He also wrote to the Dutch election officials suggesting that the activist should be arrested and detained. He wrote, ‘After all, his activities are destabilizing society and are as such comparable to terrorism. Preventive custody and a judicial investigation would have been very appropriate’. Available at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/17/foi_dutch/ (4 July 2009).

Not only the info emails, but also the discussion list and the WVSN crew mails were dominated by men.

The activists also received numerous emails from journalists via the info mail, but these are not included in the analysis.

All the PDFs were scanned with Optical Character Recognition software so that search engines like Google can index them.

Available at: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/FAQ (4 July 2009).

1 October 2000, Foundation versus State; 11 November 2008, Foundation versus Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland.

Copenhagen Document, [Online] Available at: http://www.minelres.lv/osce/cope90e.htm (4 July 2009).

Letter from the Secretary of State Dr A.Th. B. Bijleveld-Schouten (23 May 2007) to Foundation, [Online] Available at: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/images/c/cc/20070523-BZK_waarnemers.pdf (4 July 2009).

Much of the hype surrounding the participatory possibilities of the Internet has centred on its interactive elements. In 2003 Ward et al. (2003, p. 659) noted that interactive communication on political organizations' websites was however not particularly common. This also seems to hold true for the WVSN wiki where only a very small group of people contributed to a large amount of information.