![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Industrialized countries face comparable societal and economic changes induced by advances in digital technologies. Are these similar developments filtered through the country-specific economic and socio-cultural context, thus leading to different policy stances of party-political actors? This question is probed looking at Germany and Ireland as two West European countries with highly different conditions. Drawing on party manifestos for the three most recent elections in the examined countries, the analysis maps parties’ policy priorities in a common space. Instead of persisting differences in policy stances related to digital technologies, there is a clear trend of convergence between 2007 and 2017. Despite the very different country settings, parties in both countries, particularly in Germany, have shifted towards putting greater emphasis on aspects of productivity and efficiency. The findings suggest that adaptive pressures and the economic importance of digital technologies prevail over political-economic and socio-cultural country differences in shaping political actors’ policy priorities.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to Markus B. Siewert for his valuable input on case studies and comparative designs.
Notes
1. The importance of massive amounts of fine-grained data for economic value creation results from the ability to cheaply and unobtrusively obtain them in combination with their potential to describe, explain, and also predict future behavior (Srnicek, Citation2017, pp. 25–26). Companies can thus make use of such data to optimize their value chains, make better decisions, and establish personalized marketing practices (Akter & Wamba, Citation2016; Brownlow, Zakl, Neely, & Urmetzer, Citation2015; Lambin, Citation2014).
2. The Data Economy is regarded as a major economic factor for the future prosperity of European economies (European Commission, Citation2017a). According to its European Data Market Report, this Data Economy (measured as “the economic impacts generated by data-suppliers, data users and the whole” (European Commission, Citation2017b, p. 14)) had a volume of 300 Billion Euro in 2016 (EU28), and it exhibits a growth rate of more than 4% for the entire EU.
3. With regard to the contextual factors (X) and the outcome (Y), the cases are thus expected to be “diverse” cases (Rohlfing, Citation2012, pp. 82–83) – whether this is the case, depends on what outcome is empirically observed in the analysis.
4. Many items included in the survey are not ideal as they mix attitudinal with perceptual and situational aspects. For instance, concern about misuse of personal data will arguably depend on the existing data protection regime, and concern with data collection through video surveillance will depend on the degree to which video surveillance is actually established in a country. There are, however, a couple of items that more directly capture evaluations concerning the use of personal data in the context of a changed information infrastructure. Such items are presented in Annex I. The item that arguably most directly captures citizens’ skepticism towards the instrumental or commercial use of their personal data in a networked or online environment is the question whether citizens are comfortable with online companies using personal information to tailor advertisement and content (Q16). It shows the strongest contrast between Irish and German citizens (58% very or fairly comfortable versus 29%). The annex also comprises questions about the trust in those organizations which are most directly related to the handling of personal data generated online – Phone companies and internet service providers and online businesses (QB18) –, questions about awareness regarding privacy issues (QB6), perceived control over personal data online (QB4), and questions about the general readiness to divulge personal data (QB2.4 and QB2.6). Looking at some questions, such as readiness to provide personal information for free services (like e-mail), and whether providing personal information is “not a big issue”, French and Spanish citizens seem even more reluctant to give away personal data (QB2.4 and QB 2.6). In sum, however, the data clearly support the notion that Germany forms a stark contrast to Ireland with regard to privacy and data protection attitudes and is thus a suitable case for the intended kind of comparison.
5. Although it should be noted that the selected elections partly took place during the Euro crisis when macroeconomic issues were high on the agenda, this should not affect the results for the analysis of policy stances regarding digital technologies. After all, relevant aspects in that regard are not treated in relation to other issues, the positional analysis thus only results from the differential emphasis of aspects that concern digital change.
6. The search terms are data, digital, cyber, social media/new media, internet, online, communication.
7. Mere descriptions of ongoing developments are not per se relevant, it has to be clear that they are the target of party policy.
8. These are transportation, development aid, participation, working conditions, political competence distribution, and media, journalism, and culture.
9. Inter-coder-reliability has been tested with a second coder and based on material from the second election wave. After coding a training set (464 cases, percent agreement = 87.7%, Krippendorff’s Alpha = 0.863) the coding rules were further refined and a test sample of 10% of the material (no overlap with the training set) was drawn. The resulting percentage agreement was 93.1 while Krippendorff’s Alpha amounted to 0.924.
10. The saliency approach has been widely applied in research of party politics and policy studies. It seems particularly suitable for analyzing the digital policy as political actors hardly take an opposing stance with regard to aspects of digital change, such as establishing broadband infrastructure, achieving economic growth or guaranteeing cybersecurity. Instead, one can expect to see trade-offs between different aspects that parties emphasize. The analysis below expressly presumes the possibility of such trade-offs and aims to extract them from the data, i.e. to carve out what the trade-offs are and evaluate whether they are substantially meaningful. This approach thus avoids the potentially problematic presumption of an issue on which only one side is emphasized by parties. And it is thus compatible with the finding that – in contrast to original assumptions of saliency theory – parties regularly emphasize different sides of an issue (Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, & Winkler, Citation2014; Lowe, Benoit, Mikhaylov, & Laver, Citation2011).
11. The analysis uses the Torgerson start, which is the less robust configuration yielded by the metric MDS procedure. The number of dimensions is limited to two, which is justified not only through the greater ease of interpretation but also in light of an acceptable Stress-I value of 0.088.
12. This is an exact way of measuring the length of manifestos which furthermore circumvents the problem of deciding what qualifies as a sentence – a question that is not always easy to answer in view of the layout of some party manifestos.
13. The analysis has also been performed for the two examined countries separately (i.e. over time and without the need to normalize the coding frequencies between the countries). These analyses yield substantially identical results and conclusions. Moreover, an additional analysis has been conducted by running a correspondence analysis (with symmetrical as well as asymmetrical normalization) over the count data (coding frequencies). This is not ideal given that some cells have the value zero. The results are, however, substantially identical to those presented below, with the difference that parties with low coding numbers (the Irish parties in 2007) are relative outliers in the resulting configuration.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Pascal D. König
Dr. Pascal D. König is a researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). His research mainly deals with political communication, party competition, and policies regarding digital technologies. Recent work that looks at party competition over digital policy has appeared in the Journal of European Public Policy, European Political Science Review, and Big Data & Society.