Government on the Web

We will begin a new three-year research programme on The Internet, Public Policy and Political Science: Collective Action, Governance and Citizen-Government Interactions in the Digital Era starting 1st April.

More information about this project is available in the OII press release, and project description page.

On Tuesday, 8th March, Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) acted as an expert witness to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, which is running an investigation entitled Good Governance: The effective use of Information Technology. See the full post for a video of the committee meeting.

These experiments explored the dynamics of collective action on-line and tested empirically how different information environments affect collective action decisions at various stages in a mobilization. Specifically, we wanted to examine the effect of different forms of real-time ‘social influence’ on people’s participatory decisions.

This paper tests the hypothesis that social information provided by the internet makes it possible in large groups to exert social pressure that Olson considered viable only for smaller groups. In two experiments - laboratory and field - subjects could choose to sign petitions and donate money to support causes. Participants were randomised into treatment groups that received varying information about how many other people had participated and control groups receiving no social information.