Rachel Gibson

Rachel tells us about her role, and an exciting five-year programme of research she’s just beginning.

Please can you tell us a little about your role and what you most enjoy about it?

As a Professor of Politics and Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMI) for the past three years I have held a dual role that allows me to split my time between researching, teaching and leading a highly active and talented group of academics. This mix of responsibilities has kept me very busy and ensured that I am never bored! I have particularly enjoyed the opportunity it presents to work with and learn from, people at all stages and levels of their University careers - from students, early career and senior researchers to our professional services staff and also senior University management.

You’re about to start an important new research project examining the impact of digital campaigning on democracy in five countries. What will this project involve?

Given the scope of the new EU project I will be stepping down from CMI this year to concentrate on developing and delivering on a five-year programme of research. The key goal will be to examine how digital technologies and new forms of data are reshaping the electoral landscape and the nature and purpose of political campaigns, in both new and old democracies. Growing concerns about the growth of micro-targeting on social media and deliberate spread of misinformation in a number of recent elections has led to speculation democracy may be coming under ‘threat’ from artificial intelligence (AI) and new internet enabled technologies. This project will provide one of the first systematic comparative studies of this question using established social scientific and newer data science driven methodologies. It will do so through an international and national network of country and methodological experts including my colleague here in the Department of Politics, Dr Marta Cantijoch. In particular we will examine the exposure to, and influence of digital campaigns on citizens’ political attitudes and choices in national elections in the coming five years in the US, the UK, France, Germany and Poland.

What do you hope the impact from the project will be?

The main aim of the project is to offer more systematic and robust answers to questions about whether and how democracies, and particularly election campaigns, are changing in response to the new opportunities presented by digital and particularly social media communication. Are the negative scenarios credible? Will we see a decline in the quality of voter decision making as result of misinformation and deliberate attempts to sway public opinion? Or will data-driven campaigning increase voters’ access to information on those issues that they care most about, and allow parties to reach out to younger citizens and those that are typically harder to reach? In providing answers to these questions the project will also seek to inform national and EU policy makers and regulatory bodies about how to promote best practice in digital campaigning. Finally, a key impact will be to advance the methodological toolkit that we use to study elections and campaign effects. The project is designed to provide exciting new national datasets that will link established methods of surveying with more fine grained observational data drawn from people’s social media activities. This will provide a rich and vital new set of insights into the formation and political attitudes and behaviours.

What’s the last book you read, did you enjoy it and would you recommend it?

The last book I read was Purity by Jonathan Franzen. I really enjoyed his first novel The Corrections and was keen to see if this one lived up to expectations. I was not disappointed. What I found particularly compelling was the way in which he posed broader contemporary questions about the role of information technology as a means to challenge existing power structures, with a very human story of a young woman’s very personal quest to find her father. Although the digital angle appealed to me for obvious reasons given my research interests, I became really caught up in the central story of the protagonist and her journey, literally and metaphorically, to discover the truth about her past.