Google: The Role of Internet Search in Elections in Established and Challenged Democracies

How do search engines contribute to voter knowledge in elections? Social scientists have long noted that informed citizens are critical to sustaining democracy, while authoritarian regimes are marked by their control of information flow. While the internet in general, and search engines in particular, provide new and unprecedented ways for citizens to access information, there has been little specific research into how voters employ search engines as they carry out the democratic task of gathering information in election campaigns. This is a particularly important question, as search engine results themselves will come to reflect and prioritize citizen preferences. Do citizens in established democracies search in ways that differ from those in newer democracies? What sorts of search terms - candidates, parties, ideas, values, religions or other themes - do they favour? Do search patterns tend to direct citizens into information 'cocoons' or 'trajectories' with a narrow range of traditional information sources such as party websites and dominant media outlets or does search engine behaviour tend to continually expose individuals to a broad range of political messages? Through a transnational study of search engine behaviour, primarily gathered via Google Trends, this project will use the power of search choices and popularity to examine how and when people are choosing to gather information in elections ranging from relatively routine in the United States to the potentially destabilising in Iran. Through comparing how citizens in established democracies (the United Kingdom and the United States), challenged democracies (Italy) and transitional states (Egypt, Russia and Iran) use search engines in election campaigns, this project will reveal how search engines function in the dissemination of information during critical political events. We will combine methods and approaches across political communication research, with a focus on sociology, political science and media studies.

Academic Impact

Enhancing the knowledge economy: systematic analysis of search data, incorporated into existing knowledge and models of voting behaviour in cross-national perspective, offers a new layer of perspective and understanding about how citizens inform themselves in elections.

Worldwide academic advancement: This project looks at six different countries with various regime types to offer ideas and theories about voter behaviour and information gathering across a range of societies. This can offer valuable insights on how to improve electoral democracy (by creating more informed citizens and more balanced information spheres) in a range of societies.

The development and utilisation of new and innovative methodologies, etc: Taking search data as the 'spine' of the project, the researchers will use a range of approaches from across political science, sociology and media studies to integrate search data as another useful layer of how we understand citizen behaviour in elections. The innovation comes mostly from the approach - i.e. conceptualising how to include large pools of data that are publically created via search/Google.

Contributing to the health of a discipline: It is hoped that this project will serve as a template to scholars as to how online data augments, rather than threatens, traditional scholarship.

Delivering and training highly skilled researchers: At a local level, the grant principals and our RA will be learning important new skills in how to analyse online data. More importantly, we will disseminate that information (through academic publications and presentations) to academics in general, particularly via our commitment to open data access (as discussed in our data management plan).

All of this impact is delivered via academic publication and presentations, as well as via information posted on line and podcasts (to widen dissemination).

Economic and Societal Impact

Contributing toward evidence-based policy making and influencing public policies and legislation AND Shaping and enhancing the effectiveness of public services: We believe that by showing the differential patterns of search in elections that governments of different countries (under study for this project are the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Iran, Egypt and Russia) can gain insights into the ways in which citizens seek knowledge during campaigns. This can highlight where there are perhaps deficiencies in mainstream information; it may also suggest to governments that they need more pro-active campaigns to educate voters about their rights (and responsibilities).

Enhancing the research capacity, knowledge and skills of businesses and organisations: We believe that our project can show Google, as a corporation, an important aspect of how their business model of search contributes to voter education. We hope that this type of research can even suggest useful ways to tweak or re-tool some search engines in elections (perhaps by having a Google Election engine).