Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The effect of robocalls

Partisans of all descriptions have not been shy, of late, about speculating about the possible effects of fraudulent phone calls in the 2011 federal election.

Conservative Dean Del Mastro has argued that in 2011, "national voter turnout was up by 900,000. Canadians obviously knew where to vote." Ah-ha - the calls, if they happened, had no effect!

The NDP's Pat Martin has asked of the Conservatives, "Did they really win that last federal election? Or did they achieve their razor-thin majority by cheating?" Ah-ha - the calls, if they happened, stole the election!

As fun as it is to jump to convenient conclusions, the whole exercise has nothing to do with the most fundamental question in the robocalls affair: Are any political operatives, of any party, guilty of unethical or illegal behaviour? If so, that's a serious breach that demands investigation and redress, irrespective of whether those calls ever managed to change a single voter's behaviour. Fraud is fraud, whether or not it has the intended result.

We don't need to ever know whether turnout was affected by fraudulent calls in 2011 to know that fraudulent calls are wrong.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't also ask the question of what political effect such calls might have had - it just means that our determination to investigate fraud shouldn't depend on the answer.


Information about how voters respond to misleading information can help us, as citizens, understand how our democracy works, and guard it better. Beyond rules and laws about fraud and fair dealing, are there steps Canada should be taking to counter the political effects of misinformation?

While partisans have been trying to out-shout each other, more neutral observers have been puzzling over what strategy could explain the known pattern of complaints, if indeed there was a Conservative strategy. There is nothing to suggest a coherent pattern that helped Conservatives to win tight races. The issue is further complicated by the possibility that more than one party might have been responsible for spreading misinformation, especially if some misinformation was the result of incompetence rather than a co-ordinated and malicious campaign.

And people of all parties and none have been arguing, using little evidence other than their own gut feelings, over the question of whether a misleading call would cause someone not to cast a vote at all.

One thing that has been missing from this noisy argument is detailed research into what did happen to voter turnout in 2011.

A professor in the economics department at Simon Fraser University has started to fill that gap, by assessing turnout in ridings where misleading calls were reported. This is a difficult task, for many reasons. The factors that go into human decision-making are many, and must be considered in any such research. And the research is based, for now anyway, on reports and complaints about phone calls, not on firm evidence of the calls themselves.

Anke Kessler took these limitations into account in her working paper, "Does misinformation demobilize the electorate? Measuring the impact of alleged 'robocalls' in the 2011 Canadian election." The paper and the data are available on her website sfu.ca/~akessler. She warns that her paper is not meant to call into question the results in any particular riding.

Even so, her paper is significant. "To my knowledge, there are no hard data on the effect of intentional demobilization on turnout," she writes - it's not the kind of thing a scientist can study in a lab. So the silver lining is that we can thank Pierre Poutine for giving Canada a chance to contribute to the social-science literature.

Kessler is very careful to avoid traps such as simplistic comparisons of turnout from one election to the next (see Dean Del Mastro, above) or comparisons between ridings. When we look at what happened within a single riding, we know that common factors such as the closeness of the race, or the quality of the candidate, aren't skewing the turnout numbers. She finds a decline in voter turnout between 2008 and 2011 in those polling stations where non-Conservative votes predominate, and finds this effect is "larger in ridings that were allegedly targeted by the fraudulent phone calls." The effect, she says, is statistically significant: "In those ridings where allegations of robocalls emerged, turnout was an estimated 3 percentage points lower on average."

This correlation doesn't necessarily prove anything. It does, though, suggest that there's a phenomenon here worth a closer look, and deserving of a respectful, honest and thorough discussion.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: editorial

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