The MoveOn Effect: The Internet's Impact on Political Action?
Dave Karpf, Rutgers Assistant Professor and Yale Information Society Project Fellow
Rutgers Assistant Professor and Yale Information Society Project Fellow Dave Karpf discusses his research on the emergence of a new generation of internet-mediated political advocacy groups in America. Karpf argues that changes in membership and fundraising regimes are affecting the political economy of interest group action, dramatically altering the interest group ecology of American politics. The talk will focus on issues with studying groups who, despite online information abundance, keep the important data behind firewalls.
About Dave
Dave Karpf is an Assistant Professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information. He holds a Ph.D in political science from the University of Pennsylvania (2009) and has held fellowships at Brown University's Taubman Center for Public Policy and the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs. He is currently a Visiting Fellow with the Yale Information Society Project.
Dave's research concerns the internet's impact on American political associations, with a particularly emphasis on the new "netroots" political groups like MoveOn, Organizing for America, and community blogs like DailyKos. He runs the Blogosphere Authority Index (www.blogosphereauthorityindex.com), an open-access dataset used by many blog researchers. His work has been published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Politics and Technology Review, and IEEE Intelligent Systems, and has also been covered in The Economist. Dave's perspective on political associations draws on over a decade of participation-observation in the leadership of the Sierra Club, having served as National Director of their student-run arm in 1999 and recently serving 2 terms on their national Board of Directors (2004-2010). His work can be found online at www.davidkarpf.com.