Daniel Kreiss

Research Statement

During my time at Stanford, I have explored how technologies, social forms, and culture together shape American politics. How do these forces interact to produce American political life?  How do conceptions and practices of citizenship change? Why do academics and citizens alike invest technologies with their hopes for democratic renewal?  And, what are the consequences of sociotechnical shifts for democracy?  Scholars who address these questions have generally focused on the falling costs of communication, tracing a historical movement from the centralized corporate power of mass media to a participatory Internet.  My work goes beyond this approach to consider how changes in political organization and practice have social, cultural, and technical dimensions.  My dissertation and other research work reaches across several different contexts to ask how the affordances of tools are entwined with their meanings and deeper patterns of political history.  I do so by drawing on the conceptual insights of a number of fields including communication, science and technology studies, sociology, and political science. 

My dissertation reveals a host of social, cultural, and technical shifts in electoral politics over the last decade. At the same time, my research demonstrates that digital technologies are not the primary drivers of changes in political practice and networked politics is rarely as radically democratic as many scholars suggest.  Through participant observation, open-ended interviews, and archival research my work shows how until the 2003-2004 presidential election political consultants used the Internet as mass medium.  During the Howard Dean campaign, however, consultants deployed a set of Internet applications that enabled citizens to work together on tasks such as voter mobilization and fundraising.  My research reveals that as these new media staffers drew from their corporate experience to build these tools they described the campaign as a 1960s-style social movement.  The dissertation concludes by showing how after the campaign these staffers founded political consultancies and brought these tools, techniques, and claims to many other sites in the political field, including Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency.  In the process of telling this history, I make a number of analytical contributions to scholarly understandings of digital media and politics. While many theorists argue that changes in digital technologies are driving shifts in political practice, my research shows that social formations and cultural work shape the uptake of tools.  In contrast to many accounts of democratizing ‘Web 2.0’ technologies, my dissertation presents a more nuanced picture, showing that digital media vastly amplify the power of campaign consultants to motivate, channel, and control electoral work, while also extending the agency of citizens in some domains.

My subsequent work will focus on extending the analytical and historical reach of my dissertation research, situating the Dean campaign within larger currents of sociotechnical change with origins in the participatory political movements of the 1960s.  I will do so in order to continue to explore the implications for civic life of the uptake of networked communications tools by political campaigns and social movement organizations.