Laudatio

Dear Professor Margetts, dear guests, colleagues and friends,

I am really delighted that the laureate of the Meyer-Struckmann-award this year is Professor Helen Margetts. She is a scientist with an outstanding international reputation who has acquired great merits for her research in digitalization and democracy. It is an honour for me to briefly introduce some cornerstones of her academic career and research profile.

Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford and Director of the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute. The Alan Turing Institute, which bears a famous and challenging name, is the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence in Great Britain. The universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick and the University College London created The Alan Turing Institute in 2015. Eight new universities joined the institute in 2018. At the Turing, computer scientists, engineers, statisticians, mathematicians, and social scientists work together across disciplines to generate impact through theoretical development and application to real-world problems. The institute nurtures a network of industry, public sector, and third sector partners. It defines as its mission to make great leaps in data science and artificial intelligence research in order to change the world for the better.

Prior to her appointment at the Turing Institute, Professor Margetts was director of the Oxford Internet Institute from 2011 to 2018. She played a vital role in developing this institute to one of the world’s leading centres for interdisciplinary digitalization research. Before this she was the first professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy at University College London.

Professor Margetts is a member of United Kingdom government’s Digital Economy Council, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council, the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Agile Government and the Ada Lovelace Institute for Data Ethics. In 2018 she was awarded the Friedrich Schiedel Prize by the Technical University of Munich for research leadership in technology and politics. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. For the policy impact of her research she received a prize with a very fitting name: the Political Scientists Making a Difference Award. 2019 she was awarded an OBE, an Order of the British Empire, for her services to social and political science.

Professor Margetts has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and policy reports and six books. She has presented her work all over the world at forums from the Hay Literary Festival, Harvard University and MIT, to the Royal Society and Davos, as well as at innumerable academic and policy-making events and in media appearances.

Helen Margetts stands for a close linkage between basic research, application oriented solutions and practical relevance. The political and societal impact of her scientific work is of central concern to her.

This objective is also paramount in the guiding principles of the Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme which Professor Margetts is leading. The programme has the aim of developing research projects, tools, and techniques that help governments innovate with data-intensive technologies. The researchers work alongside policy makers to explore how data science and artificial intelligence can inform public policy and improve the provision of public services – from allocating resources in the fairest and most transparent way to designing personalised public services that are tailored to people's individual needs and situations.

Essential for this programme is the conviction that governments can reap the benefits of digital technologies only if they make considerations of ethics and safety a first priority. Therefore, the public policy programme of the Alan Turing Institute cooperates with policy makers to develop well-crafted laws and sensible regulation, using the ethical principles and norms that clarify the socially acceptable uses of these technologies.

A recent publication by the Public Policy Programme embodies these ambitions: “Understanding Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Safety”. It provides guidance for the responsible design and implementation of algorithmic systems in the public sector. The guide outlines values and principles to assist political and administrative actors in ensuring that they develop and deploy Artificial Intelligence ethically, safely, and responsibly. The latest book by Professor Margetts herself is “Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action”. It won a prize for the best politics book in 2017 and features many qualities which are significant for Helen Margetts’ work.

The book demonstrates how it is possible to span a bridge between basic theoretical groundwork, sophisticated empirical research and concrete practical applications and recommendations.

Its leading question is how the dissemination of social media changes the dynamics of mobilization – from global political movements to neighbourhood campaigns. How does mobilizations via social media get started, how does they operate, why does some succeed, while other fail?

The starting point of the inquiry is the basic fact that the incentives of individuals to participate are fundamentally reshaped in the context of social media. Participations are possible with much lower costs than traditional participation. Cumulative tiny acts of political engagement, micro-donations of money, time, and effort can aggregate to form a large-scale mobilization and powerful campaigns for policy change. By this the Internet facilitates the mobilization of individuals and groups who have traditionally not participated before.

Additional incentives for participating like the visibility of one’s own pro-social actions and social information about the behaviour of others are also more easily available in digital contexts. By means of analyses of digitally generated data and experimentation, it is shown in the book that visibility is a powerful determinant of people’s propensity to participate in collective action, whereas social information emerges as the optimal form of social influence for maximising the chances of providing a public good. Platforms that provide social information will therefore be more successful in raising participation, encouraging civic engagement and campaigning than those that do not.

As a consequence of the new options and incentives digital instruments offer for political participation, social media inject turbulence into political life. A small number of unpredictable, extreme events can inject chaotic dynamics into every area of politics, acting as an unruly influence on political life. They facilitate a non-normal distribution of mobilizations, where most fail and few succeed dramatically. Political mobilizations can become viable without leading individuals or organizations and proceed to critical mass and achieve the policy or political change at which they are aimed. Turbulent pluralism is the outcome with politics which are unstable, unpredictable, and often unsustainable.

To summarize the challenge facing social science when confronted with these dynamics, an apt and revealing analogue is used in the book: for the social scientists, it is said, the tiny acts of political participation that take place via social media as units of analysis are the equivalent of particles and atoms in a natural system, manifesting themselves in political turbulence.

Nevertheless, the book ends with a quite optimistic outlook: for citizens digital media create a new capacity to set the political agenda from outside the political system and unleash more citizen-based politics. For policy makers the data generated from social media can allow them to monitor and understand undercurrents of public opinion and dissatisfaction and could be deployed by governments to understand trends and patterns in citizens’ needs, preferences, concerns, behaviour, and complaints. They can be used by political decision-makers as a barometer of their own legitimacy or illegitimacy, and to identify the warning signals of critical transitions.

Well, the future will tell!

If I may make a personal remark, I was especially pleased while reading the book that it demonstrated that research in the digital era can profit significantly from classical work in the social sciences like Mancur Olson’s seminal work on collective action, Mark Granovetter’s groundbreaking theory about the role of strong and weak ties or the threshold models of collective action by Thomas Schelling. Too often the impression is nurtured that we have to start from scratch when in reality the insights of earlier work in fundamental social mechanisms can be adapted very successfully to analyse and understand the new digital world and its dynamics.

Finally, I would like to repeat what I said to Professor Margetts on some other occasion: Brexit, which made many of us very sad, is not the end of friendship and cooperation. Therefore, I am especially pleased that we have the privilege of honouring a leading scientist from the United Kingdom and thereby able to send a little message of how much we appreciate the work of our British colleagues and that we very much hope for ongoing mutual exchange and collaboration in the future too!