Press

Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Peter John, Dr Scott Hale, and Dr Taha Yasseri have won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize at the Political Studies Association (PSA)’s Annual Awards in Westminster on 5 December 2017. Now in its 16th year, the PSA Awards pays tribute to those that have made outstanding contributions to politics in the past year. Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action investigates political mobilization in a digital world. As people go about their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, [...]

Rhys Crilley reviewed Political Turbulence in "Political Studies Review" One of the major strengths of Political Turbulence includes the authors' ability to make complex concepts from a variety of disciplines easily understandable and applicable to analysing social media. They manage to navigate the reader deftly through disciplinary borders and a deep ocean of data while never losing sight of the political significance of their findings. Indeed, such an inter-disciplinary perspective is exactly what is needed when making sense of politics in the age of social media. ...more The full review appears in Crilley, R. (2017). Book Review: Helen Margetts, Peter [...]

Author Helen Margetts spoke to Hendrik Lehmann of Digital Present on the opportunities and risks for politics in the age of social media. The article, in German, is available on the website of Digital Present. Für eine bessere Politik müssen wir Forderungen an Facebook und Twitter stellen Die Oxford-Professorin Helen Margetts spricht im Interview über Chancen und Risiken von Politik im Zeitalter von Social Media. Frau Margetts, in Ihrem Buch »Political Turbulence« argumentieren Sie, dass sich politische Systeme, ähnlich wie das Wetter, immer chaotischer verhalten. Warum? Zum einen generieren politische Systeme heute in einer Art Daten, wie sie es vorher [...]

We are honoured Guardian columnist and former political editor of the Observer Gaby Hinsliff included Political Turbulence in her column on the best political books of 2016. For Westminster junkies, meanwhile, one of the most useful things I read all year was a dry tome by four academics on how social media interacts with politics to produce fast-growing but volatile grassroots movements. It’s no Boxing Day page-turner, but Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton), by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, sheds interesting light on the year’s great upheavals. ...Read more

What role might social information have played in the Trump campaign? Political Turbulence Author Helen Margetts explores this issue in a blog post for the University of Oxford Commentators have been quick to ‘blame social media’ for ‘ruining’ the 2016 election in putting Mr Donald Trump in the White House. Just as was the case in the campaign for Brexit, people argue that social media has driven us to a ‘post-truth’ world of polarisation and echo chambers. Is this really the case? At first glance, the ingredients of the Trump victory — as for Brexit — seem remarkably traditional. ...Read more