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, endorsing, viewing and following. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighbourhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence shows how most attempts at collective action online fail. Those that succeed can do so dramatically, but are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. …read more
Professor of Society and the Internet
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet, a political scientist specialising in digital government and politics. She was Director of the OII from 2011-18. She is a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College.
King’s College London
Former Senior Research Fellow
Taha Yasseri analyses large-scale transactional data to understand human dynamics, collective behaviour, collective intelligence and machine intelligence.
