Wonks and War Rooms
Wonks and War Rooms
Elections and Our Digital Media Ecosystem
Wonks and War Rooms is kicking off season 7 with all things elections! With 73 elections worldwide, 2024 is being called a “global elections supercycle”. Elizabeth introduces the headlining topics listeners can get excited to learn about this season, including the theory of planned behaviour, astroturfing, foreign interference at the nomination level, and election laws. Elizabeth also talks about the land acknowledgement you hear at the end of each WWR episode, she explains how Wonks and War Rooms is working towards reconciliation through research, guests and other initiatives and contextualizes this effort within the University of Ottawa’s broader Indigenous Affirmation
Additional Resources:
- Check out the 2024 Global elections Supercycle tracker for more information on worldwide elections in 2024.
- Elizabeth notes the next Canadian election is currently scheduled for October 2025.
- Elizabeth mentions the Truth and Reconciliation calls to action and the role of land acknowledgements [for more information, visit the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation run by the University of Manitoba]
- Elizabeth references the University of Ottawa’s Indigenous Resources, including the Indigenous Affairs office, the Indigenous Education Council and the University of Ottawa’s Indigenous Affirmation [see also: University of Ottawa’s Indigenous Resource Centre]
Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.
Elizabeth Dubois: [00:00:05] Welcome to Wonks and War Rooms where political communication theory meets on the ground strategy. I'm your host, Elizabeth Dubois. I'm an Associate Professor and University research chair in politics, communication and technology at the University of Ottawa. My pronouns are she/her. Today, I am very excited to be kicking off season 7 of the podcast. We're going to be talking about elections because, if you haven't heard, 2024 is a global elections supercycle. We've already had 52 national elections this year in Mexico, Algeria, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and many others. By the end of the year, we're expecting 73 total elections, with the US election on November 5th being the largest worldwide [consult the 2024 Global elections Supercycle for more information on worldwide elections in 2024]. So, needless to say, [there's] a lot going on. In this season what we're hoping to do is equip everyone with a few more concepts and theories that can help us better understand how elections take place, how people develop opinions and behaviours within electoral contexts, and what we can do to up our media and digital literacy game when we are in the midst of an election. As for Canada, our next election is scheduled currently for October 20th, 2025, but, as you may know, the Liberal Party currently holds a minority government. What that means is there could be a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons that could trigger an earlier election.
[00:01:30] So what are we talking about this season? We're going to hit on things like the theory of planned behaviour and how that impacts advertising decisions for political campaigns, [and] how advertisers use our understanding of people's social behaviour to make choices about who to target and when. We're going to talk about the role of newsletters in our political information environment (we'll get a little Ottawa bubbly here, but I promise it's interesting). We'll talk about astroturfing and foreign interference. [In terms of] astroturfing, we'll talk about [it] in the Brazilian context and then kind of zoom out to other places that we see that kind of disinformation spread. And then for foreign interference, we're talking about it at the nomination level, which rarely gets discussed, so I'm pretty excited for that conversation. We'll have an episode talking about election laws and what that means for election integrity and security. And we'll talk about social media platforms and how they incentivize and de-incentivize the sharing of political content and news and what that means for us in our political information environments. So I hope you are excited about the season to come -- we certainly are [excited] here at the Wonks and War Rooms team.
[00:02:37] While I have you, I also wanted to take a minute to talk about why we include a land acknowledgment at the end of each Wonks and War Rooms episode. If you've listened to past seasons, you've heard me say, "I want to acknowledge that I am recording from the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin people, and I want to pay respect to the Algonquin people, acknowledging their long standing relationship with this unceded territory". I've said this each episode to highlight the important relationships between the University of Ottawa community and Indigenous people across this land, and also to highlight the work we still have to do toward reconciliation. I recognize that one sentence at the end of each episode could potentially be a helpful reminder, but also needs to be part of a much larger effort. So in our lab, we're committed to trying to learn more about Indigenous history and to finding ways to uphold the 94 Truth and Reconciliation calls to action. Some of the ways we try to make this happen are reading, listening, and watching resources created by Indigenous scholars, incorporating Indigenous perspectives into our own research approaches when we can, and speaking with Indigenous podcast guests. Of course, there's still more to do. The acknowledgment I make [in] each episode is a shortened version of the University of Ottawa's official Indigenous Affirmation, which was written by the Office of Indigenous Affairs on campus in partnership with the Indigenous Education Council, Indigenous student groups, and members of the local Indigenous community. It was developed with the intent of being used at the start of events and ceremonies on campus. And so here, I'd like to start off season 7 with that complete affirmation: We pay respect to the Algonquin people who are the traditional guardians of this land. We acknowledge their long standing relationship with this territory, which remains unceded. We pay respect to all Indigenous people in this region from all nations across Canada who call Ottawa home. We acknowledge the traditional knowledge keepers, both young and old, and we honor their courageous leaders past, present and future.
[00:04:39] If you'd like more information about land acknowledgments, uOttawa's Indigenous affirmation, and the Truth and Reconciliation calls to action, you can find links in the show notes and in our annotated transcripts. Thanks for listening.
