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AbstractIn Hood's (1983) classic "NATO" scheme, nodality—centrality and visibility in information networks—is one of the four tools of government. Despite its potential as a resource to effect policy change, contemporary scholars have largely neglected this unique policy tool. However, the growing prominence of digital platforms in public life prompts a rediscovery of this concept. The decisive shift is the parallel growth of citizen nodality, which can increase societal capacity and enhance government nodality, partly by allowing citizens to challenge government nodality. Moreover, citizen nodality and government nodality can interact to promote more democratic government. With the aim of rediscovering and updating nodality, this article defines the concept, reviews how the modern digital landscape has transformed the practice of nodality, and proposes a conceptual and methodological toolkit. The goal is to understand how nodality may be more effectively used by policy‐makers while at the same time fostering democratic governance.

AbstractTo conclude this special section, this article looks at the possible avenues for regulatory reform in the field of digital campaigning. Diagnosing the need for a multi‐layered approach, we argue that action is needed from government, regulators, companies, and civil society. We take each actor in turn and consider the kind of change needed, the prospects for reform, and outline four recommendations for change.

This editorial introduces a special issue resulting from a panel on Internet and policy organized by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) at the 2015 International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP) held in Milan. Two main themes emerged from the panel: the challenges of high cost and low participation which many e‐participation initiatives have faced; and the potential Big Data seems to hold for remedying these problems. This introduction briefly presents these themes and links them to the papers in the issue. It argues that Big Data can fix some of the problems typically encountered by e‐participation initiatives: it can offer a solution to the problem of low turnout which is furthermore accessible to government bodies even if they have low levels of financial resources. However, the use of Big Data in this way is also a radically different approach to the problem of involving citizens in policymaking; and the editorial concludes by reflecting on the significance of this for the policymaking process.

Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to "open up" government operations to citizens. New forms of "big data" analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens' behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain "closed" and under‐exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).

This article argues that the extreme right in Britain has a higher level of latent support than would be indicated by its polling performance. After reviewing the likely salience of demand, supply and opportunity structures as factors that could explain the level of support of the extreme right in British politics, the article analyses survey evidence and voting data on the British National Party (BNP) from 2004 to 2007. The article presents results from surveys of the liking for and propensity to vote for the major and minor parties, and explores the patterns of preferences in the London elections. It argues that supporters of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) provide another source of latent support due to linkages perceived by the electorate between the BNP and the UKIP, especially through their perception of the most important policy problem. The article argues that the BNP has entered the mainstream of British politics and suggests that the potential support for the extreme right in Britain is more solid than many comparative studies indicate. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

This article explores the performance of the additional member systems of proportional representation introduced in the UK for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales & the Greater London Assembly. It sets out the key features of these systems & examines how they have fared in terms of delivering (more) proportional results, using a range of measures of deviation from proportionality. On all measures the British AMS systems have relatively high levels of deviation from proportionality, but still rather less than the plurality system still used for Westminster. 4 Tables, 14 References. Adapted from the source document.