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As the only Sunni Islamic Republic in the world, Sudan's middle-class, modernist Islamist revolution can be seen as a model for the mobilization of public consciousness about citizenship in an Islamic state. Ways that this citizenship is consciously & conspicuously gendered are considered here. In the north, where mobilization has been most successful, Sudanese women have both been constructed & have constructed themselves as the woman citizen -- mother, Muslim, & soldier. A brief historical background reveals complicated shifts in national, local, & gender identities from the colonial state to the present. State hegemonic strategies, including the manipulation of gender & other identities, especially as these are manifested in the fashioning of the "new Muslim woman," are explored. The waning of "Arab" identity claims in the face of state emphasis on Islamic identity & the relevance to Islamist women are also considered. The discussion is illustrated by interview statements from Islamist women, which attest to both their complicity in & resistance to their construction as members of the Islamic nation/community. 14 References. Adapted from the source document.

In the last few years, especially after the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. elections, there has been a surge in academic interest for misinformation and disinformation. Social, cognitive, and political scientists' work on these phenomena has focused on two main aspects: - Individuals' (and by extension societies') vulnerability to misinformation; - Factors and interventions that can increase individuals' (and societies') resistance to misinformation. In this article, we offer a critical review of the psychological research pertaining to these two aspects. Drawing on this review, we highlight an emerging tension in the relevant literature. Indeed, the current state of the art of the political misinformation literature reflects the combined operation of two opposing psychological constructs: excess gullibility on the one hand and excess vigilance on the other. We argue that this conceptualization is important in both advancing theories of individuals' and societies' vulnerability to misinformation and in designing prospective research programs. We conclude with proposing what, in our view, are the most promising avenues for future research in the field.

Contemporary collective action, much of which involves social media and other Internet-based platforms, leaves a digital imprint which may be harvested to better understand the dynamics of mobilization. Petition signing is an example of collective action which has gained in popularity with rising use of social media and provides such data for the whole population of petition signatories for a given platform. This paper tracks the growth curves of all 20,000 petitions to the UK government petitions website (http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk) and 1,800 petitions to the US White House site (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov), analyzing the rate of growth and outreach mechanism. Previous research has suggested the importance of the first day to the ultimate success of a petition, but has not examined early growth within that day, made possible here through hourly resolution in the data. The analysis shows that the vast majority of petitions do not achieve any measure of success; over 99 percent fail to get the 10,000 signatures required for an official response and only 0.1 percent attain the 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate (0.7 percent in the US). We analyze the data through a multiplicative process model framework to explain the heterogeneous growth of signatures at the population level. We define and measure an average outreach factor for petitions and show that it decays very fast (reducing to 0.1% after 10 hours in the UK and 30 hours in the US). After a day or two, a petition's fate is virtually set. The findings challenge conventional analyses of collective action from economics and political science, where the production function has been assumed to follow an S-shaped curve.

Now that so much of collective action takes place online, web-generated data can further understanding of the mechanics of Internet-based mobilisation. This trace data offers social science researchers the potential for new forms of analysis, using real-time transactional data based on entire populations, rather than sample-based surveys of what people think they did or might do. This paper uses a 'big data' approach to track the growth of over 8,000 petitions to the UK Government on the No. 10 Downing Street website for two years, analysing the rate of growth per day and testing the hypothesis that the distribution of daily change will be leptokurtic (rather than normal) as previous research on agenda setting would suggest. This hypothesis is confirmed, suggesting that Internet-based mobilisation is characterized by tipping points (or punctuated equilibria) and explaining some of the volatility in online collective action. We find also that most successful petitions grow quickly and that the number of signatures a petition receives on its first day is a significant factor in explaining the overall number of signatures a petition receives during its lifetime. These findings have implications for the strategies of those initiating petitions and the design of web sites with the aim of maximising citizen engagement with policy issues.

Political behaviour increasingly takes place on digital platforms, where people are presented with a range of social information—real-time feedback about the behaviour of peers and reference groups—which can stimulate (or depress) participation. This social information is hypothesized to impact the distribution of political activity, stimulating participation in mobilizations that are increasing in popularity, and depressing participation in those that appear to be less popular, leading to a non-normal distribution. Changes to these platforms can generate natural experiments allowing for an estimate of the impact of different kinds of social information on participation. This paper tests the hypothesis that social information shapes the distribution of political mobilizations by examining the introduction of trending information to the homepage of the UK government petition platform. The introduction of the trending feature did not increase the overall number of signatures per day, but the distribution of signatures across petitions changed significantly—the most popular petitions gained more signatures at the expense of those with fewer signatories. We further find significant differences between petitions trending at different ranks on the homepage. This evidence suggests that the ubiquity of trending information on digital platforms is introducing instability into political markets, as has been shown for cultural markets. As well as highlighting the importance of digital design in shaping political behaviour, the findings suggest that a non-negligible group of individuals visit the homepage of the site looking for petitions to sign, without having decided the issues they wish to support in advance. These 'aimless petitioners' are particularly susceptible to changes in social information.

Open data remains one of the most significant current trends in public administration, with hundreds of projects around the world seeking to open up stores of public sector information for future re-use. However, as open data has grown, a critical literature has also emerged which questions who the true beneficiaries of open data are, as well as highlighting the high costs it places on government. Hence systematic research on the actual outcomes of open data projects is urgently needed. This article seeks to explain the factors which promote greater levels of downloads of open government data. We show that the use of profit making datasets far exceeds those which could be used to enhance government transparency or service delivery. We also show that well updated datasets with high quality metadata are more likely to be downloaded. We conclude by supporting currently developing calls for prioritisation in open government data programmes.

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a variety of different model specifications including a first difference regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion.