On political surveillance

The CP reports on some of the information-gathering currently undertaken by Canada's main political parties, leading naturally to questions about how political actors should be able to mine and apply data about voters:

(Conservative) Party sources say they are making personalized appeals to thousands of undecided voters in more than 40 ridings they hope to win. They're sending them letters, calling them, and setting up meetings with elected officials from nearby ridings.

It's all part of a data-gathering project that could be the most sophisticated of its kind in Canadian political history. The party has already compiled two million names in an electronic database that records the concerns and political opinions of voters...

Conservatives and opposition parties say they don't buy corporate information on individuals, which would be illegal under the federal Privacy Act. But they identify key neighbourhoods from public-opinion surveys and past election results from individual polling stations within a riding.

Then they can compile information for a single street by using publicly obtained and privately purchased information. Even people's Air Miles cards are used by ad companies and political parties to track their purchasing patterns and demographic data.

It's certainly not surprising that the parties are gathering as much information as possible in order to plot their strategies for upcoming campaigns. But it's worth wondering whether the political system is better or worse off for the strategy - and whether Canada's election rules should be changed to limit the ability of political parties to engage in the current degree of data collection.

Now, it's easy enough to argue that the data merely helps parties to create platforms which best reflect the desires of the targeted voters...making it little more than a more thorough form of canvassing voters for their views, which surely can't be considered a bad thing.

But then there's the problem that no matter how a platform or personalized message is phrased, it may bear little resemblance to the substance of how a party performs in government. And if intensive data mining enables a party to win votes by parroting narrowly-targeted issues and messages rather than by genuinely sharing and applying the same view of government held by constituents, it seems to be a potentially harmful influence on the electoral process.

For better or worse, there doesn't seem to be much prospect of changing the current law, since the current government seems to be ahead in data-mining strategies and since each party in Parliament is presumably leery of giving up information that it's been able to collect and use in the past. Which leads into the question of whether it'll be possible to move away from the demographic targeting model only by making laws to limit its application, or whether there's a real opening for a party to undermine the premise of the model by engaging in a less self-interested policy-making process.

Given what appears to be a great deal of (well-justified) public cynicism about the current system, one would think that the prospect of a party based more on substance than on gloss would hold a significant amount of appeal. But then there's no way to differentiate between the two types of policy based solely on the content of a platform...and any party which spends too much time boasting about its lack of message targeting might well come off as both implausible and naive.

For now, suffice it to say that while it's clear that some targeting is probably inevitable, it's hard to say whether the degree of targeting now taking place (along with any future expansion) is a positive either for the political system generally, or for the parties engaged in it. And since the parties are likely to hold the details and effects of their own strategies rather close to the vest, there doesn't seem to be much prospect of discovering the precise effects unless the targeted voters consider it worth their while to start analyzing political parties as closely as they're being analyzed personally.

Update: Note that the current talk about a voter ID plan could introduce another source of individual information into the mix.