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Student Zone - Using the Web to study British Politics

The Web has transformed the study of British politics in a remarkably short space of time. It is, particular, a vital tool for any research based projects.   In addition, electronic delivery of most journals now means that there is easy, instantaneous access to the latest scholarly research.

Opportunities and limitations

But the rapidity of growth, association with cutting edge glamorous technology, and the speed with which it brings access also create dangers. Used the wrong way it can be a great time waster, and can give a misleading impression of authenticity.  Used the right way it can be a hugely valuable tool for study and research.    Before the rise of the Web it was virtually impossible to do any kind of original project work on contemporary British government documents without access to a large research library - and even then, such is the scale of government publication that most research libraries were several years behind in cataloguing and shelving official documents.  Now, annual reports, minutes of evidence before inquiries, White Papers (outline proposals for government legislation), reports of inquiries - all are virtually instantly available at the click of a mouse. 

All higher education institutions, and most big schools, further education colleges, and sixth form colleges now have computer clusters that give high-speed access to the web. The rapid spread of Broadband means that with a fairly cheap desktop and a phone line virtually the same level of access is available to the private student. 

 Beginning with the Web

The simplest way to think of the Web is as a vast library and document archive.   When you go to your college library you do not usually just wander round aimlessly hoping that you will find a book that suits your purpose.  If you have a reading list you look up the book's location in the catalogue; if you don't have a particular book in mind, you try to identify the 'catalogue number' of books on a relevant topic and browse the shelves.  The catalogue is in effect a 'search engine' for the library.  The Web is so vast, diverse and rapidly changing that no single 'catalogue' can be created for it.  But fortunately 'search engines' of great power and speed have been developed. Equally fortunately for the student pressed for time, one search engine - www.google.co.uk - is now pre-eminent and looks likely to be so for the foreseeable future. The creation of Google Scholar - www.scholar.google.com  - offers a refined tool for the academic searcher: keyword searches will soon identify the most commonly cited - and therefore probably the most useful - academic articles on a subject. 

Google is now the natural first stop for anyone at the beginning of a search on a topic, particularly relevant to the beginning stages of work on a project - see Student Guidance for Course Projects on this site.  I virtually always advise my own students at the start of a project to 'go off and Google' for half an hour at the start of their work.  Google has become the leading search engine because it is reasonably effective in sorting web sites by order of relevance.  Thus, type in 'Conservative Party' and you will get over six million results!  But the Conservative home page (www.conservatives.com) will be first in the listing. Thus if we want to focus on any organisation it is a very powerful site finder.  But any user soon finds that more discriminating searches are much harder; a great deal of time can be wasted chasing links, randomly hunting subjects - the electronic equivalent of wandering round the library picking books off the shelves in the hope of finding something suitable.

Four other tools help alleviate this problem.

  • First, there are specialised search engines for scholars, such as ISI Web of Knowledge and Ingenta, which allow scholars to do keyword and title searches to find details and abstracts of relevant journal articles.

  • Second, there are specialised full-text databases. These include IngentaSelect, a full-text database of online journals; Dialog Newsroom, which allows full-text searching of local and national publications around the world; and the Lexis-Nexis Professional database, which allows full-text searching of British newspapers and magazines from the mid-1980s onwards.  (All these can located by simply Googling.) The Times Digital Archive allows access to the complete archive of the Times from 1785 to 1985.  Access to these, however, is restricted, and in practice is only possible if your college subscribes.  Most higher education libraries now do subscribe.

  • Third, there are specialised public sector 'portals'. As the name suggests these are 'doors' into a larger collection of linked sites.  Every system of government has its own portal, giving access to a site map, and a search engine for the contents within the portal.  One great advantage of these sites is that they are almost all free to access.  For a student of British politics, five particularly important portals are:

  • Finally, there are specialised academic portals.  Leading academic associations, and leading research institutions, increasingly offer web pages that are rich in information, with well organised links elsewhere.  Particularly valuable are:

    • 1.     Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources, http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk an amazing collection of data and links about virtually every aspect of politics.

    • 2.     The Political Studies Association politics 'gateway', www.psa.ac.uk with well organised links to libraries, data archives, and other sources.

    • 3.     The Centre for Contemporary British History http://icbh.ac.uk obviously especially valuable for anything on modern British political history.

Interrogating the Web

 We need to 'interrogate' the Web - question sceptically what it reveals to us - because in one important way the analogy with an academic library is false.  The contents of an academic library mostly consist of attempts at impartial scholarly research.  Much of what is posted on the Web, by contrast, is committed reporting, advertising or advocacy.  This is true even of material that looks impartially official.  For instance, the contents of the sites behind the main British government portal (see above) contain huge amounts of invaluable hard information. But much of this information is packaged for a purpose: for instance, to display in the best light the policies of the government of the day; or to display in the best light the agency which has posted the material.  (If you look at the Annual Reports of Agencies, for instance, you will soon find that, unsurprisingly, they try to promote the Agency in the best light.)  This does not mean that you should disbelieve what you read.  Much of what government in particular posts is governed by the highest standards of professional accuracy:  for instance visit the pages of the government statistical service for a mine of hard data about government and society, www.statistics.gov.uk.   But we need a clear idea of what we want before we start electronic searching - just as we need an idea of what we are looking for when we go into the college library to search for books.

Biases in the Web 

We need to be aware of three sources of web bias.

  • Poster bias.  Material only appears on the web because some person, or organisation, has posted it there.  This selection already has bias built into it.  It might be conscious partisan bias of the kind noted above.  If we want to write a project estimating how successful the Government has been in solving the problem of homelessness, we should not rely only on official government web sites.  But that is obvious.  More subtle, and more difficult to track, is unconscious bias because the individual or organisation happens not to be very interested in a group or issue. Of course this kind of unconscious bias can itself provide fascinating subjects for investigation.

  • Time bias. The Web we know only began to spread rapidly from the mid 1990s. Material published before then is thinly represented, though the digital recording of older hard copy archives is beginning to remedy this (see above for the example of the Times digital archive.)  Since the study of British politics has a powerful bias to the present this is less of a practical problem than with some other subjects, but it carries many dangers.  Imagine going into to a library, for example, and deciding as a matter of principle that we would not read anything published before 1990. That would plainly impart pronounced biases to our work.  

  • Storage bias.  If we think of the Web as a vast library, it is also a library with finite, though huge, storage capacity. Every organisation posting has finite electronic 'shelf space' - dictated by the size of its servers.  This means that material commonly is removed to make space for new postings.  In some cases it is 'archived' - the electronic equivalent of being put into the library store, where it can be retrieved by searchers later. But often it is simply deleted, and thus lost for ever. This is a particular problem with non-government organisations that are often of great interest to students of politics, such as pressure groups and political parties. We often want to retrieve the ephemera published by these groups - pamphlets, posters, speeches - to research their political history. Here the Web may actually have made research harder, for in the old days of hard copy only such ephemera would usually be dumped in a basement store, where researchers of a later generation could hunt them out.

The Golden Rules for Web Usage

The above only amount to cautionary points in using the most exciting resource which has become available to students of British politics since the development of the great research libraries.  Everyone with a fairly modest PC and a phone line can have access to this 'library' on a 24/7 basis.  Just bear in mind the three golden rules

  • Be self conscious about the possibility of bias in the material you are viewing.

  • Use search engines, rather than 'hunting with a shotgun', wherever possible.

  • Read and record web based material as carefully as you read and record hard copy in books and papers.  Just because it is downloaded to your hard disk doesn't mean that you have mastered it.

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