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E-mail
Technology Concerns Legislators
By Jeremy Diener
Increasingly, state and national legislators
are using e-mail as a means of communicating with each other,
constituents and lobbyists. A researcher at the University of
Missouri-Columbia studied e-mail communications in the political
sector, finding that while most legislators feel e-mail helps
them communicate better with constituents, several concerns exist
about the technology.
Lilliard Richardson, associate professor
at MU’s Truman
School of Public Affairs, found that politicians’ main
concern with e-mail usage was how lobbyists abused the system,
trying to steer campaigns toward a single issue. Nearly 80 percent
of respondents expressed this concern.
“What we heard was that these interest
groups can generate tons of e-mails from anywhere, and the legislators
don’t even know if they’re from authentic people,”
Richardson said. “So they don’t know anything about
these people, yet their e-mail boxes are filling up. Rather than
‘grass-roots,’ the legislators call this abuse ‘AstroTurfing.’
We were told of a few cases where lobbyists had sent a high enough
volume of e-mail to flood and shut down the state server.”
To gather data for the study, Richardson
selected states based on a variety of criteria, including multi-member
districts versus single-member districts and whether or not the
state had term limits. Arizona, New Jersey, North Dakota, South
Dakota, Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania and South Carolina were
included in the study. Legislators in each state were asked to
complete a survey to determine how they felt about constituency
service and the use of technology.
Most legislators surveyed expressed concern
that relying upon e-mail communication could result in biased
representation, as many constituents may not have access to e-mail.
They also were concerned about the confidentiality of e-mail,
and whether or not the sender was actually a constituent. For
this reason, many prefer more traditional means of interfacing
with their constituents.
“Legislators still place a higher
value on phone calls or letters and especially personal visits,”
Richardson said. “For some, it is about feeling uncomfortable
with technology, but others don’t see a high level of effort
involved in e-mail communication. They’re going to pay more
attention to personal visits.”
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Last Update:
November 15, 2007
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