The Politicization of Internet Governance: An Examination of the Impact of ‘Focusing Events’ on Issue Salience, Actor Expansion, and Polarisation.

Given the evolving nature of information and communications technology, existing scholars have pointed out that the protection of personal data on the Internet has now become one of the most pressing problems of our age. While a growing body of research tries to understand who ‘governs the internet’ or to assess key privacy regulations (like the European General Data Protection Regulation), few studies systematically analyse the mechanisms behind this trend. My research seeks to fill this gap. Specifically, I examine when and how internet governance (specifically regarding data protection and privacy) becomes politicised. Building on existing studies, I conceptualize politicization as a combination of three key factors (1) issue salience, (2) actor expansion and (3) polarisation. My central argument is that politicisation is largely a function of ‘focusing events’, like the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013 and, more recently, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. To test my argument, I map politicisation as well as focusing events using a systematic analysis of news media coverage over a 15-year period, resulting in a new dataset of over 37,000 news articles. Using novel methods in computer-assisted text analysis and controlling for a battery of other factors, my analysis reveals two main findings: (1) focusing events have a significant impact on politicisation, and in particular actor expansion; and (2), somewhat counter-intuitively, these events significantly reduce polarisation. Rather than dividing industry actors, these events led to greater industry unity on questions of data protection and privacy.