Thread by @Timo_Seidl

Interested in the politics of digitalization? Then I might have 2 papers for you. The 1st helps understand when platform companies like Uber are regulated – and when they are not. The 2nd explains why the EU adopted the GDPR despite fierce resistance by business interests

Thread

The first paper looks at two attempts by New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio to put a cap on the growth of Uber. The first bill failed spectacularly – the second one was successful, despite being proposed in the same city, by the same mayor and only 3 years apart. Why?

To explain the different fates of the two bills, I show how Uber used powerful narratives of exclusion and collusion to drive a wedge between de Blasio’s progressive coalition. I also show how Uber mobilized its users as cooperate grass-roots activists against the Mayor.

Using narratives as weapons and its users to amplify its business power, Uber defeated the bill. De Blasio started with an overwhelming majority behind him, but he lost the battle of ideas, which ultimately made the political costs of supporting him too high for many Democrats.

It was 3 years later that de Blasio took Uber on once more. This time, the bill passed. De Blasio won because he countered Uber's narrative with a powerful narrative of his own – a narrative that connected the issue of congestion with the issue of workers’ rights.

Uber, the narrative went, lured too many drivers on the streets because it did not have to pay them properly, leading to both congestion and low wages. Instead of saving NY from the 'unholy alliance' between de Blasio and the taxi industry, Uber was now the villain to be stopped

I defend this ideational explanation against several alternative explanations that stress changed political realities, the reputational decline of Uber, or increased congestion problems.

The paper shows how ideas can make a difference in coalitional politics, and how we can understand the regulatory entrepreneurship of platform companies like Uber and the particular political dynamics of regulating them.

Much of the debate on platform capitalism has been focussed on *how* to best regulate platform companies. But policymakers not only need to know how they should regulate platform companies, but also how they *can* regulate them. My paper sheds light on this problem.

You can download the paper here: osf.io/preprints/soca…

And you can find the replication materials here: timoseidl.com/publication/th…

The second paper - co-authored with @MoritzLaurer - explains why the GDPR was adopted despite fierce business lobbying and the EU’s often-alleged deregulatory and business-friendly bias.

It makes two arguments.

First, it shows how issue-specific institutions triggered and structured the drafting of the GDPR. In particular, the constitutionalization of data protection strengthened data-protection-friendly forces within the Commission, leading to a data-protection-friendly proposal.

Second, we show in a novel way that the Commission’s proposal would have been considerably watered down during the decision-making stage had the Snowden revelations not boosted the salience of data protection and raised the political costs of opposing it.

The paper shows how past institutional choices shape the politics of digitalization today, and how issue salience can transform the coalitional dynamics of regulating digital economies by politicizing (and 'geopoliticizing') seemingly technical and abstract issues.

You can find the paper here: osf.io/preprints/soca…

And you can find a R Notebook that allows you to recreate the paper and replicate the analysis in the same file here: timoseidl.com/publication/re…

To make a very long thread even longer, I recently updated my website with #blogdown, which I can only recommend, especially if you want to move your workflow to R Studio. Take a look, you can also learn more about my research interests and papers there: timoseidl.com