What do we study when studying politics and democracy? A semantic analysis of how politics and democracy are treated in SIGCHI conference papers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the concepts of politics and democracy are represented in SIGCHI conference papers, revealing evolving thematic focuses and potential semantic ambiguities that impact research directions in human-computer interaction.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive semantic analysis of HCI research on politics and democracy, highlighting shifts in focus and conceptual understanding over time.

Findings

Increasing use of 'politics' and 'democracy' in HCI papers.

Shift from mezzo-level to macro-level analysis.

Transition towards normative and activist research.

Abstract

Human-computer interaction scholars are increasingly touching on topics related to politics or democracy. As these concepts are ambiguous, an examination of concepts' invoked meanings aids in the self-reflection of our research efforts. We conduct a thematic analysis of all papers with the word `politics' in abstract, title or keywords ($n$=378) and likewise 152 papers with the word `democracy.' We observe that these words are increasingly being used in human-computer interaction, both in absolute and relative terms. At the same time, we show that researchers invoke these words with diverse levels of analysis in mind: the early research focused on mezzo-level (i.e., small groups), but more recently the work has begun to include macro-level analysis (i.e., society and politics as played in the public sphere). After the increasing focus on the macro-level, we see a transition towards more normative and activist research, in some areas it replaces observational and empirical research. These differences indicate semantic differences, which -- in the worst case -- may limit scientific progress. We bring these differences visible to help in further exchanges of ideas and human-computer interaction community to explore how it orients itself to politics and democracy.