Leaders

3 www.digitaldaya.com Real Leaders Tweet How heads of state are engaging their citizens on the World Wide Web ith the increase in information velocity brought about through the use of technology, and more specifically, through the use of social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, LinkedIn, Brightkite and other networking sites, more and more government leaders and institutions of government are turning to these outlets to engage the populations that these individuals and government entities lead. Governance is no longer an abstract concept – something you read about in the newspaper or see on the evening news report.Today,enlightened governments and their leaders have turned to social media to connect with constituents. Governments are turning more and more to social media to put a“face” to government and to express political views and agendas. So who is leading the charge? Is the nature of the government leading the population whether open democracy or closed autocracy of significance? The results may surprise you. GovernmentTypes Governments take many forms across a broad spectrum, from fully democratic states to entrenched autocracies found in many countries in which government is centralized and, in many cases,distant. In addition to democratic and autocratic states, there’s a broad range of mixed and/or incoherent authority regimes broadly classified as ‘anocracies’. These include governments that have democratic and autocratic aspects of governance to varying degrees. The Polity IV Project, a well-respected research group, tracks the characteristics and transitions of regime characteristics to quantify and compare political schema over time,and on a global scale. Begun in 1975, Polity is based on foundational research conducted by the collaborative work of Harry Eckstein in his seminal thesis, Patterns of Authority: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry. Since its inception, Polity has tracked trends in governance on a worldwide scale, and has become the “most widely-used data resource for studying regime change and the effects of regime authority.” The most recent rendition, the Polity IV Project, collates data through 2008 at the Center for Systemic Peace and George Mason University,with its main campus located in Fairfax,Virginia,U.S. W Real Leaders Tweet How Heads of State are Engaging Their Citizens On The World Wide Web Democracy is difficult,messy, frustrating,but is a basic universal human aspiration.11:14AM Jan 7th Barham Salih http://www.twitter.com/ BarhamSalih