The internet and social media bring political change, allowing ‘tiny acts’ of political participation which can scale up to large-scale mobilisation of millions – but mostly fail.These new forms of mobilisation increase instability and uncertainty in political systems, challenging policy-makers in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. But they also generate new sources of large-scale data.

Drawing on research carried out for the new book Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Margetts, John, Hale and Yasseri, 2015, Princeton University Press), this lecture discussed how social media is changing political systems – and how data science tools and methodologies might be used to understand, explain and even predict the new ‘political turbulence’.