This article appeared in The Hill Times, June 19, 2024.
Skills, values, and ethics: where is political staffing work headed?
Canadian politics and the wider world are undergoing several important shifts that will impact how and why we all do our work, and staffers can’t do their jobs now without several forms of technology.
By Jennifer Robson, Associate Professor and Director, Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management
There are many terrific staffers across Parliament and government, and your work deserves to be recognized. You are working in a profession that requires skill, knowledge, and ethical judgment. I’m writing this as I get ready to take a sabbatical year after serving as the head of Canada’s premier graduate program in the practice of political management, an academic and professional education program I’ve been part of for the last 13 years. This has put me in a reflective mood. Despite a few close calls, it’s been a long time since I worked inside a political office, but I listen to and learn from my current and past students who do.
To read many political commentators, staffers today are—as a group—ill-informed, unqualified, and delusionally partisan. This isn’t new. Go look up the Dorion Inquiry in 1965, or the Gomery Inquiry in the early 2000s. That said, it’s never a bad idea to be open to more learning. Maybe you would benefit from some extra training on things like parliamentary procedure, cabinet and central agencies, policy analysis, media relations, or digital campaigns. In the program at Carleton University, there are some really good teachers with loads of political experience, and yes, courses can be taken as professional development if you don’t want another degree. We all need to keep our skills sharp, especially in the current environment.
I think Canadian politics and the wider world are undergoing several important shifts that will impact how and why we all do our work—you staffers included. The one I want to highlight here is the impact of emergent technologies on the work of politics. You can’t do your jobs now without several forms of technology. Some politicos have been able to build profitable businesses by specializing in the more advanced tech skills, customizing off-the-shelf tools, maximizing impact on key platforms, or even building new tools altogether. Artificial intelligence is already part of a lot of the tools and platforms you may be used to. Generative AI will be part of more of them in the very near future. With these leaps in tech, will we need as many staffers or campaign workers in the future? Will Hill-adjacent jobs in government relations and public affairs need as many staff if a chatbot can be programmed to handle a lot of the routine tasks?
Most importantly, there are the very real ethical issues and frightening public harms that advanced AI could have on our politics. To illustrate the point, I had Open AI’s ChatGPT 4 contribute the next paragraph, shown in quotes, and totally unedited from the original output:
“Imagine an election cycle where deepfake videos are indistinguishable from reality, spreading lies about a candidate’s stance or actions. The damage to public trust and the integrity of our democratic process would be immeasurable. We’ve already seen glimpses of this in recent campaigns globally, where AI-generated content has been used to deceive and manipulate voters. Moreover, AI’s role in accelerating microtargeting efforts raises ethical concerns. While targeted messaging can effectively reach specific demographics, it can also exacerbate divisions and spread tailored misinformation. In the wrong hands, AI can segment the electorate into echo chambers, each receiving a customized narrative that reinforces biases and undermines informed decision-making.”
If that paragraph doesn’t give you pause for what it says and how it says it, then you’re not paying attention. As generative AI becomes more integrated into the work of politics, what value will political staffers continue to bring? Like I said, we will all need to keep our skills sharp. You should really check out the course offerings in the master of political management program.
But more than learning prompt engineering, staffers will play a really important role in the values and ethics that govern how these new tools are used in our politics. It’s not clear that Canada’s proposed AI legislative framework—sent to committee last September—is up to the task of putting sensible guardrails on the use of AI in political work. The legislation likely doesn’t even apply to parties, and relies on privacy legislation that absolutely does not. So, can we start to have a cross-partisan conversation on the ethical use of advanced tech and AI in politics, or will delusional partisanship get in the way?