The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial Redlining

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211027835
• Author: Colin Koopman
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211027835

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 337 –361

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211027835

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Article

The Political Theory

of Data: Institutions,

Algorithms, & Formats

in Racial Redlining

Colin Koopman1

Abstract

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst,

we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the

presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how

to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power

they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent

work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward

a political theory of data. This article maps some limits of this emergent

literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on

data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused

almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension

of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply,

formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways

they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count

as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value

because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of

categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends

to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political

insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended

interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining.

1University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Colin Koopman, University of Oregon, 1295 UO, Susan Campbell Hall, Eugene, OR 97403,

USA.

Email: koopman@uoregon.edu

1027835PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211027835Political TheoryKoopman

research-article2021

338 Political Theory 50(2)

Keywords

Data, formats, algorithms, institutions, power, redlining

Data’s Politics

It is increasingly undeniable that data technology is significant for contem-

porary politics. Although few would deny this, there are perhaps fewer who

feel convinced that they have a thorough understanding of the terms on

which data has become a political force. We acknowledge the presence of

data across so much of our political lives—from mass surveillance to dis-

criminating algorithms to automated disinformation. Yet we often do not

know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms

of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate.

We lack a political theory of data despite our widespread affirmation of the

politics of data.

Consider two contemporary exemplars of data politics. First, a multina-

tional quarantine in response to data-driven forecasts predicting a pandemic’s

spread. Governments issued restrictive public health measures not on the

basis of direct clinical experience, but rather because of predictive modelling

developed by small armies of epidemiological statisticians. It is striking how

the response to SARS-CoV-2 was driven by forecasting data models that

could not have been conceived of, let alone implemented, as real-time models

one hundred years ago in the midst of the influenza pandemic of 1918. A

second case is that of the infiltration of a democratic election in an advanced

liberal nation by a foreign government through the medium of a relatively

decentralized communication platform. Where our imaginary of espionage is

still trained by Cold War spy thrillers, the Russian-based Internet Research

Agency influenced at least one (and quite possibly a second) U.S. presiden-

tial election by exploiting the inattention to, or better yet widespread lack of

understanding about all the attention to, the informational ecology of social

media. As event after event like these two attest, data increasingly drive

politics.

Too often what we can clearly see we also find opaque to the understand-

ing. How do we make sense of the politics of data we so readily perceive?

What conceptual repertoire would be adequate to data such that we could

understand and evaluate their political effects? How, in short, do we theorize

the politics of all those data?

The inherited conceptual tools of political theory are often inapplicable to

contemporary problems of data politics. Consider, for example, how tradi-

tional conceptions of political power, arguably the fulcrum of modern politi-

cal theory, are increasingly insufficient for a clear articulation and cogent