Elections 2.0: Comparing E-Campaigns in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States

Abstract

Past analyses of the role of the Internet in politics have described it as an underused tool in election campaigns (de Landtsheer et al., 2005; Kluver et al., 2007; Lusoli, 2005). Most studies find that party and candidate websites are created mainly to provide a space for offline material to be posted for viewing in a non-mediated environment (Morris, 1999). In contrast, elements which allow interaction are usually eschewed as these are said to detract from the core functions of campaigning and lead to a loss of message control (Stromer-Galley, 2000). Scholars have therefore come to postulate a normalisation of cyberspace (Resnick, 1998; Margolis & Resnick, 2000). Broadly, this includes two interlinked conclusions. Firstly, the normalisation of power relations which follows from observations that those parties with the greatest amount of resources have the most sophisticated web presences and lead innovations (Gibson et al., 2003). And secondly, there is the normalisation of political communication as offline traditions of campaigning override any Internet-specific style of electioneering that may encourage dialogue between candidates or parties and those whose votes they seek (for an overview see Schweitzer, 2008).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.