Politics as usual? Assessing the extent and content of candidate-level online campaigning at the 2015 UK general election

Rosalynd Southern · Benjamin J. Lee

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Social Media and Politics Electoral Systems and Political Participation E-Government and Public Services

Abstract

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15–30; Lee, B. 2014. “Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election.” Politics 34 (1): 45–57; Southern, R. 2015. “Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 12 (1): 1–17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use.

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References

2000Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace “Revolution”2000On-Line Interaction and Why Candidates Avoid It 2003Campaigning Oniline 2014New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns 2006Web Campaigning 2009Building an Architecture of Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in Britain 2003Election Campaigning on the WWW in the USA and UK 2010Towards a More Participatory Style of Election Campaigning: The Impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election

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