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State of Campaign Web Site Research
Steven N. Schneider and Kirsten Foot
What is the “state of campaign web site research?” We will review some empirical evidence, and move to a normative response.
Empirically, and historically, we all owe a debt to David D’Alessio. His 1997 article, published in Electoral Studies, traced the use of the Web in the 1996 U.S. elections (D'Alessio, 1997). An additional study of the 1998 U.S. campaign (D'Alessio, 2000) join Elaine Kamarck (1999) and J. Sadow & K. James (1999) in the “first wave” of campaign Web site research. This phase of scholarship, examining the use of the Web by candidates running for office in the United States between 1994 and 1998, focused on the number of candidates that established a Web presence in a particular election cycle, and began the tradition of describing the features present on these early Web sites. The analysts cited above described campaign sites as mostly “brochureware” or “virtual billboards,” simply replicating in electronic form materials already distributed in print. In general, Web campaigning was largely seen as a gimmick, or at best an ancillary to “real” campaigning, by campaigns and scholars. In 1996, for most candidates, merely being on the Web, or demonstrating knowledge of the Web, was Web campaigning. And only marginal change was noted in the types of Web campaigning in 1998.
We suggest that the “second wave” of campaign Web site research examined campaigns’ use of the Web in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia between 2000 and 2004. This work covers the territory from www.mccaininteractive.com to www.deanforamerica.com -- from state-of-the-art circa 2000 to the most advanced 2004-era Web presence. As the 2000 election season dawned in the U.S., the U.K., and several other countries, the dot-com boom was in full swing. Many critics proclaimed 2000 to be the “first Internet election,” and the comparison to the role of television in 1960 was often made. Though much of this commentary proved to be hyperbole, the 2000 election marked a significant shift in the attention paid to the Web by political candidates. All major party candidates for the U.S. presidential nomination established a Web presence early in the campaign cycle; some produced multiple sites. Several—notably Forbes, McCain, Bush, Gore, Bradley, Nader, and Buchanan—invested significant resources and placed considerable strategic value on Web campaigns (Foot & Schneider, 2006; for archival impressions of these and hundreds of other U.S. campaign sites produced between 1999-2004, seehttp://mitpress.mit.edu/webcampaigning).
Between 2000-2004, campaigns continued to experiment online to figure out how best to accomplish their aims on the Web-- and an increasing array of scholars from diverse fields, including political science, communication, sociology, psychology, information science, and rhetoric, analyzed their efforts. Several books, dozens of journal articles and scores of conference papers employed a wide range of methodological approaches to examine the activities of campaign organizations and parties during this era, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K.. The foci of scholarly analyses ranged from the integration of the Web into campaigns’ day-to-day operations (c.f. Howard, 2006), to the range of features provided by producers of campaign Web sites and campaigns’ Web strategies (c.f. Williams & Tedesco, 2006), to the ways in which citizens, journalists and others have used the Web to obtain political information during campaigns (c.f. Bimber & Davis, 2003), to the impacts of Web campaigning on civic engagement as well as campaign processes and electoral outcomes (c.f. Valentino, Hutchings, & Williams, 2004). A considerable literature has developed examining online campaign activities outside the U.S. and the U.K. (c.f. R. Gibson & Rommele, 2003; R. Gibson & Ward, 2002; Park, Barnett, & Kim, 2000; Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003). Some of this research on elections during this era was explicitly comparative (R. K. Gibson, Nixon, & Ward, 2003; Kluver, Jankowski, Foot, & Schneider, 2007; Ward & Voerman, 2000).
Since 2005, several developments have emerged suggesting the need for a new generation of scholarly research examining the relationship between political campaigning and the Web. First, the full-throated arrival of “Web 2.0” technologies support alternative models of content creation and community construction. Second, the emergence of highly structured linked environments, including those driving search engine results, challenge earlier assumptions of interactivity, openness and democratic potential. Third, the spread of Web presence from novelty to ubiquity among candidates at all levels of political office expand the field from national to local politics. Fourth, the rapid convergence of voice, video and text on the Internet that has expanded the Web “site” to a more comprehensive digital presence shifts our gaze beyond an exclusive focus on the Web browser as the platform for Web campaigning.
These factors taken together challenge scholars to move beyond the questions addressed by research focused on elections during the first decade of Web campaigning when it moved from the exotic and exploratory fringes of the electoral arena to its very core. In some ways, Web campaigning has become so synonymous with electoral campaigning, its edges so blurred and indistinct, that it is difficult to isolate its impact or even clearly define what, precisely, it consists of. Perhaps this is why some have dismissed the role of the Web in politics as anything but revolutionary. To the contrary, we think that despite the near-ubiquity of the Web and the consequent blending of the offline with the online, practice-based and developmental approaches enables analysts to discern the unique and specific effects of Web campaigning on parties and campaign organizations, elections, and democratic politics in general. The new era of Web campaigning research should address questions that examine—in view of the evolving electoral arena as a whole-- the role of citizen-generated content, the shift of video to the Internet, the transition from a computer-based Web to a multi-platform Internet, and the impact of near-ubiquitous Internet diffusion in some societies.
Steven Schneider is Professor and Interim Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, at SUNY Institute of Technology. Kirsten Foot is Associate Professor in Communication at the Univeristy of Washington.
REFERENCES
Bimber, B., & Davis, R. (2003). Campaigning online: The Internet in U.S. elections. New York: Oxford University Press.
D'Alessio, D. (1997). Use of the World Wide Web in the 1996 U.S. election. Electoral Studies, 16(4), 489-500.
D'Alessio, D. (2000). Adoption of the World Wide Web by American political candidates, 1996-1998. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 44(4), 556-568.
Foot, K. A., & Schneider, S. M. (2006). Web Campaigning. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gibson, R., & Rommele, A. (2003, August 27-September 1). Regional Web campaigning in the 2002 German federal election. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia.
Gibson, R., & Ward, S. (2002). Virtual campaigning: Australian parties and the impact of the Internet. Australian Journal of Political Science, 37(1), 99-129.
Gibson, R. K., Nixon, P., & Ward, S. (2003). Political parties and the Internet: Net gain? New York, NY: Routledge.
Howard, P. N. (2006). New media campaigns and the managed citizen. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kamarck, E. C. (1999). Campaigning on the Internet in the elections of 1998. In E. C. Kamarck & J. S. Nye (Eds.), Democracy.com?: Governance in a networked world (pp. 99-123). Hollis, NH: Hollis Publishing.
Kluver, R., Jankowski, N. W., Foot, K. A., & Schneider, S. M. (Eds.). (2007). The Internet and national elections: A comparative study of Web campaigning. New York: Routledge.
Park, H. W., Barnett, G. A., & Kim, C.-S. (2000). Political communication structure in Internet networks: A Korean case. Sungkok Journalism Review, 11, 67-89.
Sadow, J. D., & James, K. (1999). Virtual billboards? Candidate web sites and campaigning in 1998. Atlanta: American Political Science Association.
Tkach-Kawasaki, L. M. (2003). Politics@Japan: Party Competition on the Internet in Japan. Party Politics, 9(1), 105-123.
Valentino, N. A., Hutchings, V. L., & Williams, D. (2004). The impact of political advertising on knowledge, Internet information seeking, and candidate preference. Journal of Communication, 54(2), 337-354.
Ward, S., & Voerman, G. (2000). New media and new politics. Green parties, Intra-party democracy and the potential of the Internet (an Anglo-Dutch Comparison). In Jaarboek 1999 Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (pp. 192-215). Groningen: Universiteitsdrukkerij Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Williams, A. P., & Tedesco, J. C. (Eds.). (2006). The Internet Election: Perspectives on the Web in Campaign 2004. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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