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Roundtable: New Directions in Campaign Web Site Research
As David D'Alessio notes in his essay for this issue's roundtable, use of websites in political campaigns is very recent. It's only been since 1994 that the first such sites were created, and really only in the last two election cycles that their use has become ordinary among political candidates. So the data today is a mile wide and an inch deep. Nonetheless, a number of key issues and questions of interest to scholars is emerging.
In their commentary, Schneider and Foot set the scene. They note that the "first wave" of research—roughly through the 1990s—approached campaign websites as something of a gimmick. Not many candidates created them, and those that did seemed to be desparate or in need of some new advantage. As Davis notes in his essay, during this period some analysts began to ask the big, undifferentiated question about the impact of these sites on democracy itself, but that this approach proved too all-encompassing to be of much use.
However, in the early 21st century, campaign websites became more common and more interesting from an academic perspective. Scholars began to dissect the web strategies of candidates and to discern whether these strategies had any measurable impact.
Schneider and Foot end their essay with the observation that rise in levels of interactivity available on campaign websites opens the way for a new generation of scholarship. Now as common as direct mailing, these sites challenge scholars to see this work as central to the core activities of campaigns, including, and perhaps especially, a candidate's efforts to get elected.
On this last question, D'Alessio notes that the findings to date are not encourage. The evidence so far indicates that websites do very little to help candidates get elected. But that could change in the near future as more voters use the Internet to seek out political information and candidates explore the potential of the medium.
Davis lists a host of other pertinent questions. He groups them under the broad categories of "audience," "sender" and "medium," and they include such questions as, "whether and how campaign websites are changing the way that journalists cover campaigns," and a version of D'Alessio's question: "what does online communication do for a candidacy?"
Benoit encourages scholars to recognize that, in many ways, the Internet is not a stand-alone medium. Rather, the media seem to be converging--think of the Democratic and Republican presidential debates that recently took place on Youtube. While acknowledging the real differences between media, Benoit invites scholars to consider the ways that they are meshing together into a more homogeneous media universe.
Howard takes up a separate issue—the increasing use of websites and other online forms of communication by political groups to simulate a social movement. He labels these efforts "astroturf" movements to designate their artificiality. Driven from a desk-chair, but looking like a sudden uprising of the people, such movements have become increasingly common in the last decade. Intriguingly, Howard notes that their time may soon have passed. As citizens become more sophisticated in the way they confront online information sources, it become increasingly difficult to attract them to these initiatives.
In broad form, these essays sketch the state of research on a subject that is likely to attract more and more interest in the next few years. Speaking for the membership of our division,let me say that we are thankful for their efforts.
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