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"Dynamics of a Dynamic Field "
by David D'Alessio
From a personal standpoint, the most interesting thing about the development of the World Wide Web as a weapon in the armories of political campaigns is that it has happened entirely in front of our eyes. It is unlikely that anyone reading this does not remember a time when there were no campaign sites on the Web, as the first campaign sites were deployed in 1994 (senate) and 1995 (house; Foot & Schneider, 2006). This is the first time since the introduction of TV as a mass medium that it has been possible to observe the adoption and impact of a new medium on the political/electoral/campaign process.
Viewed from that frame of reference, I have been continuing to track rates of adoption of Web sites by campaigns. This is informed, of course, by Rogers’s (1995) work on diffusion of innovations. Adoption rates seem to be consistent with the outcomes of simple benefit/cost analysis, and the rates themselves strongly suggest that candidates and campaigns recognize that there are relatively low costs to adoption and that they perceive relatively high benefits.
Currently, we have just completed an examination comparing adoption in the off-year elections of 1998, 2002 and 2006 at the levels of house, senate and gubernatorial campaigns, In each case we’ve been using the same methodology, making the data directly comparable from one election to the next, just as we did in comparing the 1996 and 1998 campaigns (D’Alessio, 2000). In broad terms, what we now see is a convergence of adoption rates across campaign levels at the level of 86-92% of all candidates at each level. Governor and senate candidates were at that level in 2002, and house candidates reached it by 2006. Underrepresented classes of candidates are house incumbents, and minor party and independent candidates. The use of three data point allowed us to look for curvilinearities in the data, and they appear to match the upper part of the s-shaped diffusion curve very nicely.
From a larger perspective, one key question is “What does this mean for Democracy?” The Web was originally seen to be the great equalizer, the one medium wherein an independent candidate running a shoestring campaign could have essentially the same voice as the best-funded of major party incumbents; one would not have to buy air time, or pay to have signs printed, or find a way to finagle invitations to debates or access to the local news hole that almost inevitably feature the major parties and only the major parties. From a numerical standpoint, though, it is the major parties that again dominate, implying that once again the rich are enriched.
In another sense, though, the Web does have the potential to level the playing field. In Web clearinghouses such as PoliticsOne or Yahoo! an independent’s site is the same distance from the voter as the frontrunner’s: exactly one click. This almost certainly will not result in extra votes—about which more in a second—but does provide the opportunity for independent or third party candidates' ideas to be read and considered. The Web moves these campaigns from the back room onto the shelf of the marketplace of ideas.
Scientifically, the questions now are “Why did so many people adopt so quickly?” and “Why are there people not adopting?” Rogers makes a number of points about laggards…and the people not adopting as of yet fall into the category Rogers calls ‘laggards’…and some appear to be true: that they tend to be more socially isolated, for instance. The enormously high adoption rate is another question entirely; when I corresponded with candidates as to why they had made Web sites, the reasons cited by the few that responded were things like, “Well, we thought we had to have one,” and “Everyone else was doing it.” Based on those few letters it seemed to me that people were jumping on the bandwagon for fear it would leave town without them. Perhaps this is why incumbents are underrepresented: they know how to get elected and for years they managed it without a Web site.
No one came out and said there were votes out there in cyberspace, though. In the 1996 election candidates who deployed Web sites, controlling for party membership and incumbency, received about 9000 more votes than those that did not (D’Alessio, 1997). I didn’t think this was a direct effect—people were still putting web counters on their pages in those days and the pages were averaging about 1000 hits each—and I concluded that the Web site variable was a surrogate for something else…an indication that a campaign was pulling out all the stops, of which a Web site was one. Although it was eliminated from the 2000 paper (correctly) as peripheral, it turns out the same analysis showed campaigns with sites receiving 6100 more votes.
Subsequently Rachel Gibson and Ian McAllister (2006), using a better methodology, looked at the 2004 Australian general election. They found that web sites had an impact on electoral support for a candidate independent of other campaign variables, including not just party membership but factors such as the amount of experience the candidate had, and the number of party workers given to the campaign. Armed with this, I went back to the US house campaign data for 2006, and again, controlling for incumbency and party membership, campaigns having sites averaged 12000 votes more than those that did not.
There is still no reason to attribute more than a small part of this to direct effects. It still seems likely that the presence of a Web site is serves in this analysis as a surrogate for some other form of campaign activity…but what is it? What campaign activities can we measure and control for, and what does it mean if these is still a significant impact on the number of votes once they have been controlled?
In broad terms, what this indicates is that we don’t completely know what the role of a Web site in a campaign is in the most practical of terms: what does it do to help or hinder the ability of the deploying campaign to be elected? I would say that seems to be worth a look.
David D'Alessio is Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Department at the University of Connecticut, Stamford.
REFERENCES
D’Alessio, D. 1997. Use of the World Wide Web in the 1996 US 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., and Schneider, S.M. 2006. Web Campaigning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, R.K., and McAllister, I. 2006. Does cyber-campaigning win votes? Online communication in the 2004 Australian election. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. 16(3), 243-263.
Rogers, E.M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations (4th Ed.). New York: Free Press.
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