The Internet and National Elections

Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, Kirsten Foot, Steven M. Schneider, Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, Kirsten Foot, Steven M. Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134114627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides a comparative analysis of the use of the World Wide Web in countries around the world for political campaign purposes.

Drawing upon a common conceptual framework - the 'Web sphere, ' and a shared methodological approach called Web feature analysis - in order to examine how the Internet is used by a variety of political actors during periods of electoral activity. Research teams around the world conducted analyses in technologically advanced nations, as well as those with low Internet diffusion, and a variety of countries in the middle range of network penetration, and from a variety of political and cultural contexts. The book represents an important contribution towards gaining a cross-national understanding of the current and emerging impacts of the Internet on political practice. To that end, the contributors collect and analyze data related to the structure for political action and information provision. They examine twelve types of political actors engaged in elections, including candidates, parties, non-governmental organizations, government, media and individual citizens.

Exploring the complex dynamics between politics, culture, and information technology at both the national and global levels, The Internet and National Elections will be of interest to students and researchers of political science, communication studies, international relations, media and Internet studies.

Part I

Conceptualizing and designing the project

1 Introducing the Internet and Elections Project

Nicholas W. Jankowski, Randolph Kluver, Kirsten A. Foot, and Steven M. Schneider

Since the development of the internet, large sectors of the public – scholars, politicians, journalists, activists – have debated the relation between this “network of networks” and political life. That debate has not abated in the short, two-decade history of the internet, but the original questions have been refined and the accumulated evidence has led to more nuanced understanding. This book reflects the concerted contribution to that debate by a group of social scientists who collaborated in an international comparative empirical research initiative, entitled the Internet and Elections Project. The participants in that initiative pooled their investigative resources to study one facet of the internet and political life: how a wide range of political actors in diverse countries around the world engaged the web during national elections in 2004–2005. This book represents findings from 14 case studies of the web in national elections, and an overarching comparative analysis. This chapter sets the stage of the project: its inception and organization, and its theoretical concerns. By way of introduction to the individual contributions, the organizing principles of the book are outlined and salient findings from the chapters highlighted.

Conception of the Internet and Elections Project

This project developed out of a conference panel of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Maastricht, the Netherlands in October 2002. Then, the four coordinators of what subsequently became known as the Internet and Elections Project, contributed to a panel of papers and, at the conclusion of that panel, went to a Maastricht internet café, where Steve Schneider and Kirsten Foot demonstrated a database and analytical tools they had developed to study the appropriation of web technologies in U.S. elections. The data essentially were codes indicating the structure and content of websites that political parties and candidates had prepared during the 2002 U.S. election. Zeros and ones on a computer screen are not often grounds for elation, but that feeling came when we saw how Foot and Schneider’s innovations enabled large-scale collaborative research, and could be employed in an international investigation of political websites during elections. The café conversation concluded with a collective toast and resolution to work together in “internationalizing” the conceptual and methodological framework of web sphere analysis. That framework has been elaborated in detail elsewhere (Schneider and Foot 2005; Foot and Schneider 2006). The approach employed in this project is explained in Chapter 2, but basically it consists of examining the features of websites as inscriptions of political actions on the part of site producers, enabling or constraining political actions by site visitors. In the case of websites produced during and related to election campaigns, the sites may conform to conventional political objectives: informing an electorate and getting out the vote. It can, of course, be much more complex and sophisticated, and the analytical procedures and tools that Schneider and Foot had developed provided a way to explore these issues on a global scale in a comparative framework.

In addition to Foot and Schneider, Randy Kluver and Nicholas Jankowski also committed to this comparative project. Kluver was then Executive Director of the Singapore Internet Research Center and he imagined involvement of a wide range of Asian scholars in such an investigation. He had also been engaged for some time in work related to understanding political culture (e.g. Kluver 1997, 2004, 2005; Kluver and Banerjee 2005) and saw such a project as an opportunity to explore that concept within a comparative framework. Jankowski was particularly enthusiastic about both the broad and detailed methodological issues related to internet-based data collection and analysis. Jankowski has been involved in the examination of social science research methodology (e.g. Jensen and Jankowski 1991) and with the transformation of the manner in which research is being conducted in an internet environment (Jankowski 2007). Like Schneider, he also has had a long-standing interest in the concept of the “public sphere” and how it may be manifested in internet environments (Schneider 1996, 1997; Jankowski and van Selm 2000).

With the AoIR conference panel and subsequent internet café demonstration serving as point of commencement, the four of us – Foot, Schneider, Kluver, and Jankowski – began to assemble a team of 30 researchers from 22 countries to examine national-level elections during the 2004–2005 election cycle. We chose to focus on elections held during this limited period, as we knew a more longitudinal study would encounter problems with regard to technological development and degree of diffusion. As it was, we encountered a wide variety of challenges associated with conducting cross-national comparative research, as will be seen in the following chapters. However, we believed that by looking across national contexts during a period in which elections were held around the world, we would gain a greater sense of the diversity of ways in which various types of political actors employ web technologies with regard to elections in a wide variety of contexts.

In Europe, researchers focused on the elections held in 11 countries for the European Parliament, including Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Italy, France, and Luxembourg. In Asia and Australasia, the national presidential and parliamentary elections in ten countries were studied: Australia, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. In North America, the U.S. congressional elections held in November 2004 were the object of attention. With involvement of research teams in these countries, the overall project came to include nations at different levels of technological diffusion, economic power, and styles of democratic governance. As mentioned in the preface to this volume, personal situations resulted in a number of country-based case studies not being completed and represented in this book as individual chapters. Data were, however, collected on the features of websites from the sample of political actors for some of these countries (France, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Thailand, and Taiwan) and these data are included in the overall comparative analysis presented in Chapter 17.

Theoretical considerations

Although the authors of each of the following chapters provide a theoretical basis for their own work, we want to highlight here the three main considerations guiding the overall inquiry. The first addresses how the web may enable increased political presence and engagement for less powerful political actors, particularly during periods of election campaigns. The second relates to how features of political culture may mediate use of the web during elections. Finally, the third consideration important to this study is known as “online structure” and involves examination of structural and contextual conditions within which political action transpires. We are concerned, specifically, with features on the websites of political actors related to information provision, discussion, and forms of political action.

Regarding the first consideration, the web as a tool for the less politically engaged, flows from a long-standing claim that the internet has the potential to provide political space to a wide range of segments of society, including individual citizens, interest groups, social movements, political parties, candidates, the press, and governmental bodies. That potential has been the basis of much debate. The “cyber-optimists” in the debate stress that the web provides opportunities for deliberation and direct decision making for a large sector of the public (e.g. Rheingold 1993; Rash 1997). “Cyberpessimists” contend that the internet reinforces, or even strengthens, political forces already dominant in society. Margolis and Resnick (2000: 14) are advocates of this latter position and suggest that “political life on the Net is … mostly an extension of political life off the Net”. This position is often referred to as the normalization thesis; see the discussion in Chapter 3 for further elaboration.

In contrast, Norris (2001: 233–239) suggests a middle ground between the optimists and pessimists, an area she attributes to “cyber-skeptics”. Norris makes three observations regarding this position. First, political institutions are relatively conservative in adopting new communication technologies; second, the internet may be better at supporting the already active than in mobilizing the disengaged; and finally, employment of the internet may favorably serve the interests of less powerful players than established political institutions. This last point suggests possible transformation of the political arena when “transnational advocacy networks and alternative social movements … have adapted the resources of new technologies to communicate, organize, and mobilize global coalitions around issues” (Norris 2001: 238–239). In a comparative study of party websites in Europe and the U.S., Norris (2003: 43) observes that European political sites contain more bottom-up elements than their American counterparts. She speculates that “the development of party websites will generate egalitarian patterns of party competition and more opportunities for citizen participation in party politics”. This idea can be considered a specialized case of the so-called equalization thesis; see, once again, Chapter 3 for elaboration (see also Lusoli 2005; Chadwick 2006).

These positions are well summarized by Ward, Gibson, and Lusoli who conclude from their own investigations of elections that the internet “will make a modest positive contribution to participation and mobilization” (Ward et al. 2003: 667). In a comparative study, Gibson et al. find similarities between political campaign websites in the U.K. and U.S. In both countries, political parties fail to incorporate fully possibilities offered by the internet in their campaigns. These researchers suggest that web campaigning, at least in these two countries, may be entering a life cycle of conventional and conservative features: “cyberspace is clearly not jolting traditional political actors into radically different styles of message delivery, nor is it leading to a more egalitarian world of political communication” (Gibson et al. 2003: 66–67).

Regarding political culture, this concept may be described as the symbolic environment of political practice, shaped by political institutions, historical experiences, and philosophical and religious traditions (Kluver 2005; Martin and Stronach 1992). This broad description includes the assumptions, expectations, mythologies, and mechanisms of political practice within a country and addresses the ways values and attitudes influence political behavior. All too often, research on the political use of the web overlooks political culture, which may constrain use of the technology. Norris (2001), for example, seems to disregard the role of cultural issues in her analysis of the internet in global politics when suggesting that electronic infrastructure may be the primary predictor of internet deployment in political campaigns. In the studies presented in the following chapters a number of contextual and regulatory aspects relevant to the election campaigns in the respective countries are examined, such as geographic location, economic prosperity, internet penetration, voter registration, and campaign restrictions. In Chapter 17, which provides a comparison across the country-based studies, specific features of political culture are incorporated into the analysis.

Regarding the theoretical concept online structure, Schneider and Foot (2002) suggest that the structure of an online environment may be related to ensuing political action. Building on previous studies that examine such structure with regard to social movements (e.g. Klandermans et al. 1998; McAdam et al. 1996; Cohen and Rogers 1995; Oldenburg 1989, 2001), Foot and Schneider (2002, 2006) argue that the potential for social change may be related to the online structure of a web sphere, constituted by the features of websites produced by various types of actors, which can provide web users with opportunities to associate and act.

In the context of electoral web spheres, online structures may facilitate engagement in the election process through three interrelated activities: provision of election-related information, opportunity for discussion and debate, and opportunity for undertaking election-related political action. This formulation of political engagement, based on a typology developed by Tsagarousianou (1999), suggests that obtaining information, engaging in deliberation, and participating in decision making are the constituent components of (digital) democracy. Leaving aside criticisms of this typology regarding the temporal order and interrelationship of these components (e.g. Jankowski and van Selm 2000: 151), it nevertheless provides guidance in understanding the relation between online structure and political engagement. Ea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Conceptualizing and designing the project
• Part II Political actors as web producers
• Part III Reaching diverse constituencies via the web
• Part IV Political culture and the diffusion of technologies
• Part V Comparisons and conclusions
• Appendix
• Index