Party and Candidate Websites: A Comparative Explanatory Analysis

Abstract

This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites across five countries. It examines three prominent features of current online political communication (interactivity, political personalization and mobilization). It furthermore assesses to what extent country, party and source characteristics explain differences in the usage of these features. In total, 63 websites and 416 pages in Germany, Romania, Hungary, The Netherlands and GreatBritain were subject to a systematic content analysis. The findings suggest that differences in party and source characteristics explain variation in levels of mobilization, interactivity and personalization, with for example party websites trying to mobilize citizens, while websites belonging to politicians being used as a platform for self-promotion. In general, results show that the division of countries into East and West European is less important.

Two strategies for building a personal vote: Personalized representation in the UK and Denmark

“…We study strategies for personalized representation by examining the way politicians portray themselves as representatives on their personal websites. Websites were the first online platform brought into use by political parties and politicians (Kruikemeier et al 2015;Norton 2007) and enjoy widespread use (Ward and Gibson 2003). In our two cases -Denmark and the UK -698 out of the 829 members of parliament or 84% hosted a personal website in 2016.…”

“…13 At the party level, we include party size measured as percentage of seat share since Kruikemeier et al (2015) found that personalization was more widespread in larger parties. We also use data from the Chapel Hill expert survey 2014 (Bakker et al 2015) on party ideology, measured as position on the left-right dimension, as socialist parties and, in general, parties further to the left have shown to be more party oriented (André et al, 2014: 101; Pedersen 2010).…”

Twitter as a tool for agenda building in election campaigns? The case of Austria

“…According to the results on the individual party level, this is because only the new leader of the relaunched conservative People’s Party, who is said to be personally responsible for his party’s election victory (Bodlos and Plescia, 2018), ran a successful Twitter campaign, while all others did not. It remains to be seen whether this success can be attributed to a well-implemented ‘individualised’ campaigning style, which is said to be able to increase a candidate’s visibility (Karlsen and Enjolras, 2016), or to a well-drafted campaign strategy with clearly defined and coordinated functions of the personal account as a platform for self-promotion and the account of the party headquarter as a tool for mobilisation (Kruikemeier et al, 2015).…”

Oh Snap: Chat Style in the 2016 US Presidential Primaries

“…The rapid adoption of social network sites among US citizens not only provided users with another platform for sharing political information, opinions and experiences, but also spurred contemporary US presidential campaigns to execute a wide variety of online relationship-building strategies to achieve electoral goals. Although previous research analysed political candidates’ use of websites and blogs (Baker & Stromer-Galley, 2006; Kruikemeier, Aparaschivei, Boomgaarden, Van Noort, & Vliegenthart, 2015), Facebook (Sweetser & Lariscy, 2008; Williams & Gulati, 2012), Twitter (Adams & McCorkindale, 2013; Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, & van’t Haar, 2013; Kruikemeier, 2014), and YouTube (Lev-On, 2012), the 2016 US presidential primary candidates were the first to use Snapchat in their online relationship-building strategies.…”