Towards a More Participatory Style of Election Campaigning: The Impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election

Abstract

Web 2.0 has heralded a networked, participatory and conversational culture reaching beyond national borders and cultures, reshaping communicational hierarchies and thus creating a new set of communicative rules. Web 2.0 offers political actors a potentially effective means of building a relationship with activists, supporters and possibly floating voters. The cost, however, is that the interactive nature of these technologies requires some loss of control of political discourse. Election campaigning tends to be synonymous with top-down, persuasive and propagandastyle communication which aims to win the support of voters crucial for the victory of a candidate or party. While this remains as the dominant paradigm for understanding campaigns, the use of Web 2.0 tools, features and platforms challenges this notion. Emerging in 2005, Web 2.0 ushered in a networked, participatory culture to be observed online with tools facilitating asynchronous or symmetrical conversations to take place within a variety of online environments. This participatory and conversational culture, like the Internet itself, reaches beyond national borders and cultures, reshaping communicational hierarchies, thus creating a new set of communicative rules. Web 2.0 applications raise significant questions for political parties and individual candidates in terms of how they might use the Internet for building relationships with activists, supporters and possibly floating voters. Through the systematic measurement of the usage of Web 2.0 tools, features and platforms-embedded within or linked to-from the websites of six UK parties we analyse the use of the Internet, and in particular Web 2.0 tools, features and platforms, during the 2010 general election in the UK. We find that differing strategies emerge between parties, with some withdrawing from interactive feature -69 -© 2010 Policy Studies Organization use. Where Web 2.0 features are employed they are largely within discrete areas aimed at building contact with communities of supporters, but largely these are geared towards electoral objectives and not harnessing the collective wisdom of party networks to inform policy.

Towards hypermedia campaigning? Perceptions of new media's importance for campaigning by party strategists in comparative perspective

“…Following the success of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, which is broadly considered to have been the first to fully exploit the potential of the online environment and utilize social media, there has been a surge in adopting new media and especially social networking sites for electoral mobilization across the Western world (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010;Johnson & Perlmutter 2010;Cogburn & Espinoza-Vasquez, 2011). Despite the widespread turn towards "Web 2.0 campaigning" (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010;Gibson, 2013), bringing the parties the ability to bypass the editorial control of traditional news media organizations (Zittel, 2004) and significantly reduce campaign costs (Gueorguieva, 2008), parties have not abandoned the older tools and campaign techniques.…”

“…Despite the widespread turn towards "Web 2.0 campaigning" (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010;Gibson, 2013), bringing the parties the ability to bypass the editorial control of traditional news media organizations (Zittel, 2004) and significantly reduce campaign costs (Gueorguieva, 2008), parties have not abandoned the older tools and campaign techniques. Indeed, some scholars argue that even today, the 24/7 mass media still remain dominant for campaigns, especially as they continue to be the primary source of information for the general population (see Lilleker & Vedel, 2013).…”

Political conversations on Facebook. Exploring the role of homophily in argumentation and communicative interaction

“…The emergence of social media has attracted huge academic interest about their implications for digital politics, since the increasing penetration of digital technologies among the population can potentially transform the relationship between politicians and the electorate (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010;Fuchs, 2013). According to Nielsen & Vaccari (2013), researchers have studied the rise and use of the Internet in the political communication realm from different approaches.…”

“…This intense use of Facebook entails new opportunities for political participation (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010;Kruikemeier et al, 2014;Warren et al, 2014;Boulianne, 2015). Although Facebook basically attracts people for entertainment and social purposes, this type of use can easily lead to other activities related to public affairs.…”

“…For instance, Lilleker & Jackson (2010) consider right-wing parties to be apparently more open to interaction, but they warn that these predictions need more statistically rigorous tests to be confirmed. For its part, Sudulich argues that left-wing parties are more likely to interact with Internet users online (2013).…”