Politicians Online – Identifying Current Research Opportunities (original) (raw)
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The implementation of new technologies into politics has broadened the extent of communication acts of politicians. It has displayed a certain idio- syncrasy but has also uncovered many drawbacks. This idiosyncracy consists in the fact that the fragmentary professionalization occurs along with the crisis of trust and attitude towards politicians (and politics). The parties and politicians prefer to implement online means of communication technically. They appre- ciate their informative potential. However, they are more reserved when it comes to direct interaction with the electorate.
Politicians and Political Parties’ Use of Social Media in-between Elections
Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2020
Digital transformation changes the relationship between citizens and politics. The observation of this nexus is highly relevant for representative democracy. After the successful 2008 Obama campaign, a vast body of research that explores how and why politicians use social media has emerged. However, we still know very little about how social media are being adopted and used in-between elections, and still less yet about what this means for political representation. Therefore, this Special Issue brings together innovative research that focuses on how the use of social media is impacting upon the relationship between politicians and political parties, and citizens. First, we discuss some pros and cons of this transformation in the context of the relevant literature and, especially, in relation to Stephen Coleman’s concept of ‘direct representation”. Finally, we discuss the findings and merits of the contributions and what the issue adds to our understanding of the phenomenon, to the state of research.
Online communication for electoral purposes: A view on political practices in Timis County
Sociologie Româneasca = Romanian Sociology, 2014
The paper aims to present instances of political communication during electoral processes carried out with new media tools. The high rate of Internet penetration and the spreading of social networks triggered the response on the part of political candidates, interested to reach their publics wherever possible. In addition, the development of e-democracy, e-governance and e-politics naturally produces effects in electoral processes. The 2012 parliamentary elections in Romania have as distinctive features the breakdown of constituencies into smaller units and the uninominal vote instead of the previously employed party lists. These features placed the burden of communication tasks on individual candidates, who had to resort to at least one web based communication channel during the campaign. The article is structured in five sections, as follows: the first section is dedicated to presenting the context and tools of the study. The second section views the digital communication as the n...
U. S. Congressional Campaign Communications in an Internet Age
New technologies -with perhaps the most notable being radio and televisionoften change the face of political campaigns. The Internet, and particularly campaign websites with their concomitant technologies (e.g. interactive and multimedia features), has evolved at a faster rate than any other prior innovation. This raises a critical question: have website technologies altered how congressional candidates campaign? We address this question with a novel dataset from 2008. Not only do we chart technological change on sites over the course of the campaign but we also explore how and when candidates use certain technologies. We discover two critical and, to our knowledge, novel points. First, congressional candidates use these technologies to a much lesser extent than one may suspect. Second, their scant usage is driven by how certain technologies limit control of the candidate's message, the candidate's status in the race and other key variables such as the employment of campaign consultants. In sum, the Web 2.0 era (which began around 2008) does not appear to have dramatically altered congressional campaigns.
REPRESENTATION AS COMMUNICATION: THE INTERNET AND THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT OF ELECTED OFFICIALS
The Internet has been heralded as a technology that supports participation in liberal democratic governments. This paper challenges that account, arguing that at the local level, the Internet is more conducive to the process of good governance rather than representative democracy. One of the difficulties analysts who study the Internet face is finding a point of comparison to evaluate the impact of the Internet on current political practices. This paper addresses that problem by comparing the role of Internet use with the communication structure of a liberal representative democracy. The findings indicate that the Internet plays a larger role in structuring an elected official's communications with stakeholders as well as stakeholder influences in policymaking. (Castells 2006). "Governance" as a form of political organization reflects the structure of new ICTs which create the communication channels which connect actors in policy networks. Generally this term refers to a situation where public policy is produced through recursive interactions between actors inside and outside governments placing actors in interdependent relationships whereby the government can not independently and directly steer policy alone (Rhodes, : 1246. Governance emerges in a context of professionalized political communication strategies employed by both government officials and stakeholders (Crozier, 2007. While ICTs facilitate the creation of governance networks, they do not make this emergence inevitable. Rather, the structural affordances of ICTs facilitate the coordination of activity across space and time. These trends indicate shift towards a highcommunication environment surrounding policymaking. This paper is an empirical investigation into the role of the Internet in the in the communicative interactions between stakeholders and elected government officials in American local governments. In contrast to rich ethnographic accounts of governance and policymaking, our focus here is on the communication flows within a political system that connect actors engaged in these activities. Therefore our goal is to analyze the communication architecture, that is, the underlying structure of communication flows between actors. While ethnographic accounts are useful in providing detailed analysis of the microprocesses between network actors that shape policy preferences, one cannot infer how the system functions on the basis of narratives about its constituent parts. The advantage of studying the communication architecture is that it enables us to see how the use of ICTs impacts and structures new governance relationships.
The Internet in Campaigns and Elections
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
This chapter evaluates a number of positive claims surrounding the role of the Internet in campaigns and elections. It is observed that the Internet is becoming embedded within campaigns and elections. Capturing the influence of any campaign, or isolating the impact of any specific tool or aspect of a campaign, is at best a highly complex moving target. The hypermedia campaign must allow for and expect the ‘decomposition and recomposition of messages’. The chapter recognises that, to be successful, one must both produce and join the communication ecosystem. Investigating the campaigns of Howard Dean, Segolene Royal, and Barack Obama can help explain the evolution in adaptation to such campaigns. Engagement with election campaigns is being determined by the Internet. In general, the political campaign communication has been transformed, but only to an extent.
2014
This article examines the ways how Estonian candidates were implementing Web 2.0 applications during the European Parliament elections in June 2009. The study considers effectiveness of the candidates ’ websites presentation. Several web-specific features, the ability to use multimedia and interactivity are taken into consideration. The paper also looks at how the phenomenon of personalisation of politicians ’ reflects in the Estonian web-campaign environment. Conclusions are drawn as to whether political web pages offer opportunities for implementing a deliberative policy, as Web 2.0 applications give opportunities to involve people to the debate and increase participation. The analyses show that in Estonia political web sites do not offer citizens many possibilities for participation. Even if candidates have blogs and are present on social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, they tend to use these applications only for marketing purposes and not for implementing deli...
Online Political Communication
This book provides research findings and practical information on online communication strategies in politics. Based on communication research and real-world political-campaign experience, the author examines how to use the Web and social media to create public visibility, build trust and consensus and boost political participation. It offers a useful guide for practitioners working in the political arena, as well as for those managing communication projects in institutions or companies. Benefits - Guides the reader on how to develop a successful political campaign by using online tools – from Social Media to Big Data - Presents real-world perspectives from successful and unsuccessful political campaigns - Provides a visual guide on producing effective websites and using photographs and infographics to convey political meaning