ABSTRACT
Since the mid 1990s, it has been widely predicted that the internet will have a decisive influence on election campaigning. This prophecy has, in part at least, been fulfilled in the United States, especially since Howard Dean’s blog-fueled campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2003-4 primary season, the widespread impact of online video during the 2006 midterm elections, and the proliferation of Web 2.0 social media during the 2007-8 contest. It is tempting to think that this “success
story” has been driven by the diffusion of the internet. By 2005, 76 percent of Americans were recorded as being online (International Telecommunication Union, 2005). And, despite ongoing divisions in patterns of use, the overwhelming majority of people have integrated information and communication technologies into their everyday lives (Horrigan, 2007). Since the public get their news, do their
shopping, and communicate with friends online, it is hardly surprising that they are also being citizens. However, technology diffusion expla-
nations of changes in election campaigning only tell part of the story. There are other countries with high levels of internet diffusion, in which it has yet to have such a significant impact. In the United Kingdom, while more than 60 percent of the population are now online (International Telecommunication Union, 2005), there is consensus that the internet has had only a marginal influence on elections, a fact noted on numerous occasions during both the 2001 and 2005 national polls (Coleman and Hall, 2001; Ward, 2005). It seems perverse, therefore, to suggest that once internet penetration reaches some kind of critical mass (whatever that may be) a decisive political impact somehow becomes inevitable. Given the unevenness of the role played
by the net in electoral contests across even the liberal democratic world, we must look for additional explanations for national differences. One element of such an explanation
may be found by considering how the internet interacts with the relevant political institutions that pre-date its existence: in particular, the organization of political parties and the norms and rules of the electoral environment. These vary greatly across political systems. Different types of party organization and electoral environment have the potential to catalyze or to retard the development of internet campaigning because they render new communication technologies more or less useful to candidates and parties seeking office. When viewed in comparative context, American parties are unusual political organizations, and quite dissimilar to those found in other, notably European, liberal democracies. Such differences may help explain the quantitative and qualitative differences in internet campaigning across countries. This is not to suggest that research on
internet campaigning has lacked an international orientation. Rigorous individual country studies are growing in number. But, to echo the opening comments of Foot et al.’s chapter in this volume, with a few exceptions (for example, the editors’ conclusion in Gibson et al. (eds), 2003c; Newell, 2001; Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003), very little of the research on parties and internet campaigning is grounded in cross-national comparison of relevant political institutions. Gibson et al. (2003) conducted a comparative survey of candidate websites in the United States and the United Kingdom, but excluded variables related to parties and the electoral environment. Zittel (2004) focused, not on campaign dynamics, but on individual legislators’ adoption of the internet. Again, this involved a survey of legislator websites in three countries, correlated
with independent variables: age of legislator, constituency demographics, the electoral system, and type of government. The latter was not disaggregated but defined in basic terms as “presidential” versus “parliamentary”. Foot et al.’s highly illuminating chapter in this volume, while focusing on a wide range of political actors and featuring sophisticated dependent variables that signal the growth of online campaign “web spheres”— nevertheless downgrades political institutions in the overall analysis. The closest of several independent variables, termed “political culture” is, understandably given the scale and ambition of the Internet and Elections Project from which it is drawn, defined and measured solely in terms of individual citizen attitudes and self-reported behavior. Institutions proximate to election cam-
paigns can have a direct impact on the mobilization of resources, acting as catalysts and anti-catalysts. At their most extreme, institutional structures may act as complete barriers. Examples include the ban on the purchase of television advertising in the United Kingdom, or on podcasting in Singapore. Most of the time institutions may simply make the process of deploying resources unattractive, as would be the case if stringent regulatory hurdles had to be overcome to set up a political website, for instance. Opportunity costs are also entailed in choosing to deploy a particular resource. A large billboard purchase may cut the number of mailings a party can send; dedicating campaign staff to a blogging campaign may remove them from face-to-face roles. The internet may reconfigure or reduce opportunity costs but it does not destroy them. The benefits political actors are able to derive are thus strongly influenced by the institutional environment (March and Olsen, 1989). This chapter argues that a comparative
approach to analyzing the relationship
between technology and political institutions has the potential to offer renewed understanding of the development of the internet in election campaigning. Taking the different characteristics of political parties and the norms and rules of the electoral environment in the United States and the United Kingdom as an illustration, it aims to show that the relationship between technology and political institutions is best perceived as dialectical. Technologies can reshape institutions, but institutions will mediate eventual outcomes. This approach has the potential to generate a theoretical framework for explaining differences in the impact of the internet on election campaigning across liberal democracies.
