The advent and profusion of the Internet has transformed many aspects of life, including politics. Scholars have made some headway in documenting how the Internet affects things like citizen deliberation, news consumption, and political participation. Less attention, however, has been given to how the Internet affects the conduct of electoral campaigns, which serve as the fundamental link between citizens and their representatives.
The investigators aim to fill this gap by continuing an ongoing study of how United States congressional candidates use the Internet in their campaigns. The investigators have constructed an extensive and theoretically-grounded framework for collecting candidate website data that includes measures of both political strategy and technology use. Over the last three campaigns (2002, 2004, 2006), they have used this instrument to collect data from more than 700 Senate and House candidates' websites. These data are further augmented with detailed information about the candidates' backgrounds, the districts/states, and the campaign. In 2008, the investigators will continue their data collection while incorporating a number of new features into their procedures. They will, for example, code sites multiple times over the course of the campaign as well as having the sites archived for future reference.
The project will have broader impacts in that all of the data will be made publicly-available and will constitute a valuable resource for researchers and the public-at-large. Researchers will be better able to test theories of campaign behavior using information from candidate websites which, unlike other campaign communications (e.g., television ads), provide a representative, unmediated, and holistic portrait of what campaigns are trying to communicate. This project also serves the wider public interest by providing empirical evidence that will help in evaluating the ever-increasing amount of speculation and punditry concerning politics and the Internet. Moreover, this project will provide detailed information that will help inform citizens about the many ways in which congressional candidates go about seeking their support.
