IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/polstu/v63y2015i3p529-547.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel K. Gibson
  • Ian McAllister

Abstract

type="main"> A core question addressed by parties and internet scholars is whether the medium is equalising or normalising levels of inter-party competition, Are minor parties better placed to compete for voters' attention online (equalisation), or do major parties continue to dominate (normalisation)? To date, most research has supported the latter scenario through ‘supply-side’ comparisons of website content in a single election. This article re-examines the debate using Australian surveys of election candidates conducted between 2001 and 2010. As well as providing the first longitudinal study of this question, we link the supply side with voter responses and compare how well the parties recruit support through their web campaigns. Our results confirm that major parties dominate in the adoption of personal websites, although minor parties are stronger users of social media. Both strategies are effective in gaining votes, suggesting that the web may be rebalancing if not equalising party competition.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel K. Gibson & Ian McAllister, 2015. "Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 63(3), pages 529-547, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:63:y:2015:i:3:p:529-547
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-9248.12107
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dobber, Tom & Trilling, Damian & Helberger, Natali & de Vreese, Claes H., 2017. "Two crates of beer and 40 pizzas: the adoption of innovative political behavioural targeting techniques," Internet Policy Review: Journal on Internet Regulation, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin, vol. 6(4), pages 1-25.
    2. José Santana-Pereira & Hugo Ferrinho Lopes & Susana Rogeiro Nina, 2023. "Sailing Uncharted Waters with Old Boats? COVID-19 and the Digitalization and Professionalization of Presidential Campaigns in Portugal," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-21, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:63:y:2015:i:3:p:529-547. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0032-3217 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.