The Disconnection In Online Politics: the youth political web sphere and US election sites, 2002–2004

Abstract

In recent years, candidates and other political actors have dramatically increased their presence and activities online. Although the notion of these activities reaching beyond a limited set of early-adopters is relatively new, younger citizens have long been at the forefront of new developments on the web and continue to make up a substantial proportion of those seeking political information online. Given longstanding concern over levels of civic and political engagement among young people, questions concerning what young people seeking information and opportunities for political involvement online might find there are particularly relevant. In particular, we explore political websites that are directly targeted at younger voters (e.g. Rock the Vote and similar sites), websites produced by candidates and political parties, and possible linkages between these two web spheres. Based on content and hyperlink analyses spanning the 2002 and 2004 US election cycles, we find a complex evolution of the online political information environment offered to youth. Although the youth engagement web sphere experienced dramatic growth during this time period, our data also identify a reluctance of many mainstream political actors to speak directly to young people through the web, and a surprising underdevelopment of linkages between youth politics websites and the wider web of political information online. We conclude by considering the implications of these patterns for future research on the role of new media in processes of political communication and engagement.

Keywords:

• Youth civic engagement
• online politics
• campaign websites
• political portals
• hyperlink analysis

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) for their generous support of data collection related to this project.

Notes

1. For information on the Issue Crawler, see http://www.govcom.org/crawler_software.html

2. Specifically, we created an archival version of each site using Teleport Pro.

3. Though these number suggest a 75 per cent, rather than a 64 per cent rate of web presence, this discrepancy is due to the inclusion in the archive of websites produced by candidates who ran at one time during the 2002 season, but either dropped out of their races or were defeated in primary elections.

4. Candidates were, and are, able to remove their records from the archive collection in two ways: candidates may ‘opt out’ of the archive officially, or they may have included technical features on their sites (the robots.txt exclusion) that disable automated collection techniques, such as those used in the creation of the archive.

5. Though the technology has come a long way, web archiving continues to be a complex endeavor. As a result of the many variations in site design, layout, organization and construction, as well as the occasional contingencies of the Internet itself, 100 per cent reliability remains on the horizon. We believe, however, that exclusion from our analysis on the basis of these factors exhibits no underlying systematic bias.

6. For example, a few candidates listed personal or professional web pages in their campaign documents – such as Martin Lindstedt, Republican Senatorial candidate for Missouri, whose archived site is not primarily dedicated to his Senatorial campaign.

7. Archival rendering allows one to view a site more or less exactly as it was rendered during the time period specified. When a site is collected into the archive the files associated with that site are captured and stored electronically. Each time this is done, an archival ‘impression’ is made of the site for that point in time. For example, most of the campaign sites used in the study were captured on a daily basis. Thus one can select a specific date from index pages at politicalweb.info or MINERVA at the Library of Congress and view the impression of the site, which reproduces it as it was seen by web surfers on that particular day.

8. For seven of the 15 features analyzed we were able to obtain reliable estimates of their presence from prior research (Foot et al. in press) gathered on the basis of larger samples, thus these items were removed from our coding scheme.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Xenos

Michael Xenos is an assistant professor in the department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how the context and content of political communication influences the quality of democratic deliberation, public opinion and civic engagement.

W. Lance Bennett

W. Lance Bennett is a professor of political science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement (http://www.engagedcitizen.org). The general focus of his work is with how communication processes affect citizen engagement with politics.