MATRIX REVOLUTIONS?

Abstract

This article investigates the characteristics of political parties' websites in the Republic of Ireland and seeks to evaluate whether parties' organizational structures influence the manner in which they present themselves online. Ireland has been chosen as a research environment because there is significant variation among political parties in the political system in terms of size, age, ideological coherence and organizational structure. Ireland is also an interesting test case for the evolution of politicized internet usage due to the large increase that has taken place in Information and Communications Technology availability and usage in the country over the past decade. We argue that features of internal party organization affect the nature of internet usage across political parties. Specifically, we hypothesize that parties with highly centralized and hierarchical organizational structures will be less likely to have interactive features on their websites than parties with less centralized organizational structures. The dependent variable in this study is the extent of interactive content on parties' websites and is constructed through an empirical analysis of parties' sites using a widely used coding scheme. We then measure Irish political parties' internal organizations employing Janda's (1980) scale of centralization of power, and we use this measure as an independent variable. We test for the hypothesized relationship between the dependent and independent variables, employing non-parametric statistical techniques.

Keywords:

• political parties
• parties' websites
• Irish politics
• party organization

Notes

The original scheme employed by Janda (1980) used eight dimensions; however, data restrictions meant that we were unable to code all parties with regard to ‘Controlling communication’, ‘Leadership concentration’ and ‘Allocating funds’ as these matters were not discussed in all party constitutions.

We do so by subtracting each variable value from that variable's mean (measured across all parties in the data set) and dividing the difference by that variable's the standard deviation (again measured over all parties' scores). This standardization procedure is carried out in order to incorporate indicators that are measured on different scales into a single measure without giving undue influence to those indicators that are measured on larger scales.

We note here that only parties that are represented in the Irish parliament following the 2007 general election (not including independents) were selected for this study.

Available at: http://janda.org/ICPP/ICPP1990/index.htm (14 December 2008) and http://www-polisci.tamu.edu/programs/cross/data/ (14 December 2008).

Data on Irish parties' websites were collected in February 2007.

We adopt this approach so that the scores generated by this project will be comparable with other works, which may contain a larger number of interactive features as the technology and the parties' technological proficiency advance.