Candidates' Web Practices in the 2002 U.S. House, Senate, and Gubernatorial Elections

Abstract

This study focuses on the extent to which U.S. campaigns are adapting traditional campaign strategies to the Web and/or developing innovative strategies that employ some of the particular affordances of Web technologies and on how well campaign characteristics, such as incumbency and major party affiliation, and/or race characteristics, such as statewide office and competitiveness, explain the level of a campaign's adaptation of or innovation with Web technologies. Adapting traditional campaigning proved to be far more common than developing innovative strategies. The findings suggest that additional aspects of campaigns' structure and organizational processes need to be studied in order to understand campaigns' Web technology adoption strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• campaigning
• campaigns
• elections
• innovation
• Internet
• Web

This study was supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts. A draft version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association conference, September 2003. The authors appreciate the helpful comments Phil Howard and Jennifer Stromer-Galley provided on an earlier version.

Notes

^a p ≤ .001;

^b p ≤ .01.

There is some dispute in the historical record about the first candidate to launch a Web site. D'Alessio credits House candidate Jerry Estruth, a Democrat from California. PoliticsOnline, in its compendium of “Political Firsts” (http://web.archive.org/web/20040401220927/ http://www.politicsonline.com/pol2000/politicalfirsts.asp), and MacPherson (2000) claim that California Senator Diane Feinstein had the first campaign Web site. There is agreement that both sites were launched for the 1994 campaign.

The study presented in this article is one of several that we conducted during the 2002 election season. Other studies focused on the development of the electoral Web sphere over time, so we collected data on an ongoing basis throughout the autumn of 2002. As primary elections and other events unfolded during the campaign season, we adjusted our universe of candidates weekly to include only those officially running at the time. Sample size varied depending on the parameters of the sampling frame employed each week.

The software employed in this study is distributed in the WebArchivist Toolkit; see www.webarchivist.org

The United States Election 2002 Web Archive is accessible via http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/elec2002

We appreciate the invaluable service provided by both the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org) and the National Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org) in making available the data they collect on campaign finance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsten Foot

Kirsten Foot (PhD, University of California, San Diego) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Steven M. Schneider

Steven M. Schneider (PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a professor of Political Science at State University of New York Institute of Technology, Utica.

Michael Xenos

Michael Xenos (PhD, University of Washington) is an assistant professor of communication at Louisiana State University.

Meghan Dougherty

Meghan Dougherty (PhD, University of Washington) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio in Amsterdam.