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Abstract
Within the e-campaigning activities of political actors in Germany, the Wahl-O-Mat has emerged as a popular ‘non-party’ online tool which has been used by millions of voters before elections in Germany. An analysis of the users can provide information about the characteristics of people resorting to this and other types of online pre-election tools. Based on an application-specific approach, hypotheses about the users are developed in light of the uses and gratification theory, taking into consideration normative expectations associated with the rise of the Internet. Whether the Wahl-O-Mat helps fulfilling these expectations is analysed by drawing (1) on data generated by an online exit survey of the Wahl-O-Mat users and (2) on datasets of the German Longitudinal Election Study 2009. The findings show that users of the Wahl-O-Mat largely belong to a group of young and politically interested voters who resort primarily to the Internet to collect political information.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stefan Marschall is professor of political science and Chair of German Politics at the Department of Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf. He is a specialist on political communication and comparative as well as transnational parliamentarism. He has published text books on the political system of Germany and on parliamentarism as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on political (online) communication and parliamentary affairs.
Martin Schultze is currently researcher and PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf. Previously he studied social sciences and philosophy at the University of Erfurt (Bachelor degree) and political science at the Philipps-University of Marburg (Master degree). His research interests consist of voting behaviour and political attitudes, applied quantitative methods of social research and empirical research on democracies.
Notes
1. Andrew J. Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (eds), Handbook of Internet Politics (London: Routledge, 2009); for the German case Eva J. Schweitzer and Steffen Albrecht (eds), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011).
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5. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ‘Digital divide’ has also been used to label global disparities in terms of Internet infrastructure.
6. See, for example, ARD/ZDF-Arbeitsgruppe Multimedia, ‘Nichtnutzer von Online: Einstellungen und Zugangsbarrieren. Ergebnisse der ARD/ZDF-Offline-Studie 1999’, Media Perspektiven 8 (1999), pp.415–22.
7. See (N)onliner Atlas 2009, p.12, available from http://www.initiatived21.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/NONLINER2009.pdf.
8. ‘Digital natives’ is a label for persons who have grown up in the ‘digital era’, and who have been early socialised into the usage of online communication (vs ‘digital immigrants’); Marc Prensky, ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’, On the Horizon 9/5 (2001), pp.1–6; John Palfrey and Urs Grasser, Born Digital: The First Generation of Digital Natives (Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books, 2008); Frank Jäckel, ‘Was unterscheidet Mediengenerationen? Theoretische und methodische Herausforderungen der Medienentwicklung’, Media Perspektiven 5 (2010), pp.247–57.
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20. Emmer et al., Bürger online.
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23. Marc Hooghe and Wouter Teepe, ‘Party Profiles on the Web: An Analysis of the Logfiles of Non-Partisan Interactive Political Internet Sites in the 2003 and 2004 Election Campaigns in Belgium’, New Media Society 9/6 (2007), pp.965–85; Matthew Wall, Maria-Laura Sudulich, Rory Costello and Enricque Leon, ‘Picking Your Party Online: An Investigation of Ireland's First Online Voting Advice Application’, Information Polity 14 (2009), pp.203–18; Andreas Ladner and Joëlle Pianzola, ‘Do Voting Advice Applications Have an Effect on Electoral Participation and Voter Turnout? Evidence from the 2007 Swiss Federal Elections’, in Efthimios Tambouris, Anne Macintosh and Olivier Glassey (eds), Electronic Participation (Berlin: Springer, 2010), pp.211–24; Stefan Marschall and Christian K. Schmidt, ‘The Impact of Voting Indicators: The Case of the German Wahl-O-Mat’, in Cedroni and Garzia (eds), Voting Advice Applications in Europe, pp.65–104.
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25. Kristjan Vassil, ‘Role of Self Selection in Estimating the Effects of Voting Advice Applications: Empirical Evidence on the Basis of Swiss Smartvote Data’, Paper Presented at the ‘6th ECPR General Conference’, 25–27 Aug. 2011, Reykjavik, Iceland.
26. The report is available from http://www.initiatived21.de/wp-content/uploads/alt/08_NOA/NONLINER2008.pdf
27. See Christof Wolf and Henning Best (eds), Handbuch der sozialwissenschaftlichen Datenanalyse (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010); Scott W. Menard, Applied Logistic Regression (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002); Subhash Sharma, Applied Multivariate Techniques (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), pp.328–32.
28. shows the odds ratios and standard errors. Odds ratios will be interpreted in our model as follows: values between 0 and 1 indicate that the probability of using the Wahl-O-Mat is smaller compared to the reference category. Values higher than 1 imply that the probability of using the tool is higher compared to the reference category. As an overall goodness-of-fit measure we calculate Nagelkerke-Pseudo-R².