REACHING OUT OR REACHING IN?

Abstract

While various authors have suggested that introduction of the Internet will lead to substantial changes in political communication patterns, others have argued that traditional inequalities and patterns will only be reinforced. Websites of political parties play a specific role in this debate. On the one hand, they can be used by voters seeking information on various political parties. On the other hand, they might reach only those that are already ‘converted’ and have sufficient means to gather political information by other media. During the campaign for the 2006 local elections in Belgium, we conducted an online survey among visitors to party websites (n = 3,224). The analysis shows that a substantial majority of online visitors is male and highly educated. About 60 per cent of all respondents had already decided to vote for the party whose website they had just visited, but another 40 per cent clearly compared parties’ positions and candidates. Our tentative conclusion therefore is that during electoral campaigns party websites will be used mainly by those who are already convinced about the programme and the candidates of that specific party.

Keywords:

• party websites
• Internet
• election campaigns
• Belgium
• digital divide

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the webmasters of the political parties in Belgium for their help in collecting our data. We gratefully acknowledge the generous research funding by the Federal Science Agency of Belgium (InterMob Program).

Notes

The SCV survey was conducted on a face-to-face basis in 2005. Of the 1,524 initial respondents, 656 used the Internet. To make the comparison as close as possible, we limited ourselves to those who report that they use the Internet at least once a week for political reasons and e-government (n = 338).

It has to be noted that here we focus on traditional party websites and not on all kinds of more innovative ‘Web 2.0’ applications. These were, however, completely absent in this campaign (Hooghe & Vissers 2008).

Although we would have preferred to conduct this analysis on the entire (Belgian) sample, in stead of just on the Dutch-speaking part of it, there is no reason to assume that there is a difference between Dutch- and French-speaking respondents in this analysis. A separate analysis on just the French respondents shows broadly the same patterns, whereas an earlier analysis has shown that with regard to political Internet use, there are no significant differences between Dutch- and French-speaking citizens of Belgium.