Online Campaigning in the 2002 U.S. Elections: Analyzing House, Senate and Gubernatorial Campaign Web Sites.

In this paper we analyze the online campaigning practices of U.S. congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in the 2002 election based on the largest empirical study of U.S. campaign Web sites to date. The research questions guiding this study included the following. First, how did campaigns ‘campaign on the Web’ by adapting traditional practices to the Web environment? Second, how did campaigns take advantage of the unique capacities of the Web? Third, do campaign Web sites share a common set of features in sufficient numbers to be considered a ‘genre?’ Fourth, how useful are political-structural variables such as party affiliation and campaign intensity in explaining the Web practices of candidates in the 2002 election? Our findings demonstrate that while a majority of campaigns adapted traditional campaign practices to the online environment, relatively few made use of the unique capacities of the Web. However, there is an identifiable core of features around which a genre of Web sites has emerged. Finally, in contrast with the ‘normalization’ argument (Margolis and Resnick, 2000, Bimber and Davis, In Press), we found that political-structural variables such as party affiliation and campaign intensity hold limited explanatory power in relation to online campaigning practices when assessed on a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]