The Two-Sided Evolution of Party-Centered E-Campaigning: Evidence from German Political Web Sites.

Scholars have seldom tested the innovation and normalization paradigm of e-campaigning over time. Particularly outside the U.S., there is a lack of comparative analyses of candidate or party Web sites that deal with the concept's temporal validity and scope. The paper addresses this research gap through a longitudinal content and structural analysis of German party Web sites in the 2002 and 2005 National Elections. The results provide empirical evidence of a twofold development in e-campaigning that challenges past assumptions of the innovation and normalization framework. Specifically, the paper proposes two theoretical revisions: First, innovation and normalization do not represent mutually exclusive opposites of a scientific controversy, but rather signify a dynamic conceptual continuum of parallel stages in the evolution of e-campaigning. Second, this continuum is affected by the Web site dimension as well as by the status of the political actors being observed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]