Innovation or Normalization in E-Campaigning? A Longitudinal Analysis of German Party Websites in the 2002 and 2005 National Elections.

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 websites 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 websites 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. In particular, the paper proposes two theoretical revisions: First, innovation and normalization do not represent mutually exclusive opposites of a scientific controversy but rather a dynamic conceptual continuum which signifies parallel stages in the development of e-campaigning. Second, this continuum is affected by the website dimension (i.e., content or structure) as well as by the status of the political actors (i.e., parliamentary or non-parliamentary parties) being observed. Both intervening variables need to be taken into account in future research in order to accurately describe and explain the implementation of new information technologies in politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]