Study examines political internet campaigning in the UK and US

Apologies for the dearth of new posts around these parts – loads of
great stuff happening but work too busy to let me check my
feeds regularly!

But I thought I’d definitely flag up a working paper by Nick Anstead and Andrew Chadwick from Royal Holloway University‘s New Political Communication Unit.

The paper, Parties, Election Campaigning and the Internet: Toward A Comparative Institutional Approach [downloadable here as a pdf] examines the use of the internet comparatively between political institutions in the UK and US.

The description reads:

"This paper argues that a comparative approach to
analysing the relationship between technology and political
institutions has the potential to offer renewed understanding of the
development of the Internet in election campaigning. Taking the
different characteristics of political parties and the norms and rules
of the electoral environment in the United States and the United
Kingdom as an illustration, it suggests that the relationship between
technology and political institutions is dialectical. Technologies can
reshape institutions, but institutions will mediate eventual outcomes.
This approach has the potential to generate a theoretical framework for
explaining differences in the impact of the Internet on election
campaigning across liberal democracies."

I’m particualrly interested in the author’s suggestion that the
relationship between technology and institutions is dialectical – and
that they are working towards a theory for understanding the
relationship.

I haven’t read the paper yet (although at 16 pages, it’s not a lengthy
read) but as far as I know it looks like a valuable study of what the
UK can learn from the US in terms of political campaigning on the
internet.

Anecdotally I don’t think anyone could argue that the US is streets
ahead of the UK in this sphere (just look to Labour’s poor record) –
what the paper hopefully offers is some reasons why and how.

Technorati tags: politics, internet, UK, US, New Political Communications Unit, comparative study