Campaigns

This page considers use of the net in campaigns by political parties, individual candidates and advocacy groups.

It covers -

• introduction
• writing

     introduction

In Australia, as in most other countries, the most effective use of the internet in political campaigns has been made by advocacy groups and individual politicians rather than than by major parties. The Australian federal election during the past decade suggest that the parties essentially haven't moved beyond static brochure-ware, ie they are using sites as an opportunity to publish policy statements rather than to engage with supporters and the wider community.

We'll be offering pointers about online campaign issues and developments in the near future.

     writing

Most of the best writing about use of the net is offline, and indeed in journals rather than monographs or collections of papers.

We've highlighted some of that literature on preceding pages of this guide. Vote.com: How Big-Money Lobbyists & the Media are Losing Their Influence, and the Internet is Giving Power to the People (New York: Renaissance 1999) by Dick Morris has gained considerable attention but for us is a rather silly, often cynical exercise. It's from the author of The New Machiavelli (and disgraced former Clinton advisor); the old Machiavelli's more subtle and perceptive.

We recommend instead Dennis Johnson's intelligent No Place For Amateurs (London: Routledge 2001), which draws together recent thinking about principle and practice in campaigns, The Winning Message: Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002) by Adam Simon, Web Campaigning (Cambridge: MIT Press 2006) by Kirsten Foot & Steven Schneider, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2006) by Philip Howard and On Message: Communicating the Campaign (London: Sage 1999) by Pippa Norris, John Curtice, David Sanders & Margaret Scammell. The former's written for a US audience but many of Johnson's insights about polling, targeted contact and web sites are applicable to Australian politics. Jennifer Lees-Marshment's Political Marketing & British Political Parties (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press 2001) offers a UK perspective that is of value in considering Australasian developments.

Elections in the Age of the Internet: Lessons from the United States, a report (PDF) Professor Steven Coleman of the UK Hansard Society's e-democracy programme, asks 'why go online?'. The answer in the US was provided by the web consultant for Hillary Clinton's senate campaign: "If you don't put your campaign online, someone else will." There are varied insights in The Internet and eational elections: A comparative study of web campaigning (London: Routledge 2007) edited by Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, Kirsten Foot & Steven Schneider.

Michael Bassik's undergrad thesis The Effectiveness of Political Advertising on the Internet - Bridging the Political Digital Divide by Providing Campaigns with the Tools, Information, and Resources to Begin Advertising Online is thin but of interest for comments on US ads, supplementing Peter Lenz' E-Voter 98: Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising for a Political Campaign (PDF) and Bonchek's 1995 paper Grassroots in Cyberspace: Using computer networks to facilitate political participation.

Moveon was however characterised as harmless "therapeutic activism" -

MoveOn, however, isn't an organization so much as an outlet. It's a network of aggrieved liberals, connected by the central nervous system of the Internet, and it enables its members to convince themselves they're "doing something" when they're really not.

[It] deserves to be added to the long list of Internet bubbles that were inflated by unrealistic media expectations and self-created hype

... Political campaigns are filled with busywork, to keep volunteers engaged with sign-painting and rally-going until the endpoint of Election Day. But MoveOn has confused the means with the ends. The group declares its actions to be a success when it organizes its members to call a congressional office every five minutes, or to circulate an e-mail, instead of when one of its political aims is achieved. MoveOn has turned itself into a perpetual motion machine, one that's great at inspiring its members to engage in the political version of treadmill running but never goes anywhere.

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