Andrea Calderaro

Empirical Analysis of Political Spaces on the Internet: The Role of E-Mailing Lists in the Organization of Alter-Globalization Movements

The Internet has largely been greeted as a technology able to create new spaces of political debate. In order to investigate the issue, scholars have paid attention to how transnational social movements use new information technologies. This has been done mainly exploring the use of the World Wide Web (WWW). However, new political spaces do not take place just on the WWW, and by consequence, research in this field cannot solely carry out Web analysis to explore the role played by the Internet in creating political debate. In looking at other areas of the Internet to understand the creation of new political space, other analytical approaches need to be adopted. The Internet also includes tools other than the WWW, such as E-Mailing Lists, collaborative on-line software, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Instant Messaging tools, and so forth. This paper explores the role that E-Mailing Lists play in creating new political spaces. To explore if and how this happens, I illustrate this crucial point with an analysis of the use of E-Mailing Lists by social movements. The case I will use is that of the organization of the protest during the G8 Summit held in Genoa in July 2001.

Internet politics beyond the digital divide : a comparative perspective on political parties online across political systems

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Internet Politics Beyond the Digital Divide

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Special Issue on “Online Collective Action and Policy Change”

The Digital Divide has been considered key to understanding the relation between Internet and politics. However, today the use of the Internet is following a normalization trend and new country contextual factors must be taken into consideration in explaining the unequal use of the Internet in politics. This study focuses on the unequal presence of political parties online across political systems. By combining multiple sources, this study explores the relation between the unequal online presence of political parties in 190 countries, and country-contextual factors, including level of Digital Divide, and economic and democratic indicators. Here, the empirical findings resize the relation of causality between the Digital Divide and the use of the Internet for politics. They highlight that democratic status, among various other country-contextual specificities, is the strongest contextual factor in determining the unequal use of the Internet in politics for political parties.