Michael Margolis

Election Campaigning on the WWW in the US and the UK: A Comparative Analysis

This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combination of interview data, content analysis of sites and analysis of online and offline media coverage of the election is used to investigate these questions. Conclusions are drawn about the similarity of Web campaigning across the two countries and about the increasing dominance of the major parties, particularly in the UK.

Campaigning on the Internet

Will cyberspace bring new forms of participatory democracy as computer-mediated communication reduces organizational costs? The Internet has the potential to change the nature of American electoral politics, but we doubt that it will. The character and popularity of cyberspace are more likely to foster an on-line electoral environment that replicates the real world, albeit in a slick electronic form. Notwithstanding the novelty and explosive growth of campaigning on the Internet, we foresee the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, as more likely to reinforce the existing structure of American politics than to change it.

Party Competition on the Internet in the United States and Britain

This article examines the prominence of Web sites of major and minor parties in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparing features such as search capabilities, membership forms, information on party organization and issues, characteristics of graphics, and currency of updates as well as their relative quality and sophistication.We also look at the prominence of major and minor parties in newspapers and magazines and in various search engines and sites for political junkies. We find that minor parties have a greater presence on the Web in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but even so, the sites of major parties in both countries are more prominent and sophisticated than those of minor parties, and major parties generally receive more media coverage than minor parties, both on-line and off-line.The data suggest that the established interests dominating most of the communications, transactions, elections, and political processes of advanced industrialized countries are extending their influence to these processes in cyberspace.

Breaking ground on the virtual frontier: Surveying civic life on the internet

The Internet provides a virtual frontier to expand our access to information and to increase our knowledge and understanding of public opinion, political behavior, social trends and lifestyles through survey research. Comparable to other technological advancements, such as the telephone and the computer, the Internet presents opportunities that will impact significantly on the process and quality of survey research now and in the twenty-first century.Cyberspace permits us to move beyond traditional face-to-face, mail and telephone surveys, yet still to examine basic issues regarding the quality of data collection: sampling, questionnaire design, survey distribution, means of response, and database creation. This surveys include those posted on LISTERV mailing lists, USENET newsgroups, and the World Wide Web. A survey on politics and civic life, conducted by the authors, is used as a case study.

The politics of gun control: comparing Canadian and American patterns

In this paper two questions are asked: To what extent do the Canadian and US publics differ in their beliefs about firearms-control legislation, and to what extent do these differences help to account for the stricter firearms legislation found in Canada? Surveys indicate that Canadians and Americans have remarkably similar attitudes towards firearms and gun control. Linear regression is used to analyze the factors that underlie the popular support for (or opposition to) stricter gun-control legislation. It is found that, with respect to support for gun control, cultural differences between Canadians and Americans are overshadowed by socioeconomic variables, such as gender and gun ownership. The similarities in public attitudes between Canadians and Americans suggest that the explanation for stricter firearms legislation in Canada lies more with the differences in political elites and institutions than with differences in public opinion. The differences in public attitudes in the two countries are insufficient to explain the stark contrast in firearms legislation.

Typing Politics: The Role of Blogs in American Politics, by Richard Davis

campaigns are ones with an effective comprehensive message strategy aimed more or less at the entire electorate around core issues, underlined by specific messages aimed at particular issue constituencies. Hillygus and Shields effectively highlight the utility of microtargeting in communicating with issue publics without losing sight of the fact that such targeted messaging alone cannot win a presidential campaign. The Persuadable Voter provides a refreshing perspective on campaign effects and voting behavior, in a voluminous literature that is frequently devoid of new perspectives on campaigns and elections. They offer a perspective that ought to ring truer to practitioners of politics than much of the existing literature, and they bolster their argument with a wide array of quantitative evidence taken from several different sources. A must-read for any student of political behavior.