Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

5. Structure and Features of Political Websites

I n the 2008 Spanish general elections, incumbent prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) faced Popular Party’s (PP) leader Mariano Rajoy in a close contest. As the first national election after the surprising 2004 win by the Socialists, which many believed had been fostered by the digital mobilization that followed the terrorist attacks in Madrid three days before the election (Dader 2008), there were high expectations that a vibrant campaign would take place on the web. The two main parties employed a vast array of internet tools, first of all to market themselves to voters through their leaders and policy positions. Both the PSOE and the PP, for instance, opened YouTube channels, where television advertisements and videos produced solely for the web were available. Their websites offered a large number of pages detailing the parties’ policy positions and the latest statements by their main officials. Various website contents were also targeted to specific subgroups within the electorate—in particular, the Socialists addressed groups as diverse as small business owners, college students, immigrants, environmentalists, women, and LGBT; both the CHAPTER FIVE Structure and Features of Political Websites 70 Parties and Digital Politics PSOE and PP reached out to young citizens with dedicated sections on their websites. As a result, Spanish voters who went on the main parties’ websites could find many ways in which to acquire various types of information about the campaign. Users who were not content with simply retrieving contents also encountered many opportunities to actively engage with parties and their leaders through their websites. The PSOE built a web platform, linked to both the party’s and its candidate’s websites, named La mirada positiva (The Positive Look), where users could submit their policy ideas and address questions to the prime minister. The party also created a “cyberprogressive volunteers” platform, where supporters could sign up to receive calls for action to help the campaign on the web—for instance, by voting in media online polls or arguing for the party’s positions on influential blogs. The PP matched these efforts with the “popular volunteers” section on its website and organized an internet contest titled “Your proposal in thirty seconds,” where participants could submit their self-produced videos, the best of which would eventually become an official campaign advertisement. In order to collect users’ mobile phone numbers, Rajoy’s staff also published an online video that showed the PP leader calling supporters on their cell phones asking for help. Both parties also used the internet to target the more than one million Spaniards living abroad with appeals to vote. All these functions demonstrate attempts by the Socialist and Popular campaigns to engage their online supporters by promoting their participation, both online and offline, through words as well as deeds. Both informative and participatory functions were located within complex websites that, precisely because of the large number of features that they included , needed to ensure easy access and smooth usage. For instance, navigation menus and internal search engines could be found on both the PSOE and PP websites. The Socialist Party also made itself accessible to voters from other countries by providing an English translation of some of its pages. Both parties ’ websites were frequently updated, at least once a day. The PP website featured some technical flaws, with links returning missing or wrongly located pages, whereas the PSOE did not. The two parties also differed in the frequency with which they communicated with users via email: while the PP did not send any emails to its registered users in the last two weeks before the vote, the PSOE sent one. The features that I have just described indicate the extent to which party websites are well organized and communicate with users Structure and Features of Political Websites 71 effectively and continuously—in other words, how they deliver their basic online functions. As these examples from the 2008 Spanish general elections have made clear, we can broadly conceive parties’ and candidates’ websites as serving three main goals: information, which entails the one-way distribution of contents; participation, which involves two-way online dialogue as well as the promotion of offline involvement in campaign activities; and delivery, which measures how accessible and well organized a website is and how frequently it is updated. All these tools allow political actors and voters to communicate with...