Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

6. Disparities in Political Websites

T ogether with liberty, equality is one of the two core principles that democracy strives to achieve and maintain (Sartori 1987). Preoccupations with equality have been a constant thread in discussions about the role of the internet in political communication and democracy (for a review , see Chadwick 2006: 168–173). Sources of online inequalities among political actors can be located at the meso and macro levels of inquiry. At the organizational level, I show that parties’ and candidates’ online efforts are in part affected by their electoral strength and available resources, with important implications for the balance of party competition. At the structural level, I discuss whether the uneven diffusion of internet connections among the populations of different countries affects the online presence of their political actors—which may impact the breadth of political opportunities that citizens can encounter on the web. CHAPTER SIX Disparities in Political Websites 88 Parties and Digital Politics Inequalities at the Party Level: Do the Rich Get Richer? In January 2008, as the US presidential primaries were in full swing after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries and en route to Super Tuesday (when twenty-four states plus American Samoa were set to hold primaries and caucuses), voters had quite different experiences depending on which candidate’s website they visited. For instance, a Democratic supporter who went to the official site of the former First Lady (and frontrunner) Hillary Rodham Clinton could find, among many other things, information on how to vote, data and statistics on public policies, and downloadable campaign materials. If, however, the same voter went to the website of former Alaska senator and long-shot Democratic aspirant Mike Gravel, he could not find any of these features. The two candidates’ online efforts also differed markedly in their freshness and responsiveness. Three to four news updates were published every day on the website of the former First Lady, as opposed to less than one on Gravel’s site. At the peak of the campaign, Clinton was in daily email contact with those who had left their addresses, while Gravel’s website did not even ask visitors to subscribe for email updates. Clinton’s campaign replied to an email requesting issue information within two business days, while no response was received from Gravel’s staff; both campaigns, however, replied to a volunteer pledge by email in just one day. Clinton’s website explicitly targeted minorities, the youth, and seniors, as well as offering geographically segmented information, while Gravel’s did not. Clinton’s web presence was also much more engaging: visitors could register to vote, contact media outlets , distribute materials downloaded from the site both online and offline, and create their own blog linked to the campaign’s; none of these functions could be found on Gravel’s site. There were also important differences in the functioning of the two websites: visitors to Clinton’s could see moving objects within pages, read foreign language translations of most contents, and easily explore the site thanks to a “return to homepage” button and a navigation toolbar; Gravel’s website lacked all these features. Interestingly, however, it was Clinton’s website that presented missing pages and broken links, not Gravel’s. As a result of all these differences, throughout the coding period, Clinton’s website scored higher than Gravel’s in all three indices, with a gap of 12 points in information, 8 in participation, and 5 in delivery. Not all minor candidates, Disparities in Political Websites 89 however, failed to keep up with the frontrunner: former governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, for instance, had a website that rivaled Clinton’s scores in all indices but information. This performance was perhaps due to the fact that Blue State Digital, the same company that advised Barack Obama through the 2007–8 cycle, was responsible for Richardson’s online presence. Later in the same year, voters who went online before the Spanish general elections could find stark differences between the website of the governing Socialist Workers Party, which had high scores in all three indices, and that of radical left-wing party Izquierda Unida (United Left), which was distanced from the ruling party by 5, 12, and 7 points in the indices of information, participation, and delivery, respectively. However, not all small parties were doomed to be dwarfed by the Socialists’ online presence: for instance, the Catalan regionalist party Convergencia i Uniò (Convergence...