Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

Preface

Across the Western world, the internet has become a crucial platform for political interaction between citizens and the parties and candidates that court them. As a result, the role, function, and potential impact of digital media have been the subject of widespread interest among politicians and the professionals who work for them, among journalists, and among academics. The rapid and steady development of the technology and its uses—from bulletin boards to social media, from text-only interfaces to multimedia contents, from fixed to mobile access, and from dial-up to broadband—have made understanding the political and social implications of digital media an even greater challenge. In most cases, however, the rise of digital politics has been interpreted and studied only within the frame of individual countries and not across the range of developed democracies that have seen both elected officials and electorates move online over the past decade. In particular, the United States has constituted the main source of inspiration, providing politicians with role models and success stories, professionals with best practices and business opportunities, journalists with ready-made comparisons and metaphors, and Preface viii Preface scholars with theories and approaches. The implicit premise of these treatments has been that the difference between digital politics in the United States and in other Western democracies is simply a time lapse—that what happened and worked in America will sooner or later happen and work in other, somewhat similar countries. This conclusion is not surprising in light of the United States’ role as a global superpower, technological innovator, model of democracy, and source of most academic research in the period between the creation of the internet and its mass diffusion. The institutional and organizational characteristics of American politics also make it a particularly fertile breeding ground for digital media. Yet, for precisely these reasons , the United States should not be regarded as a template for the development of internet politics elsewhere, as it nearly always has. Rather, it should be treated as an exception or, in social science parlance, a deviant case. Taking the United States as an implicit or explicit reference point has been useful in the early stages of research on digital politics, but it has led scholars to overlook important aspects that vary across Western democracies and affect how the internet is employed by both parties and citizens. Another limit of most analyses of online politics so far is that they have focused on how political actors, such as parties and candidates, adopt digital media, but they have neglected how citizens integrate the web within their informational diets and repertoires of political action. This oversight is particularly problematic given that digital media afford users a greater degree of control, compelling them to make many more choices, and more consequential ones, than any mass medium. The internet allows citizens to do much more than reading or watching campaign propaganda. In addition to gathering information, they can donate money, distribute messages, organize events, maintain connections with other people, and sign up to volunteer on the ground. In turn, political organizations increasingly harness the web to ask their supporters to perform these and many other tasks. By setting up websites , social media profiles, and online applications, though, parties and candidates can only make these endeavors possible; the impact of their efforts will be impalpable unless voters encounter these tools and decide to engage with them. Consequently, understanding digital politics requires studying both its supply side (what parties and candidates propose) and its demand side (what citizens do online)—and doing so at the same time, within the same framework, and with congruent empirical methods. Preface ix This book aims to achieve these goals by offering the first large-scale and cross-national comparative study of digital politics, bringing together analyses of both parties and candidates and the people they court. It focuses on a range of seven Western democracies that together represent 46% of the online population of democracies worldwide—Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—over the period 2006 to 2010. It aims to show how—political, journalistic, and academic fascination with the United States aside—digital politics is not bound up in a process of progressive and inevitable Americanization but instead develops in distinct ways in different countries. Parties’ and candidates’ use of the internet is shaped by institutional constraints and opportunities as well as organizational and ideological...