A Europe Wide Web ? Political Parties ’ Websites in the 2009 European

This chapter investigates the characteristics of parties’ Websites during the campaign for the 2009 European Parliament elections. The study focuses on 5 Western and Southern European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and covers a total of 55 Websites, which were analyzed in the last 2 weeks before the vote. The analysis was conducted through a standard coding scheme modelled after Gibson and Ward’s (2000) seminal proposal, expanded to account for the developments in e-campaigning that have occurred in the last decade, and integrated with the results of a meta-analysis of 7 coding frames employed by previous researchers. Website features were divided into 2 main categories: those that provide information to users and those that facilitate their participation to the campaign both online and offline. The goals of this study are, first, to offer an updated mapping of the state of the art in Western European online campaigning and, second, to discover which variables affect the characteristics of party Websites. This goal is achieved through regression analyses that correlate indices measuring the amount of information and participation features in parties’ Websites with variables that measure system-level as well as party-level characteristics. Results show that system-level variables such as technological development, and aggregate levels of political support have no appreciable effect on party Website characteristics, nor do party-level variables such as resources and incumbency. Instead, ideology has a strong effect on Websites, as parties’ membership to the Socialist and Left-Libertarian families is strongly and positively correlated with both information and participation features on their Websites. INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE More than fifteen years after its first uses in election campaigns, the internet has now become a standard, almost taken-for-granted component of parties’ and candidates’ communication toolkits. However, research on the political role of ICTs still suggests caution in evaluating their impact on campaigns and democracy. On the one hand, various studies based in the United States have found that visiting candidates’ sites enhances both Cristian Vaccari University of London, UK & University of Bologna, Italy