eElectioneering: Current Research Trends - Springer Link

eElectioneering: Current Research Trends Dimitra Kampitaki1, Efthimios Tambouris2,3, and Konstantinos Tarabanis3 1

Department of Electronics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Sindos, 57400, Greece [email protected] 2 Informatics and Telematics Institute, Center for Research and Technology Hellas, (ITICERTH), 1st km Thermi-Panorama Road, Thermi 57001, Thessaloniki, Greece 3 University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, Thessaloniki, 540 06, Greece [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. Internet has transformed political campaigning during the last ten years. Political parties use it to attract, engage and motivate voters, while users use it to retrieve information and discuss political issues. Various tools have been used in such a way that nowadays electronic Electioneering (eElectioneering) practices vary significantly from traditional electioneering ones, e.g., by incorporating dynamic features and interactivity. At the same time, considerable research has been carried out, concerning account users’ profiles, candidate and parties’ profiles, various eElectioneering methods and tools and the recorded or possible effects of their use on the election result. In this paper a literature review is presented. Specifically, the results of the current research are identified, critically evaluated and categorized in order to define research trends and identify research gaps in the rapidly evolving field of eElectioneering. Keywords: eElectioneering, eCampaigning, online political campaign, elections.

1 Introduction Electioneering is defined as the political campaign of a candidate in order to be elected. It includes all the activities directed to the electorate from all the candidates. In most cases any available means of communication are used in order to spread out the message and persuade voters. Traditional electioneering involves communications through posters, flyers, speeches, and radio and television advertisements, and so on [1]. Research has been done in various topics concerning traditional electioneering practices, since electioneering is a major topic in political science [2]-[18]. In the recent past a new means of communication has made its appearance and since then has not been ignored: the Internet. On the contrary, Internet has become a very efficient means of political communication. Soon, several researchers presented studies on how Internet could be effective by surveying the tools used and their impact in various types of elections and also the electorate group they mostly affected taking into account demographic information. The present work summarizes a major part of the research related to the above fields, in order to define the research trends and identify possible gaps in that research. Particularly, the stakeholders, the tools and M.A. Wimmer, H.J. Scholl, and E. Ferro (Eds.): EGOV 2008, LNCS 5184, pp. 184–194, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

eElectioneering: Current Research Trends

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the effects of eElectioneering are presented, the way they interacted with one another are studied and also the election cycles that have been analyzed are discussed. The paper is organized as follows. In section II the methodology used for conducting this research is outlined. In section III the objects of research are presented along with the corresponding research. In section IV a short discussion of the results is taking place, and finally, in section V some conclusions are derived and future research is proposed.

2 Research Methodology The methodology adopted to conduct this research is the one proposed by Webster and Watson [19]. According to it, a complete literature review should not be confined to one research methodology, or one set of journals, or one geographic region. It should be concept-centric and success in synthesizing the literature by proposing an appropriate organizing framework. In order to satisfy these requirements the present study defines an outline concept for eElectioneering, adopts a systematic search among the published work and presents a structured review of all the found relevant literature. 2.1 eElectioneering Outline Concept eElectioneering is the political campaign of a candidate in order to be elected aided by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Accompanying the traditional electioneering communication methods, eElectioneering tools are used to establish new communication channels with the electorate in its whole, or with specific groups of it. eElectioneering refers to applications and tools that aid the online political campaign prior to an election. All the other political practices supported by ICT, which are addressed to the electorate but are not followed by an election cycle, are not considered to be eElectioneering practices, as they can be classified in different fields of eParticipation, such as eConsultation and eGovernance. 2.2 Identification and Selection of Publications In order to identify published work concerning eElectioneering, a list of articles dating back to 1997 was compiled from 3 databases (Scopus, Web of Science and CiteSeer) using several combinations of 8 keywords. The keywords were “election”, “online”, “internet”, “campaign”, “blog”, “candidate”, “politic”, and “websites”. By this way, publications with a potential link to eElectioneering were identified. The summaries of these publications were read and some publications were rejected since they were completely irrelevant to eElectioneering practices. Other articles concerned eVoting and ePolling and their associated technologies, thus they were also excluded from this study. Additionally, in many cases the identified articles contained abstracts that seemed to be relevant, but the full text of the paper was not available from the publishers. That concerned mainly older studies and resulted in the rejection of these articles. The remaining publications were ordered and read, and the final selection of the articles used in this literature review was done using the following criteria: • The article had to be published in English. • The publications should be in recognized peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings. Articles published in books, book chapters, news releases and other non-scientific articles were therefore not considered.

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• Articles discussing other eParticipation practices were not considered. The distinction was made by selecting only research articles that referred to election cycles. Finally, 47 articles were considered since only these were fulfilling all the abovementioned criteria, while the rest were rejected. These papers were studied, summarized and categorized. The results are presented below. 2.3 The Analysis Framework In order to categorize the research that has been done in the eElectioneering research field, an analysis grid was used to extract four major elements discussed in the selected articles: • Stakeholders • Tools • Effects • Election cycle The interaction between the first three elements is depicted in Fig. 1, while the fourth one sets the time and place of the election cycle studied. In respect to these elements, most of the research focused either on the profile of an element or on the interaction between two elements. In order to categorize the articles we defined for each article the scope of research. Articles that discussed the profile and the characteristics of one of the above-mentioned three elements were considered to be element-oriented research. Articles that focused on the relationships between the elements were considered to be relationship-oriented research. Additionally eventoriented research exists, which focuses on specific election periods. The selected articles were categorized in respect to these scopes of research, and the results are presented below. Stakeholder uses

is used by Tool

causes

is caused by Effect

Fig. 1. The interaction between the major elements researched

3 Results 3.1 Element-Oriented Research Stakeholders Identification. The basic stakeholders of eElectioneering practices were identified. These include the candidates, the political parties, and the voters/Internet users. Research has been done in defining the profile of each of these stakeholders, given in Table 1 along with the corresponding references.


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Table 1. Stakeholders of eElectioneering Stakeholder Candidates/ Parties

Political

Internet Users

Principal References Gibson, Rommele and Ward (2003) [20], Ward and Gibson (2003) [21], Norris (2003) [22], Druckman, Kifer and Parkin (2007) [23], Gulati and Williams (2007) [24], Jackson (2007) [25], Rackaway (2007) [26], Xenos and Bennett (2007) [27] Gibson, Ward and Lusoli (2003) [28], Johnson and Kaye (2003) [29], Norris (2003) [22], Tkach-Kawasaki (2003) [30], Farnsworth and Owen (2004) [31], Kaye and Johnson (2004) [32], Hindman (2005) [33], Howard (2005) [34], Kenski and Stroud (2006) [35], Krueger (2006) [36], Grönlund (2007) [37], Hooghe and Teepe (2007) [38]

Tools Identification. The tools used in eElectioneering are presented in Table 2, along with the respective references. These tools were adapted to eElectioneering practices but were not developed exclusively for them. Consequently, the research was not concerned with the development of new tools to support eElectioneering but rather on how existing tools were used for political purposes. Table 2. eElectioneering Tools Tool Websites

Profile (PPWs) Weblogs

e-mail e-newsletter

Websites

Principal References D'Alessio (1997) [39], Auty and Cowen (2001) [40], Johnson (2001) [41], Puopolo (2001) [42], Bowers-Brown and Gunter (2002) [43], Gibson, Römelle and Ward (2003) [20], Gibson, Ward and Lusoli (2003) [28], Norris (2003) [22], Kluver (2004) [44], Farmer and Fender (2005) [45], Lusoli and Ward (2005) [46], Schweizer (2005) [47], Souley and Wicks (2005) [48], Xenos and Foot (2005) [49], Kyj (2006) [50], Gulati and Williams (2007) [24], Xenos and Bennett (2007) [27], Druckman, Kifer and Parkin (2007) [23], Grönlund (2007) [37] Grönlund (2007) [37], Hooghe and Teepe (2007) [38] Kerbel and Bloom (2005) [51], Lawson-Borders and Kirk (2005) [52], Jackson (2006) [53], Trammel (2006) [54], Stanyer (2007) [55], Trammell (2007) [56] Gibson, Rommele and Ward (2003) [20], Williams and Trammel (2005) [57], Krueger (2006) [36] Jackson and Lilleker (2007) [58]

Effects Identification. In Table 3 the major possible effects of the eElectioneering practices are presented along with principal references. Most of the research identifies the effects of eElectioneering to be focused on enhancing citizen involvement, engagement and mobilization, while other studies focus on the political knowledge that can be acquired through the use of eElectioneering practices.

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D. Kampitaki, E. Tambouris, and K. Tarabanis Table 3. eElectioneering Effects Possible effects

Involvement Mobilization Political Knowledge/ Information Vote increase Decision Making

Principal References Kerbel and Bloom (2005) [51] Krueger (2006) [36] Farnsworth and Owen (2004) [31], Howard (2005) [34], Kenski and Stroud (2006) [35], Dalrymple and Scheufele (2007) [59], Grönlund (2007) [37] D'Alessio (1997) [39] Gibson and Rommele (2005) [60]

3.2 Relationship-Oriented Research Stakeholder – Tool Relationship. Articles in this category examine the relationship between stakeholders and tools, and more precisely the way the former use the latter. In Table 4 the relationships explored are listed along with the relevant references. Table 4. Stakeholder – Tool Relationships Relationship Candidates using Web

Users using PWWs Users using Websites Candidates Weblogs

using

Principal References Klotz (1998) [61], Auty and Cowen (2001) [40], Gibson, Margolis, Resnick and Ward (2003) [62], Gibson, Rommele and Ward (2003) [20], Gibson, Ward and Lusoli (2003) [28], Norris (2003) [22], Tkach-Kawasaki (2003) [30], Ward and Gibson (2003) [21], March (2004) [63], Farmer and Fender (2005) [45], Gibson and Rommele (2005) [60], Hindman (2005) [33], Schweizer (2005) [47], Druckman, Kifer and Parkin (2007) [23], Jackson (2007) [25], Rackaway (2007) [26], Sulkin, Moriarty and Hefner (2007) [64], Xenos and Bennett (2007) [27] Grönlund (2007) [37], Hooghe and Teepe (2007) [38] Grönlund (2007) [37], Howard (2005) [34], Tewksbury (2006) [65] Jackson (2006) [53], Trammell (2007) [56]

Tool – Effect Relationship. Articles in this category examine the relationship between the tools used and the possible effects from their use. In Table 5 the relationships explored are listed along with relevant research. 3.3 Event-Oriented Research A categorization has also been made to identify the countries and type of elections that have been studied in the past. These are presented in Table 6 along with the relevant references.


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Table 5. Tool – Effect Relationships Relationship Website tools for involvement Website tools for engagement Website tools for mobilization Evaluation of political ads on the Internet

Principal References Bowers-Brown and Gunter (2002) [43], Gulati and Williams (2007) [24] Bowers-Brown and Gunter (2002) [43], Gulati and Williams (2007) [24] Gulati and Williams (2007) [24] Kaid and Postelnicu (2005) [66]

Table 6. Countries and Election Cycles Country

Election Cycle

Belgium U.S.A.

2003 and 2004 1996

Hooghe and Teepe (2007) [38] D'Alessio (1997) [39], Klotz (1998) [61]

2000

Gibson, Margolis, Resnick, and Ward (2003) [62], Kaid (2003) [66], Farnsworth and Owen (2004) [31], Kaye and Johnson (2004) [32], Farmer and Fender (2005) [45], Sulkin, Moriarty and Hefner (2007) [64] Druckman, Kifer and Parkin (2007) [23], Xenos and Foot (2005) [49] Hindman (2005) [33], Kaid and Postelnicu (2005) [66], Kerbel and Bloom (2005) [51], Souley and Wicks (2005) [48], Williams and Trammel (2005) [57], Trammell (2006) [54], Dalrymple and Scheufele (2007) [59], Druckman, Kifer and Parkin (2007) [23], Trammell (2007) [56] Rackaway (2007) [26]

2002 2004

2006 Legislative Finland UK

2006 2003 2001 General Election

2004 E.U. Parliament 2005 General Election Germany

2002

Singapore Russia Ukraine Japan

2001 1999 2004 Presidential 2000 and 2001

Principal References

Gulati and Williams (2007) [24] Grönlund (2007) [37] Auty and Cowen (2001) [40], Bowers-Brown and Gunter (2002) [43], Gibson, Margolis, Resnick, and Ward (2003) [62], Ward and Gibson (2003) [21] Lusoli and Ward (2005) [46] Jackson (2006) [53], Jackson (2007) [25], Stanyer (2007) [55] Schweizer (2005) [47], Gibson, Rommele and Ward (2003) [20] Kluver (2004) [44] March (2004) [63] Kyj (2006) [50] Tkach-Kawasaki (2003) [30]

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4 Discussion In the previous section, the major categories of eElectrioneering research have been presented. In fact three major categories have been identified, that can describe the major research trends. The first category consists of element-oriented research and includes articles that profile the stakeholders, the tools and the effects of eElectioneering. Most of the research concentrated on stakeholders and Internet tools. By analyzing the political orientation of the candidates, the way that candidates use Internet tools and technologies, and also demographic information about candidates and political parties, research tried to connect Internet and political campaigning. Through demographic analyses and the logfiles of websites, many researchers try to profile the users and derive information about their opinion forming and the amount of their political knowledge. Articles that examine Internet tools utilized by eElectioneering fail to evaluate tools such as forums, RSS feeds and also social networking applications such as Facebook, Second Life and YouTube. Web 2.0 technologies that made their appearance recently, like weblogs, seem to have excited researchers, shown by the recent research focusing on these technologies. All these Internet tools should be further investigated in order to fully examine their potential use. On the other hand, eElectioneering effects can not be measured easily. Internet users already have their basic political opinions formed and mainly receive political messages from other means of communication rather than from the Internet. Thus, nobody can say whether the voting result depends on Internet use or on other means of political communications. Political opinion is formed by gathering political knowledge from many sources accessed by the majority of voters, while Internet users were a minority of the electorate until recently and in many countries even now. In the second category, the relationships that connect stakeholders, tools and effects are examined. Research here concentrates on the use of Websites by the candidates and political parties. There have been many studies which examine the way candidates and political parties utilize their Websites, mostly through content analysis, while limited research concerns whether use of specific tools, like email, causes certain outcome, like political engagement and mobilization. Some research focused on the way users access candidates’ web sites and PWWs i.e. interactive sites that consult users what to vote, by matching users’ opinions with candidates’ manifestos. Further research might reveal useful information on users’ behavior. Finally, by examining the third category we conclude that researchers tend to study US and UK elections more than other countries’ elections. This could be due to the major impact that these countries have in world politics and affairs. Even in countries that have high percentage of population using the Internet, like Finland, research is very limited. There have been some comparative studies, but their extent is limited to 3 or 4 countries. Many of the selected articles do not concentrate on one of the above categories of research, but examine two or more of their sub-categories. For example there are many articles that examine the profile of candidates having a website along with candidates’ websites content in one or two election cycles. Thus, the research is more complete and more valuable results can be derived.


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5 Conclusion and Further Research By examining the current research in the eElectioneering field we conclude that it focuses on the U.S.A. elections, on the candidates and on their websites. The other fields although partially examined, are not yet fully explored. Research should widen up in order to include other countries that use eElectioneering practices, stakeholders other than candidates, political parties and voters, e.g., non-partisan organizations, online newspapers, news portals and the government. In general, studies that combine the above-mentioned categories of research can be more useful than the examination of only one category. Internet tools are rapidly evovling, so candidates and political parties have to be prompt in order to take advantage of them. The most recent example is the use of social networking Internet tools like Facebook and life simulators like Second Life. In the recent elections in the United States these tools seem to have a great impact since happenings in Second Life are discussed not only online but also through traditional means of communication, and politicians in Facebook make a huge people network just moments after their Facebook Sign Up. Whether the impact of these above-mentioned tools will be so critical as to form political opinion and persuade voters are major questions and challenges to the campaign managers. The sure thing is that Internet has once and for all changed the way political campaigns are conducted and the way politicians approach voters. A major challenge is to study the impact of these new tools in the electoral process, as they seem not only to have a major impact in political discourse, but they also achieve to engage and mobilize the electorate. Acknowledgments. The work in this paper was conducted within the DEMO-net Network of Excellence (http://www.demo-net.org), a project funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP6-2004-IST-4-027219).

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