Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

302 Pages·2013·2.589 MB·English

by  Cristian Vaccari

Digital Politics in Western Democracies
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Digital Politics
in Western Democracies
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A Comparative Study
Cristian Vaccari
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vaccari, Cristian.
Digital politics in Western democracies : a comparative study /
Cristian Vaccari.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1117-0 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-4214-1118-7
(paperback)—ISBN 978-1-4214-1119-4 (electronic) 1. Internet—
Political aspects. 2. Political participation—Computer network
resources. I. Title.
HM851.V33 2013
302.23'1—dc23 2013010175
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Contents
Preface vii
Ac know ledg ments xiii
1 Introduction 1
PART I: Theoretical Issues and Research Questions
2 Understanding Digital Politics in Western Democracies 25
3 Parties and the Internet 48
4 Citizens and the Internet 57
PART II: Parties and Digital Politics
5 Structure and Features of Pol iti cal Websites 69
6 Disparities in Po liti cal Websites 87
7 Party Characteristics and Their Online Presence 98
8 What Drives the Online Presence of Parties and Candidates? 111
PART III: Citizens and Digital Politics
9 Online Po liti cal Information in Seven Countries 131
10 Socioeconomic Inequalities and Online Po liti cal Information 138
11 Po liti cal Attitudes and Online Information 153
vi Contents
12 Po liti cal Engagement, Mass Media Use, and
Online Information 176
13 Correlates of Online Pol iti cal Information in
Seven Democracies 190
14 Conclusion 207
Appendix 225
Notes 243
References 257
Index 275
Preface
Across the Western world, the internet has become a crucial platform for po-
liti cal 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 pro-
fessionals 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 fi xed to mobile access, and from dial-u p to broadband—h ave made
under standing the pol iti cal 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 offi cials and
electorates move online over the past dec ade. In part ic u lar, 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-m ade comparisons and metap hors, and
viii Preface
scholars with theories and approaches. The implicit premise of these treat-
ments has been that the difference between digital politics in the United
States and in other Western democracies is simply a time lapse—t hat 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 be-
tween the creation of the internet and its mass diffusion. The institutional
and or gan i za tion al characteristics of American politics also make it a particu-
larly fertile breeding ground for digital media. Yet, for precisely these rea-
sons, the United States should not be regarded as a template for the develop-
ment 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. Tak-
ing 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 po liti cal 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 pol iti cal action. This oversight is par-
ticularly problematic given that digital media afford users a greater degree of
control, compelling them to make many more choices, and more consequen-
tial ones, than any mass medium. The internet allows citizens to do much
more than reading or watching campaign propaganda. In addition to gather-
ing information, they can donate money, distribute messages, org a nize events,
maintain connections with other people, and sign up to volunteer on the
ground. In turn, pol iti cal organizations increasingly harness the web to ask
their supporters to perform these and many other tasks. By setting up web-
sites, social media profi les, and online applications, though, parties and can-
didates 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 fi rst large-s cale and
cross-n ational comparative study of digital politics, bringing together analy-
ses 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 on-
line population of democracies worldwide—A ustralia, France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—o ver the period 2006
to 2010. It aims to show how—p olitical, journalistic, and academic fascina-
tion with the United States aside—d igital politics is not bound up in a pro-
cess of progressive and inevitable Americanization but instead develops in
distinct ways in different countries. Parties’ and candidates’ use of the inter-
net is shaped by institutional constraints and opportunities as well as org an-
i za tion al and ideological characteristics. By the same token, citizens’ online
engagement is affected by social and economic stratifi cation as well as po liti-
cal preferences and offl ine involvement. The impact of these causal factors is
also conditional on contextual characteristics, such as the electoral system.
Comparing different democracies—a nd different pol iti cal actors and groups
of citizens within them—w ill thus allow us to understand how and why
these differences matter.
The cross- national empirical data presented throughout this book confi rm
that the United States should be treated as an exceptional rather than a modal
(or model) case in the development of digital politics. American pol iti cal orga-
nizations, for instance, have developed the participatory and or gan i za tion al
potential of the web more than their other Western counterparts largely
because of the part ic ul ar incentives afforded by unique institutional arrange-
ments such as campaign fi nance regulation and party org an i za tion. The
United States also stands out for the distinctive eagerness with which its elec-
torate relies on the internet for pol iti cal information, with almost one in two
voters already doing so in 2008, as opposed to ratios between one in three and
one in ten among the other countries included in this study. Thus, both supply-
side implementation by parties and candidates and demand-s ide reception by
voters set the United States apart from other Western democracies.
These differences aside, striking similarities can also be found across the
seven countries included in this study despite wide contextual variations.
Some systemic features affect digital politics in predictable ways that can be
identifi ed by comparative analysis. Thus, some affordances of the internet
may be conducive to pol iti cal outcomes through causal patterns that can be