For the Federal Election 2013 all major parties in Germany had strong online presences. They offered diverse websites, used various social media platforms, YouTube and video-livestreams, and provided their supporters with dedicated campaign platforms, to help them coordinate local campaigning efforts. This paper draws from in-depth interviews with key personnel of German parties (CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Die Grünen, Piratenpartei). From these interviews a pattern emerges: parties aimed to integrate their online campaigning efforts in their general campaign; they predominantly used in-house personnel for the planning, administration, and the design of online tools; they saw their campaigns not in the tradition of the Obama campaigns but much more in context of their own party-specific experiences, during the Federal Election 2009 and various state elections. These preliminary results offer an interesting contrast to the professionalization thesis. Instead, they can be interpreted in context of the “hybrid media system” thesis.
