Comparative Candidate Campaigning in the Digital World

Our goal is to provide a general evaluation of internet use in legislative electoral campaigns from an international perspective. We comparatively analyze 19 nations to study how legislative candidates use the internet to reach voters and gain their support from a political communication perspective. Our proposed paper compares countries from the Mediterranean (Portugal and Greece), Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania and Estonia), Western Europe (Iceland, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Austria), North America (Canada), and Australasia (Australia). We use selective data from the 29 country Comparative Candidate Survey, whose general objective is to comparatively analyze the relationships among candidates, parties, and voters by using a common measurement tool internationally. Unlike many studies conducted on internet use and electoral campaigns that often focus on content analysis of websites and Social Networking Sites (SNS), we use surveys of candidates and legislators to obtain a macro perspective of campaign tools ranging from on-line techniques to longer-standing methods such as posters and door-to-door interactions. Our data set also allows us to broaden the study of internet and elections research beyond the case study or two-nation study to the international level, which when it has occurred has tended to focus on the European Parliament elections. We analyze campaign internet use based on the legislative elections of varied nations with differing characteristics, including countries outside of Europe. The most recent data was released in December 2013 (we anticipate new data release prior to 2015 which may allow us to include additional elections/nations). At this time, data from 19 nations meet our criteria (8903 candidates/legislators).