Candidates in election campaigns are able to choose from a number of instruments to make themselves heard. Besides more traditional campaigning instruments, such as canvassing, leafleting, or paid advertising, only recently established forms of online communication, such as websites, present a “widening of the political playing field” for political actors (Ward/Gibson 2009). While there is a debate about the relevance of these new campaigning instruments, studies which actually take the perspective of the candidates into account are rather scarce. Furthermore, one could argue that developments such as the attitudes towards new technologies can fruitfully be assessed by adopting a longitudinal perspective. In this study, we try to tackle these shortcomings by measuring the attitudes of candidates in the Swiss National Elections in 2007 and 2011 towards the various campaigning instruments they employed – on- and offline. Building on the theoretical framework developed by Ward and Gibson, and Anstead and Chadwick (2009), we hypothesize that structural characteristics, of either the media or political system, determine the use and relevance of candidates’ websites in election campaigns. The level of outsourcing to professional agencies depends on the party of the candidate. We also measured the number of hours candidates used and the proportion of financial resources they invested. Surprisingly, we do not only find that the share of candidates using a website in their campaign is relatively constant, but also that the relevance candidates attribute to their website is remarkably stable between 2007 and 2011. In comparison with offline campaigning instruments, such as canvassing or leafleting, candidates’ websites are seen to be the least important instrument in use. However, when compared to more recent forms of online tools used for e-campaigning, such as Facebook or Twitter, candidates’ websites are much more relevant in the eyes of the candidates than these newly established instruments.
