Literature in the field of online campaigning has been developing extensively for about 10 years, mainly focusing on candidate and party strategies, and being partly dissociated from other important pieces of research, particularly on other types of political mobilizations, such as informal protests and social movements. This paper is an attempt to operate a connection of these aspects, in the perspective open by Andrew Chadwick when using the concept of “organizational hybridity” (2007). It would present a preliminary study for a research project to be launched in January, 2012, on the tensions existing between on the one hand candidates and party strategies to “manage” the citizens (Philip Howard) ; and, on the other hand, citizen “tactics” (Michel de Certeau) to appropriate, but also adapt and maybe resist to professional communication campaigning, even within party organizations.
Taking into account these tensions, the aim of this paper is to build both a “state of the art” in the field of party campaigning and some hypothesises on the expected uses of the web 2.0 during the presidential and legislatives campaigns 2012 in France, through preliminary observations of new spaces offered by political parties over the Web (such as the Socialist network Coopol). This paper would mostly be an overview of existing literature, as well as a first attempt to define and list these political spaces, rather than a presentation of complete data, since the campaign would be going on during the ECPR workshop.
Two aspects would be presented in this paper :
- what do we know about French political parties over the Web in the 2000s ? To what extent is the “web 2.0” already used by political parties and candidates, in comparison for instance with other “web 1.0” tools (such as websites, or even videos) ? The main parties – the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the Socialist Party, the National Front and the Green party – would be the main examples here.
- is it already possible to establish a definition and a “list” of the main political spaces of the campaign ? Can online campaigns be reduced to spaces open and/or managed by candidates and/or political parties ? Should (some) other more “informal” online spaces, such as discussion fora, mailing lists or social networks groups be also included, and why ? This appears as a key point for the study of the next French online campaigns.
