Trends in online political electoral campaigning over recent years indicate a shallow adoption of Web 2.0 tools, features and platforms; limited interactivity; and managed co-production. The Internet is now embedded as a campaigning tool however, largely, the technologies are adapted to the norms of political communication rather than technologies impacting upon internal organizational structures, party relationships to members and supporters, or the content and style of their communication. We examine these themes in more detail in the context of the Polish presidential and parliamentary election of 2011. Through a sophisticated content analysis and coding scheme our paper examines the extent to which parties use features that are designed to inform, engage, mobilise or allow interaction and which audiences they seek to communicate with. Comparing these findings with maps built from webcrawler analysis we build a picture of the strategies of the parties and the extent to which this links to short and long term political goals. Our intention within this is twofold. Firstly we wish to contextualise the use of the Internet with party strategy. Secondly we intend to explore methodologies for understanding websites as expressions of party strategy. The cartography indicates ghettoing of supporters as a strategy (with different intensity) among smaller parties, but greater openness from the frontrunner and eventual winner and its coalition partner. Linking to the media is marginal, although local media tend to link to smaller parties and national media to bigger parties. We would like to confirm if there are similar findings among the web performance of the political parties and candidates (we have chosen those who were presented first on the party list, as we assume they are most supported by the party and represent its political ideology and communication strategy most profoundly, they are also often the most active party members. As we have only started the analysis of the data we are not able to offer insights into findings, full analysis should be complete in January.
Co-authors Darren Lilleker, Pawel Baranowski, Pawel Surowiec
