Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

stored locally two weeks prior to the elections in order to provide a ‘snapshot in time’ of
the on-line campaigns. Publicly-available data on the candidates was also collected 5 for the
purpose of analyzing the causal effects of the independent variables on candidate web
presence. The characteristics of the on-line candidates were established and compared to
the characteristics of the off-line candidates. Logistical regression analysis was opted for
as the analytical tool since the design of the study required that the inter- and intra-party
variables were controlled against the candidate- and constituency demographics for their
independent effects on the dichotomous dependent variable web presence.
In order to analyze the second research question (RQ2), focus was turned to the
websites of the 874 candidates who campaigned on-line. As a first step, in finding a
means for defining and measuring website functions and delivery, quantitative content
analysis was opted for. The methodology for analyzing political websites proposed by
Gibson and Ward (2000) proved useful in this regard. The main rationale for opting for
this scheme was that it included the delivery aspect of political websites. Since this article
concerns patterns of electoral competition in candidate on-line campaigning, both
functions and delivery need to be empirically addressed (cf. Gibson & Ward 2002: 107-8).
The scheme was initially developed from, and makes use of, many features used in
existing research (e.g. Cunha et al. 2003; Kamarck 1999; Newell 2001; Norris 2003). The
scheme both summarizes and standardizes the existing methods for content analysis of
political websites. Through explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis, Gibson and
Ward categorized website features into ordinal indices mainly centred on two aspects of
websites; namely functions and delivery. The indices are either sum-variables, with fixed
maximum values, of dichotomous variables noting the presence or absence of certain
features, or sum-variables, with no set maximum value, mixing dichotomous variables
with counts. A modified version 6 of this coding scheme (see Appendix) was used in this
study. The functions of each candidate website were coded 7 into five index scales;
information provision, resource generation, networking, participation and campaigning.
The delivery of the websites was similarly coded into five index scales; multimedia,
accessibility, navigability, freshness and visibility. Then, the index scales were thereafter
entered as dependent variables into the conceptual model, after which their dependency
on the independent variables was checked. The analysis was conducted using two separate
OLS multiple regression models.
Some of the variables’ categorizations need to be presented before turning to the
findings. Party size is categorized similarly to Norris’ (2003: 28) criteria; major parties are
those with over 20% of all seats in the parliament; minor parties are the remainder of the
parties with parliamentary representation and fringe parties are parties outside the
parliament. Next, competitiveness was initially established based on common knowledge
of candidates’ seriousness with their campaign. In difficult cases (N=1352) judgments
125