Election Campaigning Online

Abstract

This article presents an integrated quantitative analysis of the functional, formal and content-related aspects of German political party websites during the 2002 National Elections. The analysis is guided by the normalization hypothesis of cyberspace, which infers a transfer of ‘real-world’ features of politics to the Internet. Results provide empirical evidence of a limited normalization in German e-campaigning: indeed, German party websites primarily serve information functions while neglecting interactive features. Yet, no overall gap in professionalism is found between major and minor parties analysed. Finally, online campaigning is dominated by a high level of self-referentiality but lacks both the expected degree of personalization and characteristic differences in communication styles between incumbents and challengers.