*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do ***
I am always on the look out for good "numbers" that can be used to compare different approaches of similar political web sites. I am also interested in additional measurement approaches, as Felix Nolte from Sweden suggested to me, a "Democracy Online Index" that could be used to measure e-government, elected official, media and other sites on some sort of democracy scale. It will be difficult to evaluate the advancement of e-democracy unless we have a number of baseline surveys of what is happening now. I fear our attention to the few leading and innovative projects will obscure our view of the lack of diffusion beyond say the 15 percent of early adopter e-government sites (for example) that adopt advanced e-democracy practices. Steven Clift Democracies Online From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date sent: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 00:07:40 EST Attached to this e-mail is an article for Do-Wire about a project that was done by the Bliss Institute. Dr. Farmer <http://www.uakron.edu/polisci/rfarmer/> whom you met at the APSA annual meeting in SF was a key researcher on the project. Thank you for your consideration. Rich Fender For DO-WIRE The Sophistication of State Party Web Sites With 58 percent of American homes and 66 percent of American workers having access to the Internet the web's importance to politics growing. Some US state political parties utilized the Internet more than others during the 2000 election cycle. Researchers at the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics <http://www.uakron.edu/bliss/> at the University of Akron archived and analyzed the 100 major US state political party web sites as they appeared during the November 2000 election. This analysis provides trends in how state parties used the Internet to reach voters, volunteers, donors and others. This project is different from other studies of politics on the Internet, because it has an emphasis on political party sites instead of candidate sites. Tables available at http://www.uakron.edu/bliss/partywebs offer a detailed analysis of much of what was found. Although overall the study found rough parity between the two political parties there were some pronounced differences. For example under the category Store (which means the site offered buttons, bumper stickers, T-shirts, hats etc.) there was a pronounced partisan difference. Of the 14 web sites that offered any of those items 10 of them or 71 percent were Republican. In the Current Events category the same kind of partisan trend is apparent. Of the six web sites that had all measured elements in the current events category 80 percent were Republican sites. Another finding that can be gleaned from the attached table is how few political parties made an effort to adopt their web sites' to meet the needs of specific audiences. Of the 100 state parties only 4 web sites provided Spanish. These data are an early attempt to look at state party web sites. Much more work remains to be done on the use of new media in politics. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
