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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


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