Abstract
As Vaccari notes, there is a general lack of comparative work on online politics on both the use of new media by politicians and by citizens. Vaccari has begun to address this absence by comparing online politics in seven western democracies: Australia, France, Germany, England (although I assume he means the United Kingdom), Italy, Spain and the USA from 2006 to 2010. He uses 57 variables to characterize websites of political parties and candidates supplying data relating to information on show, the level of participation they have on offer to citizens, and the professionalism of the site itself. In addition Vaccari adopts seven explanatory variables: level of systemic pluralism, organization of party membership, recruitment and selection of candidates, method of party and electoral financing, the political communication environment, the degree of the personalization of politics and the length of electoral campaigns.
There are some interesting findings: websites in the USA offer the most opportunity for participation, those in Spain the most information and those in Germany the greatest degree of professionalism. While sites in the USA and in Australia and Italy stand out because they are more advanced in the USA and more limited in Australia and Italy, websites in France, Germany, the UK and Italy are similar to one another. If the sites are categorized by political orientation rather than territory, the sites of socialist and social democratic parties display greater levels of information, participation and professionalism than sites of other parties. Liberal and Green parties have above average values. Parties with more resources and with a greater chance of gaining power have more advanced websites, suggesting that online politics in this respect at least tends to reinforce existing inequalities rather than overturning them and there has been a ‘normalization’ of online politics. On average around 25% of the electorate use new media for political purposes. Use is greatest in the USA and the least in Spain and Italy. Not all differences can be explained simply by relative numbers of citizens online. The UK, for example, has a greater percentage of its population online than the USA but lags behind the USA in terms of use of new media for political purposes.
Vaccari’s findings show that macro-variables such as country, time, level of technological development, political culture, affluence and electoral system play a much less significant role than meso-variables such as financial resources, presence in government, inclusivity in selection of leaders and candidates and the political orientation of parties. Majoritarian political systems tend to have poorer websites (less information, fewer opportunities to participate, fewer functions) than proportional systems as smaller parties in majoritarian systems have little incentive to invest in online politics. Findings for political orientation show that it is essentially the opportunities for participation that vary across ideology. Extreme left and right tend not to use their websites for encouraging participation, a finding that confounds the hypothesis that new media are fertile terrain for the political extremes. In contrast, Greens, radicals and libertarians do offer possibilities of participation. Vaccari explains this through reference to the decentralized social movement roots of these parties. Socialists and social democrats, it appears, are more decisively embracing online politics than conservative parties and this may be related to the importance of the base for these parties as opposed to more hierarchically structured conservative parties. With respect to the use of new media by citizens, it tends to be those already interested in the political process that make most use of online sources. Vaccari refers to this as a virtuous circle that expands the public sphere. It should be remembered, however, that it serves to increase the distance between engaged and disengaged citizens and expands primarily a bourgeois public sphere.