Can web ecology provide a clearer understanding of people’s information behavior during election campaigns?

Abstract

French

This article examines the web ecology of the 2010 local elections in South Korea by using social science hyperlink analysis. The online networks of candidates were measured daily during the official campaign period. The results indicate that network dynamics among the candidates for education superintendent changed more rapidly as the campaign progressed than in the case of the mayoral candidates. However, the intensity of online networks for both campaigns was lower than for the country’s last presidential election, in 2007, suggesting that the web ecology of a given election is influenced by the perceived importance of the event and the general popularity of certain candidates. The results also suggest that producing and disseminating information, such as news articles, blog posts and tweets, reflects a more politically conscious action than referring to information via hyperlinks. Furthermore, the article sheds light on the ways in which hyperlink analysis serves as a research method for mining data for web ecology analysis, tracking political events at different points in time and illustrating the general landscape of electoral communication in cyberspace.

Keywords

co-link analysis election campaign hyperlink web ecology webometrics

Elections produce a vast amount of information, which is typically disseminated through a wide range of channels that include people, newspapers, broadcast networks and the Internet. The present study focuses on information disseminated via the Internet, among other channels, during election campaigns. On the Internet, voters visit candidates’ websites to obtain more information on the candidates themselves and their campaign platforms. Voters interact with other voters as well, and express their opinions through discussion boards. They can also link content from campaign websites (or from other mass media outlets) to their blogs, profiles on social networking sites (SNSs), and comments made in online forums. More importantly, enriched by Web 2.0 technology, campaign websites are now intertwined with other forms of networked data, such as user entries on SNSs, comments, trackbacks, advertisements, tags, RDF data, and metadata, creating an information ecology (Finin et al., 2008).

Since information flows through hyperlink networks, one can identify the interrelationship among various sites by studying the structure of the hyperlinks connecting them. The hyperlink structure is dynamic, not static, in that the number of links to a certain candidate’s site can increase rapidly if voters perceive some information on the site to be crucial, novel or sensational. Innovative technologies or content found on one candidate’s site also encourage, if not force, his or her opponents to respond quickly. Such ecological dynamics can lead to the co-evolution of the whole system.

The present study is concerned with the interrelationship among relevant websites – we call it ‘web ecology’ – during election campaigns. This interrelationship is created and shaped by the human activity of using the Internet in information ecology. From an ecological perspective, changes and integrations in people’s information behavior over time should be closely observed and understood. This study aims to provide an empirical and analytical account of information flow, web ecology, during the campaign period of the 2010 local elections in South Korea. Information here includes voters’ interest in the elections under study, the trend of public opinion and the emergence of controversial campaign issues, all of which affect web ecology.

It is believed that e-campaign practices in South Korea have always provided useful data for global comparison, as the country was one of the earliest adopters of information technology (Hsu & Park, 2011; Kwon, Nam & Lackaff, 2011; Nam & Barnett, 2010). The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that 95% of households have broadband access as of 2010 (OECD, 2010). Furthermore, South Korean online culture has a history of active Internet-based political participation, including electioneering, citizen journalism and many types of protests (Chang, 2005; Lee & Park, 2010a; Park & Lee, 2008). In particular, South Korean voters have recently shown innovative ways to respond to the authorities’ restrictive interpretations and application of pre-Internet election laws to online activity. This has now produced the phenomenon of an increasing number of voters taking their electoral engagement to international Web 2.0 platforms, with a view to avoiding domestic legal complications (Lee & Park, 2010b). This has encouraged us to look at the latest elections in South Korea in order to understand whether, how and to what extent the web ecology reflects ongoing development in the field, or even predicts how an election unfolds.

Literature review

Elections and Internet use

In many democracies, the Internet has now become an integral part of election campaigns. Candidates have their own websites, and an increasing number of voters, journalists and activists are visiting the sites to gather information and interact with others (Druckman, Kifer & Parkin, 2010). Election candidates’ websites serve various functions (Gibson & Ward, 2000; Lilleker & Malagón, 2010; Strandberg, 2009).

First, their websites provide a large amount of information on their backgrounds and campaign platforms, and such information can be updated quickly. Moreover, providing information through websites is more cost-effective than using the telephone or postal services. Candidates’ websites also serve as an archive of information that voters, journalists and researchers can revisit later.

Second, the Internet allows campaigns to be enhanced by multimedia, more interactive and less dependent on the traditional media controlled by journalists. Therefore, candidates have the opportunity to set their own agenda. While communicating directly with voters, candidates can use a variety of technologies (e.g. cookies) on their websites to learn more about voters’ behavior, which can help to tailor campaign messages to different voter groups, along the lines of age, gender and occupation, among other attributes.

Third, various interactive features of websites can facilitate the mobilization of resources by, for example, encouraging donations and enabling immediate transactions and recruitment. Through bulletin boards, chatrooms and email, it is easier than ever for parties and candidates to organize both internal and external discussion and to highlight issues that attract their constituents and challenge their opponents. Such features provide smaller, resource-poor parties and candidates with new opportunities to exercise political influence outside conventional political channels (Bennett, 2003; Pruijt, 2002). In the US, Internet campaigns by Jesse Ventura for the governorship of Minnesota in 1998 (Bimber, 2003; Greer & LaPointe, 2004), Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 (Hickey, 2004; Wolf, 2004) and John Kerry, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 (Anstead & Chadwick, 2008; Dwyer, Hof & Kerstetter, 2004), demonstrate the potential power of e-campaigning in fundraising and motivating voters for participation. In the 2008 American presidential election, Barack Obama’s camp actively engaged younger voters by utilizing Web 2.0 platforms (Young, 2008), such as Facebook and YouTube, and raised a record amount of campaign funds, which came largely from online donations (Cooper, 2008).

Fourth, the networking function, that is, the hyperlinking facility inherent in the website, allows candidates to build broader online networks around their sites. Recently, there has been a growing research interest in the hyperlink feature (Kim, Barnett & Park, 2010; Park, Thelwall & Kluver, 2005; Park & Kluver, 2008). Previous studies have suggested that social roles and relations among political actors can be understood by analyzing hyperlink patterns among the websites of politicians, political parties and bloggers (Park & Jankowski, 2008; Park & Thelwall, 2008). In the 2007 presidential election in France (Lilleker & Malagón, 2010), Ségolène Royal, a major candidate belonging to the French Socialist Party, provided her supporters with graphics, text and arguments that could be reposted and disseminated across the blogosphere and the Web. Her efforts saw an impressive 285 weblogs linking to her official campaign site, the Independent Presidential Observatory (www.presidentielle2007.fr). That said, although hyperlinks enable candidates’ messages and agenda to be disseminated rapidly among their constituents, there is also a risk in such rapid dissemination that candidates may lose control of their own messages (Stromer-Galley, 2000).

Last of all, public participation can be further elicited by providing interactive feedback functions and discussion boards and incorporating social networking services into the campaign process.

However, although interactive features can encourage political participation by facilitating the exchange of political opinions and interactions between candidates and their constituents, there exists intense debate over whether Internet use has actually increased political participation, in other words voter turnout (Lee & Park, 2010a). Tolbert and McNeal (2003) suggest that the Internet provides voters with a more transparent and diverse source of information on candidates and elections and thus significantly increases the likelihood of voting. Shah, Kwak and Holbert (2001) argue that the use of the Internet for information exchange is positively related to individual differences in interpersonal trust, civic engagement and contentment. Weber and Bergman (2003) show that using the Internet for email and chatting, among other purposes, makes individuals more likely to participate in various political activities. Reynolds (2006) considers that the temporal and spatial expansiveness of online communication may re-enchant people with the political process. Other empirical studies also indicate that, in the US, the turnout of young voters (aged 18–24) increased dramatically from 2002 to 2004, with more websites targeting young voters in the 2004 presidential election than in the 2002 midterm election (Bennett & Xenos, 2005; Hara & Jo, 2007).

On the other hand, other scholars have reported limited effects of the Internet on elections. For example, Bimber (2001) argues that Internet access is not predictive of political participation, except for campaign donations. Best and Krueger (2005) conclude that the Internet has only marginally strengthened the political voice of young liberals. In a similar vein, studies by Sunstein (2001, 2007) and Park and Kluver (2008) show that the political use of the Internet tends to be concentrated among those already actively engaged in offline politics, leading to the establishment of like-minded communities.

Web ecology and elections

The term ‘information ecology’ is borrowed from ecology, a subdiscipline of biology. The use of information is considered to be neither neutral nor isolated. The creation, flow and use of information are shaped by a number of interdependent social, cultural and political subsystems in the information ecosystem (Malhotra, 2002).

Although information ecology can be defined in various ways, the basic notion of information ecology emphasizes the human factor (i.e. humans being users/managers of information) more than technological factors (such as machine-engineering relationships). Information ecology focuses on interrelationships between people, enterprises, technologies and the information environment surrounding them. Among these, human beings are situated at the core of the information ecosystem, which is composed of information strategies, information-seeking behaviors, information management and information architectures (Feather & Sturges, 2003). Nardi and O’Day (1999) define information ecology as ‘a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment’. From this perspective of information ecology, human activity served by technology is more important than the technology itself. Eryomin (1998: 241) refers to information ecology as a science which studies the laws governing the influence of information summary on the formation and functioning of bio-systems, including that of individuals, human communities and humanity in general and on the health and psychological, physical and social well-being of the human being; and which undertakes to develop methodologies to improve the information environment.

According to Nardi and O’Day (1999), the metaphor of ecology suggests several key properties found in common in many environments where technology is used. Those properties are system, diversity, co-evolution, keystone species and locality.

First, information ecology is, just like a biological ecology, a complex system of parts and relationships. Though some units (peoples/groups) using technologies for specific purposes can be independent from the rest in information ecology, most units complement one another within the system. Furthermore, changes in the conditions of certain units or elements may affect the entire system.

Second, diversity is crucial for the health of information ecology. Like biological ecology, different kinds of people and tools work together in a complementary way. Since there are niches for many different kinds of roles and functions, complex roles for people and tools should be considered in the information ecology context.

Third, when healthy, information ecology is not static but dynamic. People are to learn, adapt to and even encourage the continuing development of their information ecology, which in turn provides them with newer, faster and different tools and services. Tools and the use of tools mutually shape each other to achieve a dynamic balance for a healthy information ecology. Eventually, society and technology co-evolve in the information ecology.

Fourth, a biological ecology is marked by the presence of certain keystone species whose presence is crucial to the survival of the ecology itself. Information ecology also requires keystone species, whose presence is necessary to support the effective use of technology.

Finally, various technologies are used in specific ways in specific contexts (Schroeder, 2008). A computer can be a catalog machine in a library, a game machine in a child’s room or a budget and payroll machine in a small business. Although these machines might have the same hardware settings, they serve differently in their local contexts. Thus, the perceived role, availability, utility and other properties of these machines are different. Moreover, a computer is woven into a network of relationships; it is used by people and linked to other computers. Nardi and O’Day (1999) argue that locality is an important attribute of information ecology in that the specific knowledge of our own local ecology is inaccessible to anyone outside it. Along with that knowledge, opportunities and responsibilities shape the way in which localized technologies affect our lives. These two authors also suggest that healthy information ecologies are sustained by the active, intelligent participation of the people immersed in them.

From an ecological perspective, it is essential to understand the ways in which information affects a certain organization or system. An information ecology can be characterized by the following attributes: (1) the integration of diverse types of information; (2) the recognition of evolutionary change; (3) emphasis on the continuous observation and description of how information is gathered, used and shared; and (4) a focus on people and their information behavior (Davenport & Prusak, 1997). As mentioned earlier, information in an ecological system exists in diverse ways: it can be computerized or uncomputerized and it can exist in the form of text, audio or video. However, the diversity of types of information does not mean that information is randomly scattered in the ecosystem. On the contrary, information, whatever the type, is systematically integrated in the system.

An information system is flexible and subject to evolutionary change. Therefore, even if an information system is presently not clear, it is important to recognize this and predict how it may change. This evolutionary change should be observed and described for our better understanding of the system. Such observation and description should focus on what people do with information and how people facilitate effective use.

Case illustration: South Korea’s local elections in 2010

South Korea’s democratic transition from military dictatorship in the late 1980s was followed by the (re)implementation of local government elections. Celebrating the revival of local autonomy, a set of four elections concurrently took place on 27 June 1995 and produced 15 governors, 230 mayors, 972 provincial council members and 4541 municipal council members. The local electoral system has been extended and modified since, through subsequent elections in 1998, 2002 and 2006. In the fifth set of elections in 2010, each elector voted in eight different races for: (1) governor, (2) mayor, (3) provincial councillors, (4) municipal councillors, (5) party-list representatives for provincial councils, (6) party-list representatives for municipal councils, (7) education superintendents and (8) education councillors. The latter two races were a new addition. Unlike mayoral and gubernatorial candidates, education candidates had to campaign independently, without affiliation with or support from political parties.

Despite their democratic significance, local elections in South Korea had always witnessed very poor turnouts until this time. Except for the first elections in 1995, which saw turnout at 68.4%, voter turnout hovered around barely 50% in subsequent elections. This has often been pointed to as evidence of a crisis in grassroots democracy (Hwang, 2006). However, the 2010 elections yielded an increased turnout of 54.5%, up from 51.6% in the previous elections, as they took place at an interesting moment in terms of both the domestic political climate and the diffusion of international Web 2.0 services.

These particular elections make an ideal case study for understanding the ‘ecological dynamics’ among candidates’ e-campaigns for the following reasons. As would be true of any elections held in the middle of a president’s term in office, the 2010 elections were seen as a symbolic referendum on the sitting government’s performance of the past two years. The current president, Lee Myung-Bak, of the Grand National Party won the election with a considerable margin in December 2007, marking the return of the conservatives after a decade of liberal government. The Grand National Party also won back the dominant position in legislation, securing 153 seats out of 299 in the eighteenth National Assembly election on 9 April 2008. In the seventeenth National Assembly, the majority was the more center-right Uri Party with 152 seats, while the Grand National Party held only 121 seats.

However, Lee was faced with severe public opposition just a few months into his term (Cho, Choi & Park, 2012; Kwon, Nam & Lackaff, 2011). A wave of mass candlelight protests broke out on 2 May 2008 against the ‘Washington Consensus’ over the American beef imports deal he had sealed in April. These protests lasted for more than 100 days and observably weakened Lee’s administration. The economic downturn – and the high unemployment rate in particular – did not help him recover popular support either, as his major campaign promise during the presidential election had been to achieve a much higher annual growth and per-capita annual income than those under the previous liberal administration.

In fact, the competitive relationship between the previous and current administrations has been an influencing factor in the recent political climate of the country (Chung & Park, 2010). The tension was highest when former president Roh Moo-Hyun committed suicide on 23 May 2009 because of having been embroiled in a corruption scandal once he had completed his term in February 2008. Widely perceived as having been caused by pressure from an overzealous state prosecution and sensationalized media reports about his family’s alleged involvement in the scandal, Roh’s death provoked antipathy towards the current Lee government and rekindled support for the liberal line. In this context, the 2010 local elections received more attention than usual, as the results were seen to be the public’s verdict on Lee’s leadership.

Research questions

This study examines the interrelationship among relevant websites during the 2010 local elections in Korea. Charting the changes and integrations in individual online users’ information behavior over time, web ecology can describe the specific actions of candidates, political parties or voters. Not only that, web ecology can also help us to better understand the two-way relationship between political events and people’s information behavior on the Web. In the context of web ecology, information is subject to dynamic factors such as voters’ interest in elections, trends in public opinion and the emergence of controversial campaign issues. The study set out to investigate three questions:

– Does web ecology provide a clearer understanding of people’s information behavior during election campaigns?

– Is the web ecology of one election different from that of another, depending on the types of positions run for (e.g. mayor or education superintendent), the general public’s interest level in the given election and other related issues?

– Do people contribute to the maintenance of the web ecology of political campaigns?

For an analysis of web ecology in e-science research approaches, it is necessary to use computing tools in order to share distributed digital resources (Schroeder, 2008). For example, the web ecology of social networks can be measured by the link structure, sentiment analysis, readership data, conversational structure, topic classification and temporal analysis, among others (Finn et al., 2007). The present study focuses on ‘hyperlink co-occurrences’ and ‘name mentions’.

This study compares the web ecologies of the election for mayors with that for education superintendents. Although both elections were held on the same day (2 June 2010), the two posts are very different in nature, which might have affected the ways in which people engaged with the respective elections. Thus, we consider that the web ecology of the two elections, represented by the network structure among candidates, could be different, focusing on factors such as the perceived importance of a given election, the general popularity of certain candidates and key campaign issues.

In addition, web ecology reflects human behavior. As discussed earlier, ecology is to be preserved, and keystone species play a critical role in the preservation. In the context of information ecology, keystone species are those serving as the producers, translators, facilitators and mediators of information. The present study investigates what kinds of information behaviors are critical to the maintenance of the web ecology of political campaigns. For this question, we compared two types of information behaviors on the Internet: (1) the act of producing and disseminating information (news articles, blog posts and tweets); and (2) the act of referring to information via hyperlinks.

Method: Data collection and analysis

The web ecology of the 2010 elections for mayors and education superintendents was operationally defined as the total of number of ‘hyperlink co-occurrences’ and ‘name mentions’. The data were collected at multiple points during the election period to identify the dynamically changing properties of the web ecology of the elections.

First, we conducted network analysis. Network analysis involves a set of research procedures for, first, identifying the structure of a network on the basis of the relationships among its components (Richards & Barnett, 1993; Rogers & Kincaid, 1981; Wasserman & Faust, 1994) and, second, describing this structure at the global level (Kim & Nam, 2012; Moon, Barnett & Lim, 2010; Nam & Barnett, 2011). For the latter goal, the analysis examines the network’s indicators: its centrality, connectedness, integrativeness and density, as well as the higher-order attributes of the possible subgroup clusters in the network. We measured the co-occurrences of hyperlinks by using co-link data, that is, the incoming links shared between any pair of websites (Park, 2010). To be more specific, we retrieved external webpages sending at least one link to a pair of the candidates’ websites under investigation; for this, we used Yahoo’s co-link search option.¹ The significance of the co-link data is that co-links are not created at random and that web co-links can be a measure of the similarity or relatedness of sites being co-linked (Vaughan, Kipp & Gao, 2007). Note that the idea of using the data of hyperlink co-occurrences for quantifying the relative level of perceived public awareness of political actors and social events is not new in social webometrics or social hyperlink analysis (Thelwall, 2009). Recent examples include Korean legislators’ and citizens’ blogs (Park & Thelwall, 2008), US senators’ homepages (Kim, Barnett & Park, 2010) and transnational web issue networks among Palestinian–Israeli non-governmental organizations (Rogers & Ben-David, 2008). In addition, hyperlink research methods have been expanded to understand current political phenomena in particular: for example, hyperlink analysis of websites and the social networking sites of South Korean National Assembly members (Hsu & Park, 2011, 2012), co-link analysis of candidates and their parties during the 2007 Korean presidential election campaign (Park, 2012), and the trackback link network analysis of news bloggers during the 2008 candlelight protest in Korea (Chang & Park, 2012).

Based on the results obtained from Yahoo, we constructed co-link network diagrams for the frequently retrieved websites of candidates for education superintendent and mayor, from 23 May to 2 June 2010. In the diagrams, the number of lines between sites represents the richness of the network, and the thickness of those lines is proportional to the number of external websites that are co-linked to those sites. We then used the network structure from 2 June 2010 (election day) to compare the two elections. In the visual mapping, the size of a node indicates its indegree centrality (i.e. a larger node indicates a higher indegree centrality), while the thickness of a line is proportional to the number of its incoming links. Having excluded all isolates (N = 41 for education superintendents, N = 30 for mayors), we calculated network density by dividing the number of co-links by the number of candidates.

Second, to determine people’s information behavior during the campaign period, we measured name mentions by using Naver, Korea’s top search engine. We used each candidate’s name as a search query and, when necessary, other contextually relevant words (e.g. ‘mayoral candidates’) in Korean. Web mentions of individual candidates’ names were collected from blogs and news articles. We included both sources, since blogs are mostly personal media, featuring personal reflections and comments (Park & Thelwall, 2008), and news articles tend to be ‘mediated’. In addition to the two sources, we also collected name mentions from Twitter, using dabot.com (a Korean search service). The data collected from these three different spheres complemented one another. Measuring the level of word-of-mouth communication in different spheres was particularly useful for understanding the sociopolitical structures of different networks on the Web.

Results

Result 1: Network-based ecology mapping

In order to address the research questions, we first produced a series of network representations of the two elections (for mayors and education superintendents), at three points during the campaign period (20, 28 May and 2 June 2010). The diagrams clearly show that the networkedness of mayoral candidates is richer than that of education superintendent candidates in all three cases, but that the latter network attracted stronger attention from the public on election day (Figure 1). These findings from the network-based web ecology mapping are also supported by the density values over the 10 days of the campaign (Table 1). The density values indicate that the network density in the case of education superintendent candidates was lower than that for mayoral candidates, but the former’s ‘network dynamic’ changed more rapidly. The density score of the network of mayoral candidates was 3.77 on 24 May, when first observed, and then increased to 4.10 on 2 June (1.1 times). On the other hand, the density score of the network of education superintendent candidates increased from 0.03 on 24 May 24 to 1.36 on 2 June (45.3 times).

Figure 1.

Network density for education superintendents versus mayors

Table 1.

A trend of density values across elections over time

Date (2010)	Mayors N = 44	Education superintendents N = 69	Date (2007)	President N = 20
May 24	3.77	0.03
May 25	3.82	0.04
May 26	3.86	0.04
May 27	3.77	0.11	Dec 2	869.66
May 28	3.62	0.15	Dec 5	785.52
May 29	3.87	0.63	Dec 8	877.92
May 30	3.92	0.92	Dec 11	940.58
Jun 1	4.03	1.24	Dec 14	819.72
Jun 2	4.10	1.36	Dec 17	1129.62

To further our investigation, we compared the network density scores from both elections with those from South Korea’s latest presidential election, in 2007 (Lee & Park, 2010b). The results show that the intensity of online networks in both cases is much smaller than that in the presidential election (Table 1).

Next, in order to describe the respective trends of the two web ecologies over time, we determined the best-fit curve model through regression (Table 2). In the case of mayoral candidates, regression results show that the trend can be marginally described by both linear and exponential curves; the linear curve accounts for 47.4% (p = .04) of the variance in the trend, while the exponential curve accounts for only 46.0% (p = .05). On the other hand, the trend of the web ecology of the election for education superintendents can be described by both linear and exponential curves much more significantly; the linear curve accounts for 87.1% (p < .001) of the variance in the trend, and the exponential curve accounts for only 98.6% (p < .001). These results confirm that the web ecology of the election for educational superintendents was expanded more dynamically than that of its comparative counterpart.

Table 2.

A curve model through regression

	Equation	Model summary			Parameter estimates
		R-square	F	p	Constant	b1
Mayors	Linear	.474	6.309	.040	3.681	.036
Mayors	Exponential	.460	5.969	.045	3.686	.009
Education superints	Linear	.871	47.440	.000	−.431	.187
Education superints	Exponential	.946	123.777	.000	.013	.560

Snapshots of the network structure of the co-link data can provide more detailed descriptions of the web ecology (Figure 2). For the web ecology of the mayoral election, the co-link data offer possible evidence that the structure among candidates’ sites might have been influenced by the candidates’ political stances and parties. Results show that most sites of candidates of the opposition liberal party (Democratic Party) have higher indegree centralities, densely connected at the left side of the center. Candidates of the opposition progressive party (New Progressive Party) are located close to DP members. This close clustering indicates that they were frequently co-linked. On the other hand, the sites of candidates of the ruling conservative party (Grand National Party) are scattered in the network and their indegree centralities are relatively low.

By contrast, the web ecology for the education superintendent election directs our attention to a different aspect. The candidates’ sites were clustered mainly by region: the Seoul Metropolitan Area and the rest.

Figure 2.

A comparative snapshot of election day (2 June 2010)

Result 2: Webometrics (name mentions)

In both elections, the numbers of candidate name mentions on Twitter, blogs and in news articles increased in a similar fashion from 24 May to 2 June (Figures 3 and 4), while the numbers of co-links among candidates were relatively stable for the same period. It was on Twitter that the names of mayoral candidates were most frequently observed throughout the entire campaign period, followed by news platforms and blogs. In the case of the education superintendent election, there was no significant difference among Twitter, news articles and blogs.

Figure 3.

Name mentions (mayors)

Figure 4.

Name mentions (education superintendents)

Discussion

Web ecology is a concept derived from information ecology. It is useful for understanding people’s informational behavior online. This article has examined web ecology during the campaign period of the 2010 local elections in South Korea. Two methods were employed. First, networks created among candidates’ websites were measured daily, on the basis of shared incoming hyperlinks. Second, candidates’ name mentions on Twitter, blogs and in news articles were recorded from 24 May to 2 June.

Results show that network density in the election for education superintendents was lower than that in the mayoral election; however, the network dynamics for the former election changed more rapidly as the campaign progressed. The reasons were identified as follows.

First, web ecology is not static but continuously interacts with its broader surroundings, including the political and economic climate of the offline world and the overall media landscape. As would somehow be true of any elections held in the middle of a president’s term in office, the 2010 elections in Korea were seen as a symbolic referendum on the performance of the sitting government. Although mayoral offices are part of the local authorities, most Korean voters expected the mayors of major Korean cities, such as Seoul, Busan, Daegu and Incheon, to be able to counterbalance the central government and the conservative-dominated National Assembly. Therefore, particular attention was paid to the local elections this time, long before the campaign even began, as the results were regarded as predictors of who or which party would take over the reins of the government and National Assembly for the next term.

Second, most candidates running for mayor of one of the major cities already had high name recognition and political leverage. On the other hand, since it was the first direct election for education superintendents, most voters were still unfamiliar with the post itself, let alone who was running. In the beginning, the election received little attention from the public, since the issues and pledges raised by candidates were limited to the administration of public education.

However, results show that the web ecology observed during the campaigns clearly reflected how differently the two elections unfolded. Unlike previous local elections, there was a salient dividing campaign issue this time, which engaged voters more than usual. In the newly added race for education posts, debate over whether a free school meal program for all students should be adopted, or whether that would be excessively generous or costly, dominated the entire campaign discourse and media coverage. A candidate’s position in this debate, whether running for an education post or not, was interpreted as an encapsulation of his/her stance on general welfare policies. Therefore, the co-link network structure among the websites of education superintendent candidates became dramatically more dense over time, which signifies that the web ecology of the education superintendent election expanded rapidly in line with the growth of voters’ interest in the election.

That said, when compared with South Korea’s latest presidential election, in 2007 (Lee & Park, 2010a), the intensity of online networks in both local elections is undeniably low. This indicates that web ecology is influenced by the scale and perceived importance of a given election and the general popularity of certain candidates.

In addition, the visualized outcomes of the network analysis of the co-link data provide detailed descriptions of web ecology. According to our findings, both local elections had quite different network structures in terms of clustering. The websites of the mayoral candidates were clustered by political stance. In the case of education superintendent candidates, their sites were clustered by region. This finding is intriguing yet unsurprising, as education candidates are required to be politically neutral.

The findings of this study have important implications. First, in the course of a political event, the study of its web ecology can shed light on the interrelationship between people and the information environment, which encompasses information strategies and information-seeking behaviors. During an election campaign, a huge amount of information flows into a web ecology, and people therefore engage in specific information behaviors, such as hyperlinking certain sites or posting comments online. Reflecting the continuously changing political climate, those behavioral attempts to integrate information then bring about evolutionary change in the web ecology.

Second, a web ecology is not influenced by its surroundings alone but also by other adjacent web ecologies in a superordinate system. Our results suggest that there is a convergence effect. In this case, the web ecologies of both education superintendent and mayoral elections were subecologies in a superstructure and co-evolved interdependently. The web ecology of the education superintendent election was especially meager in the beginning, owing to lack of public interest. However, it developed rapidly as the provision of free school meals emerged as the major talking-point at the national level. Our ecology mapping, which reflects this development, suggests a catch-up effect (convergence) in this case; the poorer web ecology grew at a faster rate than the richer one.

Third, the analysis of name mentions illustrates the relationships between keystone species and their habitats in the web ecology, that is, how people use the Internet for political ends. In both elections, producing and disseminating information such as news articles, blog posts and tweets in cyberspace as active opinion leaders was a more politically conscious action than ‘referring’ to information via hyperlinks as mediators.

Fourth, before the election campaigns began, the media had already placed Twitter in the spotlight, speculating that it would be a revolutionary tool for connecting politicians and voters directly. Its successful utilization is often associated with boosting community spirit, increasing civic and political engagement, and ultimately contributing to the expansion of democracy, coerced neither by state nor by market forces (Kwon, Nam & Lackaff, 2011). The present study supports, to a certain degree, this association, since the perceived importance of Twitter in civic engagement located the habitus of Twitter as a central public sphere in Korean politics on this occasion.

The present study contributes to the methodological development in political communication studies. The co-link analysis and webometric methods we employed in this study have the potential to further current political research. These methods based on information retrieval provide useful accounts of people’s behaviors vis-a-vis political information in the system. Moreover, network analysis of the behavioral data can present the complex system of parts and relationships in a simplified way for a better understanding of whether, how and to what extent web ecology can explain, and even predict, how an election unfolds.

Conventionally, opinion polls have been the most popular tool for understanding and predicting elections. We suggest that the research methods we employed in this study could complement opinion polls, although we admit that the methods may need more complex processing and time for interpreting results of analysis compared to polls. Our methods trace the trend of information-seeking behaviors without the need to ask voters individually. It is currently reported that polls based on telephone surveys have low accuracy in predicting victors or voter turnouts because the interviewer cannot recruit via landline phones as many respondents as before, especially when it comes to the younger generation with new lifestyles. However, the risk of non-sampling errors (including non-responses, absences and false reports) produced in the process of the telephone-based survey can be reduced by the use of non-reactive measures such as the methods employed here.

The main contribution of this study is that it presents a broad picture of the recent series of political events in Korea, through the lens of web ecology. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the study has limitations, the greatest of which is that it is very specific, covering a period of 10 days in the Korean electoral context. The sample of time points was thus too small to precisely fit non-linear curves and to accurately predict the longitudinal trends of web ecologies. We argue that web ecology is an effective indicator of people’s information behaviors in the course of a political event but we also invite further empirical investigation, such as use of larger datasets, more sophisticated variables and international studies.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was supported in part by the World Class University (WCU) project through the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 515-82-06574). We also thank Sang-Me Nam for her assistance.

Notes

Author biographies

Yoonjae Nam, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Tourism Contents, Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He received his doctorate from University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is interested in current digital media, in general, and corporate communication, diffusion of media contents and social networks, in particular.

Yeon-Ok Lee, PhD is the Research Skills Trainer/Coordinator at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests centre around digital politics, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

Han Woo Park, PhD (Corresponding Author) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media & Communication, YeungnamUniversity, South Korea. He serves as co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia and sits on the editorial boards of Scientometrics, the International Journal of Internet Science, and the CollNet Journal of Scientometrics & Information Management.

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