Abstract
This is the second quadrennial special issue of Social Science Computer Review devoted to the role of the Internet during presidential campaign years. This issue, like the previous (volume 31, no. 5, September 2013), examines a variety of questions surrounding the role this communication medium played throughout the campaign and the election. These include how candidates used the Internet to communicate their messages to citizens, the nature of those messages, how well they were received, and more. Taken together, the essays provide a portrait of how the Internet campaign, an inherently dynamic phenomenon, has evolved since 2012.
Several of the articles focus the changing nature of the use of the Internet in political, in particular, presidential campaigns. Four separate articles by Heather Evans and her colleagues, Bethany Anne Conway-Silva, et al., David Morris, and Peter Francia explore various aspects of the Twitter campaign. This heavy focus is appropriate, given the attention paid to this social media tool in 2016. Terri Towner and Caroline Lego Muñoz examine Instagram, another social media outlet that received less attention but that is no less important to modern campaigns. Each of these articles highlights the idea that social media continues to revolutionize how we communicate with each other. Political candidates, parties, and groups are adapting to this reality accordingly, and this in turn affects how campaigns play out in the traditional media and among citizens.
The use of Twitter and other social media was, however, only part of the story of the 2016 Internet campaign. The remaining three articles in this collection highlight this. Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati show how digital campaign expenditures have increased markedly over recent election cycles. Kenneth Moffett and Laurie Rice focus on online political expression by college students throughout the campaign. James Druckman and his colleagues demonstrate that not all aspects of the Internet campaign have changed in their examination of congressional campaign websites in 2016.
Taken together, this collection of quality essays paints a reasonably good, though of necessity incomplete portrait of campaign 2016 and the Internet. I am proud to have been part of this process. Special thanks to the editor, David Garson, for allowing me to assemble and present this collection. And of course, the lion’s share of the credit goes to the contributors themselves for making it so easy to do so.