'Open Source Campaigning?’: UK Party Organisations and the Use of the New Media in the 2010 General Election
'Open Source Campaigning?’: UK Party Organisations and the Use of the New Media in the 2010 General Election
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“开源竞选?”:2010 年大选中英国政党组织和新媒体的使用
DOI:
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发表时间:
2010
期刊:
影响因子:
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通讯作者:
Rachel Gibson
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
Rachel Gibson
This paper examines efforts by UK parties to use new social media tools to mobilize members and wider supporters in the 2010 General election. It focuses on five parties specifically – Labour, the Conservatives, the LibDems, the Scottish Nationalist Party and the British National Party – each of which, set up separate campaign ‘hubs’ on the web for non-members to join, network and most importantly undertake action for the party. The introduction of these campaign hub sites is seen as an important development in party politics in terms of the potential they hold for restructuring the management of campaigns, particularly with regard to shifting power to volunteers and non-members. The paper investigates the extent to which the sites promoted greater grassroots involvement and autonomy within UK parties’ campaign management practices. It does so by first articulating the concept of ‘citizen-campaigning’, a new web-enabled mode of activism that engages non-elites/non-members with the campaign in a co-producer role. A coding scheme (derived from U.S. campaign efforts in 2008) is devised to measure and compare the extent of citizen-campaigning made possible through the party sites. This is based around five core campaign functions and measures the extent to which they are party or citizen-controlled. Conclusions are drawn about the extent to which the sites represented a genuine opening up and devolution of power out to supporters.