Collaborative Research: Campaigns in a New Media Age: How Candidates use the World Wide Web

互联网的出现和普及改变了生活的许多方面，包括政治。学者们在记录互联网如何影响公民审议、新闻消费和政治参与等方面取得了一些进展。然而，很少有人关注互联网如何影响竞选活动的进行，而竞选活动是公民与其代表之间的根本联系。调查人员希望通过继续研究美国国会候选人如何在竞选中使用互联网来填补这一空白。调查人员已经构建了一个广泛的、有理论基础的框架，用于收集候选人网站数据，其中包括政治策略和技术使用的措施。在过去的三次竞选中（2002年、2004年和2006年），他们使用这个工具从700多名参众两院候选人的网站上收集数据。这些数据进一步增加了候选人背景、选区/州和竞选活动的详细信息。2008年，研究人员将继续他们的数据收集，同时将一些新的特征纳入他们的程序。例如，他们将在活动过程中多次对网站进行编码，并将网站存档以备将来参考。该项目将产生更广泛的影响，因为所有数据都将向公众提供，并将为研究人员和广大公众提供宝贵的资源。研究人员将能够更好地利用候选人网站上的信息来测试竞选行为理论，与其他竞选传播（如电视广告）不同，候选人网站提供了竞选活动试图传达的内容的代表性、无中介和整体描述。该项目还通过提供经验证据来帮助评估有关政治和互联网的不断增加的猜测和专家意见，从而服务于更广泛的公众利益。此外，该项目将提供详细的信息，帮助公民了解国会候选人寻求他们支持的多种方式。

The advent and profusion of the Internet has transformed many aspects of life, including politics. Scholars have made some headway in documenting how the Internet affects things like citizen deliberation, news consumption, and political participation. Less attention, however, has been given to how the Internet affects the conduct of electoral campaigns, which serve as the fundamental link between citizens and their representatives. The investigators aim to fill this gap by continuing an ongoing study of how United States congressional candidates use the Internet in their campaigns. The investigators have constructed an extensive and theoretically-grounded framework for collecting candidate website data that includes measures of both political strategy and technology use. Over the last three campaigns (2002, 2004, 2006), they have used this instrument to collect data from more than 700 Senate and House candidates' websites. These data are further augmented with detailed information about the candidates' backgrounds, the districts/states, and the campaign. In 2008, the investigators will continue their data collection while incorporating a number of new features into their procedures. They will, for example, code sites multiple times over the course of the campaign as well as having the sites archived for future reference. The project will have broader impacts in that all of the data will be made publicly-available and will constitute a valuable resource for researchers and the public-at-large. Researchers will be better able to test theories of campaign behavior using information from candidate websites which, unlike other campaign communications (e.g., television ads), provide a representative, unmediated, and holistic portrait of what campaigns are trying to communicate. This project also serves the wider public interest by providing empirical evidence that will help in evaluating the ever-increasing amount of speculation and punditry concerning politics and the Internet. Moreover, this project will provide detailed information that will help inform citizens about the many ways in which congressional candidates go about seeking their support.