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，人们很少注意到因特网如何影响作为公民与其代表之间的基本联系的竞选活动。调查人员的目标是通过继续对美国国会候选人如何在竞选活动中使用互联网进行持续研究来填补这一空白。研究人员构建了一个广泛的、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。在过去的三次竞选活动中（2002年、2004年、2006年），他们使用这一工具从700多个参议院和众议院候选人的网站收集数据。这些数据进一步增加了有关候选人背景、地区/州和竞选活动的详细信息。2008年，调查人员将继续收集数据，同时将一些新的特点纳入其程序。例如，他们将在活动过程中多次对网站进行编码，并将网站存档以供将来参考。该项目将产生更广泛的影响，因为所有数据都将公开提供，并将成为研究人员和广大公众的宝贵资源。研究人员将能够更好地使用来自候选人网站的信息来测试竞选行为的理论，与其他竞选通信不同（例如，电视广告），提供了一个有代表性的，未经调解的，和全面的画像，什么运动正在试图沟通。该项目还为更广泛的公众利益服务，提供经验证据，帮助评估有关政治和互联网的日益增多的猜测和专家意见。此外，该项目还将提供详细信息，帮助公民了解国会候选人寻求支持的多种方式。

Abstract 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.