Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Uta Russmann, whose focus is on Web campaigning in Austria during the 2008 national elections, which for the first time saw a substantial use of online media for campaiging. There had been a use of Web-based information in previous elections, of course, but so far this remained quite simple and unsophisticated - mainly just various forms of shovelware.
Uta's study examined the use of the Web during the 2008 campaign, focusing on information provision, interaction with voters, and mobilisation of voters for campaigning, as well as broader connection and networking functions between parties and the media. This also takes into account the lessons from the 2007/8 US campaigns, which pointed to the Net becoming a key source of political information and participation especially for younger voters, as well as similar observations in recent campaigns in Germany, Italy, and France.
This was undertaken through a structural analysis of the various Austrian party Websites (SPÖ, ÖVP, FPÖ, Greens, and BZÖ - Jörg Haider's new party), based on weekly captures of the entire party Websites - and Uta now shows typical samples for these sites. For each of these sites, information was at the core, but there was no uniform pattern of how information was presented here (not even between the two major or the three minor parties). Some of the features on these sites were decided very much at the last minute, too - often also in response to the developments on other sites (if one party started a blog, then a number of others would follow suit...).
Participation and mobilisation features in particular varied widely - and in fact, the far-right BZÖ had no participation features at all, perhaps out of fear that such features would be disrupted by its opponents. The most prevalent feature to engage voters remains online party membership. Similarly, the amount of external links varied widely, with the social democrat SPÖ far ahead of the rest and linking regularly to mainstream media and social network sites, and the right-wing populist parties FPÖ and BZÖ not linking to social networks at all. So party size accounts for the size of the party's network, and online politics in Austria reflect and reinforce offline patterns.
