Members of the European Parliament Online

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 is the one our paper is in, too – but we start with Darren Lilleker, whose focus is on the online communication strategies of Members of the European Parliament. One idea of this study was to examine the role which their various domestic political and media systems played in determining their communication strategies – but there was no obvious correlation at all. (Part of this might be due to the fact that all MEPs receive equal resourcing.)

So, the question becomes: what audiences are these MEPs targetting, and how? Darren and his team pursued this by examining the elements variously targetting general users, journalists, issue activists, and partisan supporters. They found that there is a sense of sophistication in using Web-based information sites; a quarter of MEPs have blogs embedded into their sites, for example, and a fair few allow comments as well (but they don’t tend to get many). Overall, the sites present a very professional picture, with very limited personal information.

Some 46% of MEPs also use social networking sites, and 75% of these encourage their visitors to engage with these sites. Information and engagement were standard features; interactivity was less prominent. Information seekers and journalists are most obviously targetted (which makes sense, since journalists are probably most likely to visit these sites); small parties – especially Greens members, as well as representatives of far right groups – focus more strongly on issue activists, while partisan supporters are not targetted overly much.

There was a strong generational divide here, too – younger MEPs were much more Web-savvy. Female MEPs tended to be more likely to have interactive and better-designed Websites; male MEPs focussed more on basic information provision (they also tended to be older). The larger the electorate which these MEPs served, the more informational was there communication approach (perhaps because it would be difficult to truly interact with such larger constituencies). Newer member states’ MEPs were more interactive and more strongly Web 2.0-focussed in their approach, too.

Younger MEPs tended to be more strategic in their information targetting; female MEPs to follow an issue-based strategy; minor party MEPs' to target journalists; and MEPs elected through personalised voting systems to focus on partisans and general users. MEPs from newer member states offered the best experience for more general users – they tended to provide a more entertaining environment to draw them in.

There is also wide variation, of course; younger MEPs tended to be more pioneering in their approach, and this is also likely to be true for MPs in specific countries. MEPs with well-designed Websites also tended to be more active in other social media spaces – there was a clear divide between proactive and reactive communicators. There was generally fairly little encouragement for interactivity, however – especially very few attempts to seek the electorate’s advice on how to vote in the European Parliament.