Greek Political Parties Online (or Not...)

Athens.
The final full session here at WebSci '09 is on (Greek) politics online, so of course I'm here. It's another session with live interpretation from Greek to English - hopefully she's done chewing gum now! We start with G. Alexias, who introduces us to the performance of Greek political parties online (and he does so in English, actually). Does the online presence of Greek political actors lead to the formation of online political communities? His study examined this in the wake of the 2004 parliamentary elections, and performed both a quantitative analysis of social software features of these sites and a qualitative analysis of the sites' characteristics.

Only some 51% of Greek parliamentarians have their own Websites, and mainly use these to promote themselves; only 14% of these were updated more than once in 2005. 85% do not have a full outline of their political agendas, and in 77% there is no clear information on how political goals will be pursued. So, such sites are only about personal identity. Political party sites, on the other hand, are overloaded with political information, and are unsystematic in presenting party agendas. There are few internal or external search engines or site maps, and there are only limited updates to the front pages of many parties. Very few sites use multimedia, or have membership or community forum options.

So, such sites do not contribute to the formation of online communities, they have a low degree of interactivity, and the Net is employed as a medium of political advertising, not for bidirectional political communication. This still appears to be true today - only PASOK has an online forum, or a Facebook or YouTube presence. And similarly, direct emails from the researchers as individuals or from the research institution were answered both in 2005 and in 2008 only by one of the parties.

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