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the political importance of online channels
The internet appears to have had a big influence on the 2004 Campaign in the USA
- will it have as big an influence on the 2005 Election in the UK?
Online politics in the American Election 2004
A major study of the impact of the internet on politics during election year in
the USA showed that the internet has considerable reach and a strong influence
on voting intentions (Pew
The Internet and Campaign 2004).
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37% of the adult American population used the internet for politically-related
communication during the run up to the 2004 election.
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For internet users within the US population, the internet was a more important
source of campaign news and information than radio.
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For broadband internet users, the internet was equally important as newspapers
as a major source of campaign news and information.
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56% of political news consumers said “the internet has raised the overall
quality of public debate” during the campaign and only 5% said the internet
lowered the quality of debate.
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52% of political news consumers said the internet was important in giving them
information that helped them decide how to vote.
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27% of them said the political information they got online made them decide to
vote for or against a particular candidate.
-
23% said their use of the internet for political news and activities encouraged
them to vote.
If these figures were to be repeated in the UK General Election 2005, the
internet could play a critical role in influencing the election outcome.
Internet consumption in the UK 2005
The UK is only slightly behind the USA in terms of internet usage.
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55% of the UK population are internet users, compared with 64% of the US
population (ClickZ
Stats).
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The Internet is the number 2 “prime time” entertainment medium in the UK, with
Broadband eroding time spent watching TV (Research for Wanadoo).
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50% of UK internet users go online daily, averaging 74mins/day online.
The internet, therefore, has the potential to play as big a role in the 2005 UK
election as it did in the 2004 USA election.
Although little has been written about how best to design online environments
for politics, political web sites have a lot in common with other web content:
they seek to inform, persuade and determine the decisions made by their
readers. Over the coming days I will post analyses of the 3 main
UK party political sites and compare their performance against benchmarks
of other forms of persuasive and influential content on the Internet
(especially e-commerce sites, which I have studied in-depth).
Links:
Conservatives;
Labour; Liberal
Democrats