Released November 2006, MIT Press
Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider
foreword by Michael Cornfield
"This is the most comprehensive and authoritative work to date on the Internet's impact on U.S. politics. If you want to really understand what's happening in the online political revolution, read this book."
Phil Noble, Founder, PoliticsOnline
The use of the Web in U.S. political campaigns has developed dramatically over the course of the last several election seasons. In Web Campaigning, Kirsten Foot and Steven Schneider examine the evolution of campaigns' Web practices, based on hundreds of campaign Web sites produced by a range of political actors during the U.S. elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004. Their developmental analyses of how and why campaign organizations create specific online structures illuminates the reciprocal relationship between these production practices and the structures of both the campaign organization and the electoral arena. This practice-based approach and the focus on campaigns as Web producers make the book a significant methodological and theoretical contribution to both science and technology studies and political communication scholarship.
Foot and Schneider explore the inherent tension between the desire of campaigns to maintain control over messages and resources and the generally decentralizing dynamic of Web-based communication. They analyze specific strategies by which campaigns mitigate this, examining the ways that the production techniques, coproducing Web content, online-offline convergence, and linking to other Web sites mediate the practices of informing, involving, connecting, and mobilizing supporters. Their conclusions about the past decade's trajectory of Web campaigning point the way to a political theory of technology and a technologically grounded theory of electoral politics.
Kirsten A. Foot is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington.
Steven M. Schneider is Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at SUNY Institute of Technology.
Foot and Schneider co-direct WebArchivist.org, a research and software development group that works with scholars, librarians and archivists interested in preserving and analyzing materials created for and distributed on the Web.
This digital installation available on the Web illustrates core concepts discussed in the text of the book with examples drawn from archived campaign Web sites. Users have the opportunity to search these concepts in the context of fully operational campaign sites, recreating the Web experience of users during the election periods covered in the book.
The Election 2002 Web Archive is a selective collection of nearly 4,000 sites archived between July 1, 2002 and November 30, 2002, commissioned by the Library of Congress. The archive includes campaign, citizen, civic and advocacy, government, political party, press, public opinion and miscellaneous Web sites related to the 2002 U.S. congressional and gubernatorial elections.
There are two interfaces for the archive. The interface produced for the Library of Congress by WebArchivist.org is a site-level catalog of the full collection. The interface produced for researchers by WebArchivist.org incorporates a greater number of search fields, but covers only the campaign sites in the collection. Both interfaces can be used to access the Web archive records for sites in the collection. An index of archival impressions for each site, and the actual impressions, are accessible via the site's Web archive record.
All of the presidential hopefuls in early 2004 produced multiple campaign sites. The Web presence of candidates for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations as of February 2004 can be compared feature by feature on this grid.
