This article provides a systematic portrait of the YouTube presence of U.S. Senate candidates during the 2008 election cycle. The evidence does not support the theory that democratized production, editing, and distribution of video content is markedly changing the formats and producers of political content. This is apparent from the predominance of 30-second ads among both the most popular videos and the broad range of campaign videos. Although other potential forms of accountability remain unrealized, YouTube is facilitating candidates being held accountable for their own advertising. The 2008 findings are compared to 2006 findings with the same methodology.
This article explores how participation was promoted on the web sites of U.S. Senate candidates in the 2004 election. The research formalizes the concept of plagiarized participation, whereby would-be participators are encouraged to present the words of others as their own in support of a cause. The campaign web site functions of encouraging supporters to write letters to their friends and to newspapers provide an ideal test for the appeal of plagiarized participation. The broader mobilization efforts of candidates are also documented. Providing frequency counts and text examples, this article gives a systematic view of Internet campaigning for grass-roots and astroturf support.
“I'm extremely excited to have a prescene [sic] on the Web.”The perpetual greeting from the campaign home page of Senator Carl Levin (1996) shows that as with the adoption of any new technology, Internet use by political candidates will undergo some early rough spots. The early stages of a technology also tend to prompt divergent claims about the merits of the new technology. Thus, while political scientist David Canon has praised campaign sites as a “positive development” for allowing the transmission of extensive information, Ted Becker, another political scientist, has been highly critical of the sites calling them “cyberfluff” (Skiba 1995). By systematically studying the content of 1996 Senate candidate home pages, this article offers some hope for reconciling the divergent claims about Internet campaigning.
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