Resources
These are books, videos, reports, studies and academic articles focusing on the role and impact of blogging on political campaigns:
All the articles listed below have been retrieved from Google, online journals and databases.
Please help us update the list so we can make it as comprehensive and up to date as possible.
Academic articles
March, 2007, by Burst Media
Burst Media recently surveyed 2,100 online users who are likely to vote in the 2008 Presidential election (likely voters). In this study, Burst found that:
• over 20% of likely voters have already visited a presidential candidates website;
• one quarter of likely voters have clicked on a candidate or advocacy groups online advertisment;
• likely voters are willing to watch a presidential candidate in an online video clip, and listen to a candidate in a podcast.
Putting online influential to work for your campaign
2004, by IDPI
The study used a methodology developed by the survey research and consulting firm NOP World that identifies “Influentials,” the Americans who “tell the others what to buy, who to vote for, and where to vacation,” according to Ed Keller and Jon Berry, authors of the book, The Influentials. Normally, about one in ten Americans fits within the definition. However, our study found that a whopping 69 percent of those involved in online presidential politics were “Influentials.”
January 2007, by T. Neil Sroka
While a very new field of research, most of the academic studies of blogging and politics conducted thus far have looked at the budding relationship through a media-based lens. In these studies, blogs are seen to affect politics only insofar as they are able to refocus the media’s attention and re-frame policy debates. While this way of seeing the emergent association between blogs and politics makes a great deal of sense, the blogosphere also seems to be playing an increasingly powerful role in framing ideas and issues for legislators and leaders directly. Using a survey of congressional offices conducted between January and March 2006, I attempt to gain a picture of the readership, usage, and opinion of blogs and blogging on Capital Hill, in order to make the case for blogging’s direct effect on the modern legislative process.
2006, by Nigel Jackson
The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of weblogs by political parties in the 2005 general election campaign. It seeks to identify why, why not, and how parties used their weblogs during the election campaign.
Meetup, Blogs, and Online Involvement: U.S Senate Campaign Websites of 2004
2005, by Joan Conners
Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis “From the Bottom Up”
2005, by Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt, Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright, and Ning Yu - School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Bloomington
This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are more densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational.
Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community
Cameron Marlow
This paper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.
Weblogs: a history and perspective
7 september 2000, Rebecca Blood
May 2006; James Stanyer, Published (view link)
In light of the phenomenon of blogging in the 2004 US presidential campaign, this article aims to examine blogging during the 2005 British general election campaign. The article seeks to establish how widespread blogging was, the extent of bloggers’ partisanship, what issues blogs were concerned with, what the purpose of the messages posted by the bloggers were, and what if any impact blogs had beyond the immediate community of users.
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Elections: Divided They Blog
March 2005; L Adamic & N Glance
The paper examines the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. It aims to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities.
Year of the Blogs: Webstyle Analyses of the 2004 Presidential Candidate Blog
November 2005; K D Krammell
The study uses content analysis to investigate the use of blogs by the major party candidates during the 2004 general election cycle. With an emphasis on interactivity the study identifies the attributes of candidate blog posts, hyperlink strategies, issues discussed, and appeal strategy in the official blog of incumbent President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry.
Blog for America and Civil Involvement
2005; M R Kerbel & J D Bloom
The authors offer an initial assessment of the community that developed around Blog for America and its orientation toward civic engagement, based on an original content analysis of 3,066 unique posts encompassing every entry in the Dean blog from March 15, 2003, through January 27, 2004. The guiding hypothesis is that blog discussion centered on a set of system-affirming topics absent from or unusual in political coverage on television,particularly substantive policy debate and community action.The authors find Blog for America to be an example of how the Internet is emerging as a vehicle for enhanced civic involvement with the potential to counteract the negative effects of television on the political process.
Blogs in Campaign Communication - PDF
December 2005; G Lawson-Borders & R Kirk
Three concourses of research provide insight into blogging as a political communication function: the investigation of the blog as a social diary, the analysis of blogs as organizing tools, and blogs viewed as a form of civic, participatory journalism. The authors do not claim that blogging had a significant impact on the 2004 election outcome. However, they do argue that its effective use has been demonstrated and emerging applications of the tool pave the way for future campaign communication, one the authors suggest will become a standard part of campaign communication.
”Big Media” Meets the ”Bloggers”: Coverage of Trent Lott’s Remarks at storm Thurmond’s Birthday Party
2004; E Scott for the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Case study reviewing the factors that lead to the resignation of Senator Trent Lott in 2002.
Order the article here.
Does Cyber-Campaigning Win Votes? Online Communication in the 2004 Australian Election
June 2005; R Gibson & I MacAllister
The study uses data from 2001 and 2004 Australian Candidate Studies to investigate the factors determining personal internet use and public web campaigning among candidates and the impact of web campaigning on level of electoral support.
2004; D J Schiano, B A Nardi, M Gumbrecht & L Swartz
This paper presents the preliminary results of an ethnographic study of blogging as a form of personal expression and communication. It characterize a number of blogging practices, and then consider blogging as personal journaling.
Blogging and Hyperlinking: use of the Web to enhance visability during the 2004 US campaign
November 2005; A P Williams, K D Trammell, M Postelnicu, K D Landreville & J D Martin
The study provides an initial overview of how the Web has been used in campaigning and reports on how the Democratic presidential candidates and President Bush used the Web during the primary season of the 2004 election cycle.
How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?
May 2004; K E Gill
This paper reviews ways to measure the influence of the blogosphere on public opinion and mass media. It covers anecdotes of stories becoming big in the blogosphere and then being (re)introduced into mass media. It reports on the traffic blogs receive and their integration into political and news sites. It also compares the relative ranking of blogs on websites like BlogStreet and Technorati.
Virtual Campaigning: Australian Parties and the Impact of the Internet
2002; R K Gibson & S Ward
This paper examines the impact of the Internet, speci. cally the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media?
The internet and Political Campaigning: the new medium comes of Age?
R Gibson, S Ward & W Lusoli
The Power and Politics of Blogs
July 2004; D W Drezner & H Farrell
Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the “blogosphere”: the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets.
Weblogs in Political Campaigns - The Critical Success Factors
October 2006; R Ablod & M Heltsche
This paper tries to combine two strains of research to estimate the potential of weblogs as a campaigning instrument. First, content analysis data of about 3000 posts in party and candidate weblogs in the last eleven weeks before Election Day will be analyzed. Second, with regard to survey data of about 1300 internet users, insights into the use and acceptance of the parties’ weblog campaign should be provided. By combining data from both participants in weblog-based political communication – political parties and citizens – our paper provides some answers to the question of whether campaigning via weblogs can be a success. Against this background, the crucial factors for effectual weblog-based electioneering and for a better mobilization of citizens via weblogs should be presented.
March 2006; J Pickerill
This article examines activists’ use of ICTs.
Secrets of Successful Online Fundraising
2001; E Ireland & P T Nash
This article explains the key factors of how to raise the odds of receiving online donations.
Blogging, the nihilist impulse
Geert Lovink, March, 2007
Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens’ journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What’s declining is the “Belief in the Message”. Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.
Reports
The Audience for Political Blogs
By Joseph Graf, October 2006 for Institute of Politics Democracy and The Internet
Focusing on the readership of Political Blogs
By Pew Internet & American Life Project, January 2006
This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey of how Americans’ used the internet during the campaign of 2006. The report concludes that the number of Americans who got most of their information about the 2006 campaign on the internet doubled from the most recent mid-term election in 2002 and rivaled the number from the 2004 presidential election year.
Moving to the Mainstream: Web-Based Political Communications on the Road to 2008 (Report by E-Vote)
Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and the national Discourse in the Fall of 2004 (download PDF here)
PEW, 2004
Viral Video in Politics: Case Studies on Creating Compelling Video
New Politics Institute, Jan. 9. 2007, Mark McKinnon, media advisor to George W. Bush
The 2006 election has been dubbed by many in the media as the “YouTube election”. While amateur or user-generated content is a powerful emerging phenomenon, and with time can be designed to feed the needs of campaigns and organizations, professionally produced viral content still has an important role to play. High-end content is content in which the story is designed as part of a complex communications strategy, and the material is used in various distribution avenues reaching a wide audience. The best approach combines both amateur and professional styles to reach the full spectrum of audience subsets.
Technorati: State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006
Political Blogs - Craze or Convention?
The Internet`s Role in Political Campaigns
Word of Mouth Politics 2.0: Now Powered By the Internet
Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics
The Use of Blogs in the 2004 Presidential election
Consultation and campaigning in the age of participatory media
The Tools and Tactics for Online Political Advocacy - Online Politics 101
September, 2006, by Colin Delany, e.politics
Books
Uses of Blogs
Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging in the UK
The Revolution Will Not Be Televise: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything
Surveys
Increased role of the Internet in the 2008 Presidential election
By Performics, February, 2007
Survey Finds that 42 Percent of Americans Say the Internet Will Play an Important Role in Deciding Who They Will Vote for in Next Presidential Election
Politics online - August 2006.
26 million Americans were logging onto for news or information about the campaign on a typical day in August, the highest such figure recorded by the Pew Internet Project
Bloggers - A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers
Netroots Survey Part 1- By MyDD
Netroots Survey Part 2- By MyDD
Videos
The New Politics Institute: DialyKos founder, Markos Moulitsas on the past and future of blogs
A collection of all the significant videos of the Presidential announcements in the lead-up to the 2008 US presidential campaign
Blog posts
Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask
Tips for Candidates regarding Weblogs, by Dave Winer, 2003
Are Bloggers “The People”? byDavid D. Perlmutter
THE TRIANGLE: Limits of Blog Power
Sep. 19. 2005, Peter Daou, in the Daou Report (Salon.com)
Discussing the power and limitations of blogs - asking the question; How influential are bloggers?
Magazine and News Articles
The power of online campaigns
BBC News, Jan. 23. 2007, by Kathryn Westcott
Hillary Clinton intends to “talk”, “chat” and “start a dialogue” Oprah-style with potential voters via the internet. In this, she joins a number of high-profile politicians who are harnessing the potential power of the internet to woo voters directly.
The Economist, Jan 23, 2007
SHOULD chief executives blog? The late adopters had better decide soon, because the World Economic Forum is encouraging blogging by bigwigs as part of its annual meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland, writes The Economist
The Age, Jan. 20. 2007; by Antony Loewenstein
GriffithReview, Edition 13, 2006; By Mark Bahnisch
Reaching others is a matter of credibility
Management Today, November/December 2003; By Guy Cranswick
With a commercial outlook of business weak at present, effective, accurate and credible communication is more important than ever.
Time’s Person of the Year: You
Time Magazine, Dec. 13. 2006
Are you the Person of the Year?
Spiked, Jan. 4. 2007
Critical article discussing Time’s annual Person of the Year award
Thesis
The Impact of the Weblogs: A Case Study of The United States and Iran
BLOGGING POLITICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE 2004 ELECTION
The Blogging Phenomenon - An Overview and Theoretical Consideration
Campaigns
Engage the Blogs by The New Political Institute - About the Campaign
