It seems like I have missed yet another important contribution to the debate of whether online campaign tools including blogs can have an impact on elections.
This weeks Personal Democracy Forum article (again, I really like this site, they do an awesome job) on the use of ‘MySpace as a campaign instrument’, lead me to an even more interesting study focusing on the use of Facebook as a Campaign Tool.
The study, conducted by Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati, tries to find a correlation between the support for a candidate's Facebook profile and real-world votes. The goal of the study is to "determine whether candidate postings on the site are a useful viral marketing tool for generating publicity, campaign contributions, and ultimately votes."
I believe this is a really interesting approach to take on the topic. The study is not yet completed, but parts of it can be viewed; here, here and here.
(Interested in reading about the YouTube effect as well? Here is a link)