Posts Tagged ‘espen’s thesis’

I don’t know how it slipped by me, but August 3rd was the second anniversary of BlogCampaigning.

In those two years, a lot has happened: Espen published his thesis on the use of Blogs in American Political campaigns, Jens “Schredd” Schroeder joined us, all three primary authors moved back to their home countries, we had a bunch of great guest authors and we’re still having a great time with it all.

Thanks to everyone that has been reading over the years!

-Parker

From: Jens Schroeder
Subject: Greetings from New Zealand
To: Espen, Parker

Hi guys,greetings from New Zealand. I’m having an awesome time here – despite freezing my a** off. Coming from Germany I should actually be able to withstand minus five degrees but I guess living in tropical conditions for the last two years kind of affected my ability to adapt to cold weather. Also: when I moved to Australia I never thought that I was going to be confronted with anything resembling ice or snow, accordingly I only possess light clothing and three token sweaters. My answer to that problem lay in the “onion principle” aka layering – when I went jet-boating in Queenstown I was wearing two t-shirts, two sweaters and two jackets. I found a bit hard to breathe, but I’d choose health over dignity any time.

Today I arrived in Christchurch again after a wonderful trip through the breathtaking scenery of the South Island: Snow covered mountains, rainforests, fjords, glaciers, all of almost incomprehensible beauty. Check the photos on Facebook: Pt1 & Pt2!

Since I didn’t want to carry it around all the time and was moving a lot I didn’t want to take my laptop with me. So after a long day of sightseeing instead of seeking entertainment and news from the internets I, rather extensively, watched TV. Something which I haven’t done for ages. The result: I feel about 20% more stupid than before. I feel like a victim of CNN’s agenda setting, since I have to passively absorb their programs without being able to countercheck their reports or consult a variety of opinions with the help of the extensive resources the internet has to offer. In short: I just don’t feel empowered.I retain some empowerment respectively the ability to avoid Nicole Ritchie related news through my iPod. I loaded some documentaries on there before I left, one of them being “God’s Next Army”, which deals with the Patrick Henry College, the supposed Harvard for the Christian Right. Watching this made me think that one of the reasons American conservatives have issues utilizing blogs for the purposes is the influence of these people – the main problem being that the bible is taken literally by Evangelical powers as if enlightenment never happened: basically not much of a difference to Islamic dogmatism with strong undertones of theocratic fascism. Now, the underlying principle of blogs is (ideally!) the concept of exchange and negotiation in a public sphere, a spirit of debate that leads to better outcomes, Espen’s thesis being a case in point. However, if you’re on a divine mission and take a dogmatic stand that doesn’t allow for any negotiation and use debates to impress your view on your opponents instead of reaching for a greater good, this principle gets disrupted (yeah, yeah, I know… sounds pretty idealistic and unworldly, but I think you get the point. And since not all Republicans are adherents of this kind of Christianity but good old conservatives there are probably other issues, such as demographics, that complicate the adaptation to new technology).

Well, it seems that American conservatives aren’t the only ones having trouble utilizing new ways of reaching the electorate. Even though John Howard released a speech on global warming on Youtube, the Liberal’s Myspace presence still seems to have some issues – the main reason being John Howard refusing to create his own profile page because he doesn’t want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation (which is, quite frankly, pretty ironic since the privatization of public services his party supported he lend much of Australia’s identity to commercial organisations). Writes The Age:

Mr Howard’s office today added a video on climate change to YouTube, but at the time of writing it had not been added to the party’s MySpace page.”They [the Liberal party] are not using their profile as effectively as they should be,” said MySpace spokesman Darain Faraz.”If you go on their profile it still says they’ve got 8 friends, and we know that they’ve had a lot more requests than that. It would be great if they started using it in the same way that other political parties have.”The office of the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, has been busily adding friends to Mr Rudd’s profile since Thursday. It listed 6058 friends as of this morning.The leader of the Greens, Bob Brown, has also embraced Impact, and his profile lists 182 friends.Labor politicians outnumber Liberals by more than two-to-one on Impact.The Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the Workplace Relations Minister, Joe Hockey, are the only Liberal profiles being regularly updated with approved friends and comments.   

Espen, maybe you should come back to Australia and become a consultant for the Liberal’s internet matters.
Anyways, I gotta go, I already spend ages in this internet café. At least all this typing kept my fingers warm.

Talk to you soon!
Jens

Before publishing my thesis on the blog, I emailed it to some of the people that I am quoting, giving them the opportunity to make comments about their appearance in the paper. One of the people that kindly responded to my email was Jon Henke of the QandO blog.

In addition to pointing out that I spelled his name and blog incorrectly (both of which I am very, very sorry about…hope you will accept my apologies, Jon) Henke (who recently joined the highly qualified and experienced online team of presidential hopeful, Fred Thompson) kindly pointed me in the direction of a very interesting post on CampaignLeadership.com where he was interviewed by Matt Lewis about his role as Netroots Coordinator for the George Allen Senate campaign in 2006. Unfortunately I had just submitted my thesis to my University when I received the email from Henke.

It’s really a shame I didn’t see this post earlier. Had I known about it before, I would definitely have included it. Henke has a lot of interesting stuff to say in the interview: not only about his experiences doing ‘online damage control’ for Allan after his famous ‘macaca’ fuck-up, but also about the topic of online campaigning in general. In fact, I dare say that this is one of the most comprehensive analyses discussing the impact of blogs on the 2006 senate race that I have read so far (considering the fact that is just a short interview). It presents some very interesting reflections about why online campaign strategies are important to have in place from the start of the campaign and how blogs can provide crucial support to the candidates. But most importantly, it captures some of the aspects and perspectives that the academic research I have read so far failed to capture.

Now, I could go on complaining about the fact that I did not discover Henke’s piece during my research or, instead, I could start explaining why I published the thesis on the blog, why I love the idea of using a blog as a research tool, and why I am so enthusiastic about the fact that Henke provided me with the additional information that he did.

I’ll do the latter. And I’ll try to make it short!

Why publishing material in a blog?

Simply because a blog allows people to comment on the material we publish and therefore allows us to create a dynamic research process where readers can constantly criticise the material that is being produced or add new material not yet discussed. The criticism and new material can help us develop new perspectives that can help the research progress and take new directions. A dynamic process like this will most likely evolve faster and bring us to a more comprehensive and broader understanding of the topic being studied than will the slow stream of academic papers that are being produced. The field of social media is changing so rapidly that by the time an academic paper is published, it is likely several new technological inventions will have developed – developments that probably change the playing field that political communicators are operating within every now and them (YouTube, Facebook… – need I say more).

So, what I intend to do is to use the feedback I receive, like the link Henke provided me with, to constantly develop my paper and hopefully publish a new and better piece on the blog in a while (depends on the feedback we receive).
I’ll start adding the links and comments that the thesis is receiving to this post.

So here’s the start of the new version:

Blog Campaigning: Extras

Link provided by Jon Henke:

George Allen’s Blogger Talks: Jon Henke talks to Matt Lewis about his role as Netroots Coordinator for the George Allen Senate campaign in 2006, reflects about why online campaign strategies are important to have in place from the start of the campaign and how blogs can provide crucial support to the candidates, and discusses how we can measure the e-campaign success.

Lowell Feld about the Webb campaign’s handling of the macaca incident:

Espen: […] With regard to the “macaca” incident, I don’t fully agree with the assertion that the campaign sold the story to the Washington Post before it told the bloggers. At least, it wasn’t that neat and clean in reality. If you go back and look at how the story first broke, on the Not Larry Sabato blog, you’ll see that it leaked on August 13 (Sunday), a day before the story was published in the Washington Post. You’ll also notice that there was a huge frenzy over at Not Larry Sabato. Would the Washington Post have jumped on the story if there had NOT been a blog-induced frenzy already in progress, plus a YouTube video? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that it would have been less likely and less effective…

…for more check out this link: Blog Campaigning Thesis – More Extras: Who Really broke the ‘macaca’ story

Blogs are social and cultural objects

Internet analyst Guy Cranswick argues that as the thesis mainly focuses on the US, it should explicitly say so as blogs and blogging are social and cultural objects. “It does not make sense to me to treat this topic in universal terms, it is exclusively socially specific and accordingly should be analysed thus”, Cranswick told me in a mail. I agree, and I could probably have dedicated an entire chapter to this issue – at least a long paragraph in the introduction chapter.

- Espen

I have now, finally, finished my thesis about the use and effects of blogs in political campaigns. The thesis is now available for download as a pdf here: Blog_Campaigning.pdf, and can also be read as a series of posts on this blog.

Each chapter and subchapter has been published in posts in reverse chronological order to make it easier to view them via a feed reader or on this site. All of the posts have been tagged as “espen’s thesis” as well as other topic-appropriate tags. To view these posts you can either scroll down or view each post from this post from the links provided in the end of the entry.

I created this blog as a part of the research process for my thesis: to structure my thoughts, share my findings and create a discussion about the data as my research progressed.

I now invite you to take a look at the thesis and comment on it so that we together can develop a better understanding of the impact campaigning via blogs has on the political process. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with me.

Thanks for reading Blog Campaigning. We will have more posts coming from Jens and Parker in the next week. I’ll be taking a week off so that I can surf (waves, not the net), relax, and enjoy the rest of my time in Australia. That being said, I will respond to comments.

Cheers,
Espen

Read the thesis on the blog:
Scroll down or navigate by clicking the links – Each headline contains a link to the related post:

Abstract

1. Introduction
1.1 The purpose and importance of the study
1.2 Outline of the Study

2. Data & Methodology
2.1 Methodology
2.2 The data gathering process
2.3 Limitations

3. The medium that is revolutionising political campaigning
3.1 What is a blog?
3.2 The blogosphere
3.3 Blogs in campaigns

4. Literature Review
4.1 Measuring effects: Does web-campaigning win votes?
4.2 The potential impact of blogs
4.3 The uses of blogs in political campaigns
4.4 The impact of blogs

5. Findings
5.1 Blogs’ impact on Election 2006
5.2 How does the web affect people’s voting decision?
5.3 How can we measure the impact of blogs?

6. Conclusion

References

Note: The thesis was submitted as a part of my degree; Master of Arts with Honours in Journalism and Mass Communication at Griffith University, Australia, June 1. 2007.

Update: I apologize for spelling Jon Henke’s name incorrectly in the PDF version of the thesis. I also apologize for spelling his blog incorrectly in this version. The blog Jon is writing for is the QandO blog. Here is the link to the blog: http://www.qando.net/.

Update:
The feedback the thesis receives can be followed in this post: Blog Campaigning thesis: Extras

Abstract

A growing number of political parties and candidates contesting in contemporary campaigns are including a blog in their overall campaign strategy. As the number of blogs has skyrocketed and the political grassroots movements have taken to the Internet, political parties and candidates have shown their interest in the new medium by slowly reaching out to the new segment of voters that make up the blogosphere. The question is: Can campaigning via blogs help politicians shape public opinion and impact voting behaviour?

This paper examines how political parties and candidates use the blog as an electioneering instrument in political campaigns and considers how the use of blogs can affect the outcome of an election. By evaluating existing literature on the topic and actively engaging with political blog communities, the author questions whether a blog can play an integral role in securing a party’s or candidate’s victory in an election, and reviews ways to measure the impact of blogs on an election outcome.

Data retrieved by the current study strongly suggests that a campaign, in some cases, can successfully exploit the presence of the web and community blogs, and in doing so, even impact the outcome of a specific election race. The study supports findings by existing scholars that there are aspects of blogging that can help politicians improve their campaign, influence the political agenda and affect the direction of a particular election race. However, so far few campaigns have embraced the full potential of blogs.

The paper argues that current literature has not yet managed to develop proper methods to measure and identify how electioneering via blogs impacts voter decisions directly. Further research therefore needs to thoroughly explore the aspects that make blogs a useful electioneering tool, test the medium’s ability to swing voters and systematically test how audiences value the information they retrieve from the medium compared to the information they retrieve from traditional mainstream media.

Introduction

“We’re entering a different era of political communication, and no one is an expert at it yet. The velocity of change is extraordinary. Everyone is experimenting online, because we don’t know yet what will work” (Rosenberg in Mussenden 2007)

The landscape of political communication is changing rapidly. “Technology has changed the way people interact with one another” (Simmons 2005, p. 1) and “the creation of an electronic media has revolutionized the way information is gathered and transmitted” (Simmons 2005, p. 1). Since 2004, the world has experienced an enormous growth in online political activity. The emergence of social media and social networking sites has given room for a new political era. People can now engage in political activities via a computer as long as they have access to the Internet. This new form of political engagement has created a new and attractive market of voters for politicians to target. In an effort to optimize their reach to this new segment of voters, a growing number of politicians have started embracing some of the technologies that have emerged from the social media scene, including them in their overall political strategy.
One of the latest and fastest growing technological developments to emerge from the social media scene that has been adapted by political parties and candidates in their overall communication strategy is the weblog – more often referred to as the blog. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election blogs were for the first time added by political candidates to their bag of campaign tricks (Lawson-Border & Kirk 2005, p. 1, Trammell 2005, p. 2). Few claimed then that the tool had a significant impact on the election. Three years later, facing the 2008 U.S. presidential election, “political bloggers say that their trade is becoming more influential than standard election techniques” (The University Daily Kansan News 14 February 2007). Even experts claim blogs play a larger part in the political campaigning process than traditional ways of informing the public. According to new-media expert Sean Mussenden (2007) of Media General News Service, this election’s (the 2008 U.S. presidential election) candidates are helping redefine online politics:

“Candidates are speaking directly to voters through text and video blogs displayed on their increasingly sophisticated Web pages. They also are lobbying influential political bloggers for endorsements — and in some cases putting them on the payroll” (Mussenden 2007).

But just how effective has this new online communication instrument become as a campaign tool?
Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, claimed recently that: “The race to the White House in 2008 will be all about how candidates talk to people online” (in Havenstein 2007). Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004 and was the most profiled of the online-oriented campaign managers during the campaign, told Agence France-Presse that:

“The Web will be playing a bigger role than ever in the 2008 campaign, so much so that for the first time, it will actually change the outcome of the election” (in Zablit 2007).

Trippi’s statement might be sensational, even simplistic. But it raises an interesting question: What impact does an online communication tool like a blog have on the democratic election process?
In an effort to reach a better understanding of this issue, this paper will analyse the following research questions:

• How do political parties and candidates use blogs?
• Does electioneering via blogs influence political campaigns?
• How do we measure the impact blogs have on the outcome of an election?

To answer these questions the paper will examine how political parties and candidates have used blogs as a campaigning instrument in elections to date, locate situations where blogs might have helped a campaign produce an upset election outcome, and debate how we can measure a blog’s ability to affect voting decisions.

1.1 The purpose and importance of the study

Due to the rapidly changing landscape of online communication and the fact that the phenomenon of blogging is relatively novel, there exists little academic research to date on political blogs and the politics of blogging (Bahnisch in Bruns & Jacobs 2006, p. 139, Lawson-Borders & Kirk 2005, p. 551). Bahnisch (in Bruns & Jacobs 2006, p. 146) argues that “further research is urgently needed, particularly in mapping the reach and influence of blogs, and also in a more rigorous and empirically informed analysis of conversations and power relations internal to the blogosphere and their relationship to their environing contexts”. The purpose of this study is therefore to increase our understanding of the potential influence and role blogs can play in future election campaigns especially when it comes to affecting voting behaviour.

By comparing studies of political parties’ and candidates’ use of blogs in election campaigns from 2004 to 2007, the paper aims to locate different aspects of blogging that have changed the direction of an election campaign and/or helped a campaign produce an upset election outcome. Since research on the topic to date is limited, this study will produce new data and information never before considered. Reflections and thoughts of leading bloggers on their role in the direction of a campaign will supplement the data that already exist on the topic and hopefully bring to light new dimensions not yet considered. The paper will argue that there is enough evidence to support a hypothesis claiming that blogs can have an impact on political campaigns; however, current literature has not yet managed to develop proper ways to measure and identify how electioneering via blogs affect voting decisions.

1.2 Outline of the Study

Before going into a discussion about the findings of the study and the conclusions that can be drawn from them, the paper will present a brief outline of the methodology used to approach the research problems. The paper will further introduce the reader to the world of blogs and the factors that make the blog a valuable electioneering instrument for political campaigns. A brief outline of earlier attempts to measure the impact of web campaigns on voting behaviour will place the potential impact of blogs in a theoretical perspective. A review of the existing academic literature will further examine how blogs have been used by political campaigns to date and discuss the impact they might have had on specific elections. Finally new data will be compared to the previous literature in an attempt to generate new ideas about how we can measure the impact of blogs on a campaign and the outcome of an election.

Data & Methodology

“Determining the impact of the blog may prove to be difficult at best because it is not immediately obvious how one would show impact” (Simmons 2005, p. 1).

2.1 Methodology

During the course of the twentieth century, numerous attempts have been made to explain the effects of the mass media on the political process (Stockwell 2005, p. 114). The findings that have emerged from these studies are exceedingly inconclusive. So inconclusive, claims Larry M. Bartels (1993, p. 267), that the state of research in the “media effects” area is “one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science”. Over time theorists have gone from claiming that the media have a strong, almost hypodermic effect (Lasswell 1927) that can shape opinions and beliefs (McQuail in Stockwell 2005, p. 114), to suggesting that the media have only a minimal effect on citizens because they can not deliver political messages with any predictable effect (Lazarsfeld in Stockwell 2005, p. 115). In more recent times theorists have again been claiming that the media have a “relatively strong” effect on public opinion because they have the power to set the agenda and affect what people talk about (McCombs and Shaw in Stockwell 2005, p. 15). However, these are just a few examples of the work that have been done over time. Today we are still debating what effects the media have on the political process. If anything, we have come to realize the complexity of the issue itself, and that there is no simple answer to the question. Perhaps Berelson says it best when he muses about his own findings over the years and claims that: “some kinds of communication on some kinds of issues, brought to the attention of some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects” (in Diamond & Bates 1984, p. 347). It is therefore not with the intention of revolutionising the area of “media effects” studies that this paper goes on to look at one of the newest and more exciting technologies within the area. Rather the intention is to explore new perspectives that can help us understand the opportunities that lie within the complexities of the modern media sphere for political campaigns to produce desirable effects on the political process.

Few scholars have so far attempted to identify how effective political messages can be communicated via blogs. The reason might be that many do not yet understand how the universe of blogs works. The author of this study believes that in order to understand how politicians can utilise blogs as a means to optimise successful electioneering, it is not just necessary to understand the nature and strategies of political campaigning, but also the cultural and sociological aspects that define the medium as a new communication phenomenon. This study therefore bases its findings mainly on ethnographic research and can be seen as a methodological critique seeking to test findings of previous studies exploring the subject. Unconventional methods and data gathering techniques have consequently been employed by the researcher in an attempt to view the subject from a new perspective.

2.2 The data gathering process

During an eight month research period, stretching from August 2006 to April 2007, the author actively searched blogs and online publications in an effort to locate theoretical views and statements spoken by authoritative bloggers and experts on online communication reflecting on how blogs impact on political campaigns. The research period was especially interesting because of two major political campaigns commencing at the time: The 2006 U.S. midterm election was held in November 2006, and in December 2006, the research saw the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign kick off as one of the earliest presidential campaigns ever to be launched.

To help locate data the study employed a simple word search on Google Alerts ; a search engine searching specific words or word combinations in online newspapers and blogs. The word combinations searched for were ‘political blogging’ and ‘blogging as a campaign tool’.

The author did not rely on conventional ethnographic research techniques such as informal interviews. Instead, to engage in conversations with bloggers, the author explicitly created a blog, BlogCampaigning (thank you for reading), that reflected on the subject of the research and encouraged bloggers to discuss its content. The aim was to involve the subjects of the study in a constant dialogue. All the data collected during the research process was therefore channelled through the blog in an attempt to produce response and to test the significance of the material. This form of retrieving data is often referred to as action research:

“[…] a process of research in which the application of findings and an evaluation of their impact on practice become part of a cycle of research. This process, further, has become associated with a trend towards involving those affected by the research in the design and implementation of the research – to encourage them to participate as collaborators in the research rather then being subjects of it (Denscombe 2003, p. 57).

Action research is seen as “a strategy for social research rather than a specific method” and “does not specify any constraints when it comes to the means for data collection that might be adopted by the researcher” (Denscombe 2003, p. 58). The advantage of using action research is that it allows for the researcher to involve himself in the study and learn more about different aspects of the phenomenon and the objects being studied. As a consequence, structured self-reflection becomes a key part of the research process (Denscombe 2003, p. 58).

The author marketed the blog by submitting comments on other blogs sharing topics similar to the research and by linking to these blogs and their posts in daily entries. Additionally, specific individuals holding an authoritative status within political blog communities were notified of the blog’s existence. This active marketing process gradually increased the blog’s readership and incoming links. From August 2006 when the blog was launched, to the end of April 2007 when the research was ended, the blog had received 5,704 hits (not unique), 112 comments and ranked 193,562 on Technorati’s blog ranking list with 27 incoming links from 23 different blogs.

A result of the author’s effort to enhance the blog’s visibility by engaging with political blog communities was that it made the research and writing process more reflexive. The active engagement with other bloggers allowed for the author to gain a better understanding of political blogs and their context within the democratic election process. A similar research technique has also been employed in a previous study of blogs. In 2004 Schiano et al. (2004, p. 1144) conducted an ethnographic study aiming to understand blogs as a forum of personal expression from a blogger’s point of view. The team used conversational interviews to understand bloggers’ thoughts and habits, and in an attempt to better familiarise themselves with blogging, the team created a class blog within which they discussed their own research (Schiano et al. 2004, p. 1144). The difference and strength of the research-blog employed by the current study was that it encouraged feedback from other bloggers and therefore allowed for the researcher to engage with the subjects of the study in their natural settings. This technique represents a unique and innovative attempt to gain insight into the world of politics experienced by bloggers.