Websites as a Communication Channel for Political Parties

Abstract

A recent trend among political parties is to establish a web site to communicate their messages to the public. It also affords them a new and creative way to engage with the electorate. Political parties establish this web site as a supplement to the traditional media of television, radio and newspaper. This is because a lot of the electorate especially the youth and women tends to go to these political web site to solicit for information to make an inform decision. The purpose of this study was to investigate how political parties are using the Internet to serve their stakeholders. To reach this purpose, three research questions were stated: How the objectives (benefits) of political party web sites can be described; how the stakeholders served on these web sites can be described; and finally how the web sites design can be described. To answer these research questions, four case studies (two political party websites from the US and two from India), were investigated. In order to collect the data, direct observation/interaction with the web sites was used. The findings indicate that the stakeholders and the content of each web site differ from party-to-party as well as from country-to-country, indicating both a political as well as cultural differences. Keywords: Communication channel, web site, political parties, stakeholder.

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