Do Candidates Seek Personal Votes on the Internet? Constituency Candidates in the 2013 German Federal Elections

Abstract

The Internet provides new opportunities for political communication. How strategic are constituency candidates in exploiting these new opportunities and what are the contexts driving their choices? This paper envisions the Internet as a means for personal vote seeking on the campaign trail adopted by those candidates electorally motivated in this regard. It aims to explore this argument in theoretical and empirical ways and in light of survey data resulting from the 2013 German Candidate Study (GCS 2013). These data cover 41 per cent (N=1137) of all constituency candidates of major parties running in the 2013 campaign and enclose numerous questions on their campaign activities online.