“Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows”

Abstract

This article examines the use of the Internet by a range of political actors in the 2004 European Parliament election in Britain—candidates, citizens, parties, government, pressure groups, and the media. Specifically, it surveys the structure of online political communications and the amount and nature of electoral information and engagement opportunities available to citizens in the framework of recent theories of “third age of political communications.” Methodologically, the article builds on the identification ( n= 571), sampling ( n= 100), qualitative annotation, and quantitative content analysis of U.K.campaignWeb sites between mid-April and Election Day,June 10,2004. Evidence provides qualified support for previous findings that the online campaign, or the lack thereof,largely reflects the apathy and disillusionment of the press,national politicians, and the media with a distinctly second-order election.However,there are two important qualifications to this “politics as usual” scenario.First,political parties,candidates, and government agencies provided a considerably wider variety of political information and engagement opportunities than in the past. As only 7 percent of British adults used the Internet for electoral information, one might wonder why online contents were provided at all.Second,online information and engagement opportunities were structured on two underlying dimensions, of which one is overtly political—a public communication versus political communication cleavage—while the other—replication versus innovation of techno-political practice—touches upon the political economy of Web production in the “third media age.”