E-politics: the use of websites as a communication channel
for political parties

Abstract: Political parties have traditionally served their stakeholders through the
traditional media of radio, television and the print media. However, with
the advent of the Internet, there has been a paradigm shift from the
orthodox method of information provision and communication to the use of
web sites in serving stakeholders. This phenomenon provides a new
opportunity for political parties to reach out to various stakeholders in
new and exciting ways. The purpose of this study was to investigate how
political parties are using the public (outer) Internet layer to serve
stakeholder groups. 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 Sweden) representing the left and right from each
country, were investigated. In order to collect the data, direct
observation/interaction with the web sites, as well as interviews with
those within each party who were involved with the web site, were used. The
findings indicate that political parties use web sites for information
provision and communication purposes as well as campaign and fundraising
activities. The findings also show that the stakeholders and the content of
each web site differs from party-to-party as well as from country-to-
country, indicating both a left vs. right (i.e. political) difference in
such web sites exists, as does a U.S. vs. Swedish (i.e. cultural
differences).