Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the development of e-campaigning in a party-centered democracy. Based on theoretical concepts of political communication research that are applied to explain recent changes in online campaigning, the study compares German party Web sites in two national election cycles by a quantitative content and structure analysis. The results show that major and minor parties fall more and more apart in cyberspace and that traditional offline trends in political communication are disregarded online.