The Early Political Web, 1995-2005: A ten-year observational research seeking evidence of eDemocracy in the information architecture of political parties web sites worldwide
Scholarly interest for the impact of technologies on democracy has raised in parallel to the decline of political participation. Technology has often been seen as either one of the causes of the crisis of representative democracy or as a powerful remedy to heal the negative externalities generated by party oligopolies. The study of the impact of new media in party politics or presidential elections dates back the forties (with the outgrowth of radio) and has evolved in cyclical waves until today, covering the emergence of television, the development of global telecommunications, the birth of internet and finally what's popularly called the Web 2.0. The notion of eDemocracy emerges from this dynamic, but is in a league of its own. There is no agreement on many of the terms that one needs to use to dissect its meaning. Scholars diverge on virtually every foundational concept: from the very definition of democracy and interactivity, to the core functions of political parties, to the definition of propaganda as opposed to political communication or to political marketing. As a consequence of this, there is little agreement on both what could be done in theory with eDemocracy and what is actually done in practice. A permanent tension exist between idealtypes and real types in this domain. The aim of this research is to prove this thesis with the largest and most global research unit of political parties web sites at the time of writing. The choice of an information architecture approach has allowed to cover some uncharted territory while providing a first set of data on the structures of the political web (in 2004-2005) for public scrutiny. The core of this research contribution consists in a basic taxonomy and a set of data (on the intentions and on the information architecture) resulting from a 10 years observational research on the early actors of the political web (stricto sensu i.e. 2073 political parties web sites), reviewed with a new degree of detail (through an ad hoc software procedure aiming at dissecting ...