ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web (WWW) is used increasingly for communication by citizens and governments in most advanced democracies. Systematic study of its uses by, and effects on, traditional political actors such as parties and their voters, however, have generally been confined to the national level (Margolis et al., 1997, 1999; Gibson and Ward, 1998, 2000b, 2000c, 2002; Tops et al., 2000; Newell, 2001). This chapter seeks to address this deficit by investigating the use of online technologies for parties at the state and territory level in Australia. Specifically, the goals of the chapter are threefold: first, to profile the overall levels of web activity by parties at the state level and the ease with which those sites can be accessed; second, to show how far the sites focus on opening the parties up to greater democratic scrutiny through information provision and feedback; and, finally, to compare parties’ performance online across states and consider how far other social and political factors are influencing their uses of the Internet. In doing so, not only will we provide a fuller picture of the enthusiasm of political actors in Australia for the new media technologies, but we will also begin to build a theoretical understanding of why some are more enthusiastic than others. Does party outlook drive the move to get wired? Does federalism play a role at all in the diffusion of new ICTs? Do certain states and territories have a greater web activity than others and, if so, is this related to demographic characteristics, such as the size of the urban population, or institutional factors, such as the electoral cycle or which party is in power? Perhaps none of these is significant and it is party outlook that determines most often who is online. In order to address these questions we focus on the federal, state and territory websites of the two major parties plus those of the most active online minor party, the Australian Greens.
