ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a broad context for understanding parties in cyberspace by establishing some basic facts about parties’ presence on the web. It focuses on three interrelated areas: why and when parties go online; what they are actually doing on-line; and what implications their activities have for parties and the party system. In doing so we will revisit the continuing debate about party competition on-line and bring it up to date by assessing parties’ current activities on the WWW. Through these questions we not only want to classify party web-sites and analyse evolving on-line strategies, but also shed some additional light on the broader debates about the continuation and future form of political parties.
