Political parties and new media: the equalization vs. normalization debate The cyber optimist perspective, first articulated by scholars such as Rheingold (1994) in the mid-1990s, suggested that the Internet had the potential to “level the playing field” between major and minor political parties, thus undermining unequal power relations within societies. This “multiplier effect” for marginal political actors and the use of electronic voting systems to enable “Athenianstyle” direct democracy were characterized as a panacea for low voter turnout in countries such as the United States (Budge, 1996; Corrado and Firestone, 1996). The optimists argued that online communicative spaces had the potential to facilitate the “rational critical citizen discourse” associated with the Habermasian public sphere, with some studies suggesting an overall positive relationship between the use of the Internet for information retrieval and political engagement (Dahlberg, 2001; Johnson and Kaye, 2003; Shah et al., 2001). There was also some evidence to support an association between website presence and higher vote share and a link between consumption of online political news and the likelihood of visiting candidate and party websites (Gibson and McAllister, 2006; Sudulich and Wall, 2010). However, a more skeptical interpretation of digital politics emerged in the form of the normalization thesis. While cyber pessimists argued that online interactions were likely to promote homophily that would stifle political debate and exacerbate divisions between social groups (Hill and Hughes, 1997; Sunstein; 2007), the “normalizers” suggested that “politics as usual” would be perpetuated by new media technologies (Margolis and Resnick, 2000). The larger and better-resourced parties were still likely to benefit the most from new media technologies due to their more professional websites and the higher levels of public interest in their campaigns compared to those of minor parties. Much of the research into the functionality of party websites in countries such as Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom has offered support for this thesis (Gibson and McAllister, 2006; Schweitzer, 2008). Furthermore, this strand of research suggested that most of these parties used the Internet to create “brochureware” that provided policy information but provided little in the way of opportunities for citizens to become directly involved in the formation of these positions (Gibson, 2012; Jackson and Lilleker, 2009). The perceived loss of control and lack of resources were identified as two of the reasons why parties might be reluctant to provide more interactive features on their websites (Stromer-Galley, 2000).