Described variously as a non-event, the dog that didn’t bark and a flop, the UK’s first ‘net election’ shocked all but the wise and sober in failing to re-fashion the landscape of British electoral politics. As in the United States six months earlier, the reality of the first election in which the internet played a role undermined the excessive expectations and heady rhetoric of the e-vanguard.

But what did anyone expect? What seismic changes were claimed for e-politics? How seriously should they be taken?

The fact that politics has not been transformed – relationships rebalanced, citizens empowered, virtual conversations initiated, seats won or lost – because of the internet is hardly a surprise or a disappointment. After all, the mighty medium of television, which has dominated British politics for over 40 years, has had no such effect. In short, it is quite possible to argue that the internet is re-shaping politics without expecting it to transform politics within the course of one four-week election campaign.

Rather than searching for the miraculous and transformative qualities of the internet, this report sets out to:

• provide an analysis of the expectations and context of the 2001 e-election

• examine the innovations and value-added features that the net brought to election campaigning and coverage in the 2001 election

• offer some recommendations for the future of e-politics

In 1959, Britain had its first ‘TV election’. Or, more accurately, it was the first British election campaign to be covered on TV. In 1947, there were only 15,000 TV sets in Britain - by 1950 there were 350,000, but the BBC (as the only TV broadcaster) had entered into an agreement with the Government not to cover election campaigns in case they influenced voters.

By 1959, the landscape had changed in three ways: there were 11 million TV sets in Britain (following the mass purchase of sets at the time of the Coronation); there were two national TV channels, BBC and ITV (established in 1954); and, after the opening of critical TV debate during the Suez crisis and ITV’s coverage of the 1958 Rochdale by-election, broadcasters felt brave enough to cover the election campaign.

The televised campaign of 1959 was regarded as a watershed in the relationship between politicians and the voters. Treneman and McQuail observed that:

‘In no other medium could one virtually sit within 15 feet of a

attention.’ (Television and the Political Image, p.14, 1961)

In retrospect, the role of TV in the 1959 election was pretty dull and far from groundbreaking. The politicians did not know how to use the new medium: political interviews tended to be stilted, visually frozen and over-deferential; party political broadcasts resembled radio talks; politicians presented themselves to the cameras - when they remembered to do so at all - as if they were addressing a public meeting. In short, most of what happened on television replicated old campaigning traditions from a pre-TV age. By 1964, when Labour’s young, new leader, Harold Wilson, had learned to cultivate TV opportunities - much to the cost of his opponent, Alec Douglas Home - television started to play a pivotal role in election campaigns. It was arguably not until 2001 that the three main parties all had leaders who had grown up within and adapted themselves to a TV-dominated democracy.

The 2001 e-campaign was 1959 all over again. Everyone knew that the net was important, but few knew how to use it inventively. Old forms of publicity were replicated within a new medium: parties and candidates set up web sites that looked rather like printed brochures or low-budget TV shows or ads for insurance policies. It was a campaign of borrowed content showcased within a glossy new medium.

In fact, there was not one e-campaign in 2001, but three, each trying to hit different targets, each performing different roles.

This model imported the methods of e-commerce to politics. E-commerce is concerned with selling goods and services via the web. E-politics campaigners were concerned to sell parties, policies and politicians via the web. As with all marketing campaigns, the criteria of success were measurable. Just as selling books or holidays on the web succeeds or fails in terms of how many books or holidays are sold that would not otherwise have been bought, e-campaigners would be judged ultimately in terms of seats won or lost, new members or activists attracted to their parties, amounts of online donations or requests for information.

Much of what was offered online had little to do with traditional vote-seeking, but started from the assumption that voters were somehow under-represented and required strategies to fight back against the party machines and the media elite. There were four main elements within this model:

1. Online irreverence. A plethora of web sites provided opportunities for voters to laugh at, reconstruct and humiliate the parties and politicians. These sites circulated virally at a stunning speed, creating a bush network of populist scoffs and sniggers, unprecedented since the yellow press of the 18th century. This genre was to the majority of under 35-year-olds who were not to vote on June 7 what the Today programme was for the political junkies - it was a cultural snub to the postures and affectations of party politics.

2. Tactical voting. The several web sites which offered opportunities for electors to swap their votes with those in other constituencies, were a direct attack upon the aggregative outcomes of most electoral choices. Claiming to provide an alternative to wasted votes and a mechanism for voting against a selected greater evil, tactical voting sites offered voters the chance – or, at least, the illusion – of being able to transcend the traditional barriers of electoral arithmetic.

3. Conversational politics. Web forums and e-mail lists offered spaces for public debate and informal conversation, enabling voters to exchange views with other voters.

4. Narrowcasting. Several web sites targetted distinct groups of voters, ranging from gays to Muslims to teachers to the elderly. These sites reflected the fragmentary nature of the web and its capacity to narrowcast messages to and from specific sections of the electorate, traditionally overlooked by the broad canvass of broadcasting.

The first two models are concerned with utilising the internet as an instrumental power. But what about the internet as a social and political phenomenon in its own right? What did the parties – or anyone else, for that matter – have to say about the future of the internet, about the information society or e-democracy or the new economy? In the Scandinavian countries these issues have generated real debates in electoral politics, but in the UK this model was largely conspicuous by its absence from the election.

This is stranger still when one considers that the 2001 election took place within the context of a major anxiety about the disconnections between parties, Parliament and the people. The first week of the campaign was full of media reports about an allegedly apathetic electorate. The Conservatives accused Labour of being dominated by spin and unwilling to listen. Labour characterised the Tories as out of touch and incapable of learning from the electorate. On June 7, voters provided some credence to both main parties by staying away from the polls in greater numbers than at any time since the democratic franchise began.

One in four eligible citizens did not exercise their right to vote - as many as 62% of first-time voters and 55% of under-35-year-olds did not vote. The Government, elected with a bigger majority than any other since 1945 (apart from its own majority in 1997), received votes from only 25% of eligible voters – 20% fewer than the abstainers. Surely, this was the election in which the parties could usefully have been talking about how the internet could be used to re-engage citizens in democratic politics?

With the exception of a passing mention of ‘electronic consultations’ in the Liberal Democrat manifesto, the only reference to the internet in the entire campaign was a distractionary policy announcement by Labour about cracking down on online child molesters. This was hardly designed to inspire public confidence in the democratic potential of the net.

The Hansard e-democracy programme was developed to explore ways that parliamentary democracy could adapt to, and be invigorated by, the new information and communication technologies (ICTs.) Strengthening the relationship between representatives and represented could result in better-informed MPs, more connected and less frustrated citizens and a more legitimate democratically rooted Parliament. The objective here is not to replace Parliament by some technopopulist version of direct democracy, but to strengthen representative democracy. This will require a political will to explore the democratic opportunities offered by the inherent interactivity of digital media. Ironically, the e-marketing model of electioneering tended to steer clear of authentic interactivity – rightly so, from the no-risk perspective of traditional campaigning. Some critics, coming from the e-democratic perspective, berated the party web sites for not inviting voters to discuss their policies online. But this is to misunderstand the difference between selling policies and engaging citizens in the formulation of policy. The latter offers a counterweight to spin, superficiality and secrecy in democratic governance, but is unlikely to be adopted within the more aggressively competitive context of electoral politics.

The extraordinary hype that preceded the US presidential election of 2000 and the subsequent debacle of the e-strategists (examined in our earlier report: Elections in the Age of the Internet: lessons from the United States) served to protect the UK election from the more embarrassing excesses of e-rhetoric. Few in Britain ever believed that the 2001 election would be won, lost or significantly affected by anything that happened on the internet. And they were right.

But there is a danger of such modest sobriety resulting in an exaggerated dismissal of the political role of the internet. There has been a tendency to see the internet in the 2001 election as a flash in the pan, an ephemeral encounter with a faddish distraction. This view is misguided for several reasons:

• The 2001 election was unusually predictable and rather dull. Even television, which put huge resources into covering this election, failed badly to engage the electorate. If TV were being judged by its ability to connect with voters in 2001 it could well be dismissed as an obsolete medium. But not all elections will be like this one. The role of the internet in a more closely fought or controversial election could well be much more important. In this respect, the internet may have a key role to play in providing information and facilitating public deliberation in the forthcoming euro referendum.

• Whatever happens, a significant section of the population will want to use the net as a convenient information and communication tool. People use the net increasingly for work, sending mail, playing games, shopping, banking, learning and booking holidays; it is inconceivable that they will not also choose to use it when deciding how to vote. If politicians or the media were to evacuate the internet, others - perhaps less democratically accountable - would surely fill the void; it is important that the key players in democratic life are effectively represented on the net.

• From radio phone-ins to reality TV, there is lots of evidence to suggest that people these days prefer media featuring ‘real people’ to the staged media events of traditional politics. The interactivity of the internet, which breaks down old barriers between producers and receivers, is a perfect medium for the more inclusive, participatory aspirations of contemporary democracy.

• Even if the internet in its present form is far from being all that e-enthusiasts claim, it will not remain in its present form for much longer. By the time of the next general election in 2005/6, far more people will have access to and skill in using the internet. Web sites are likely to become faster, better designed and less of a novelty item. As more platforms become available for connecting to the internet - from mobile phones and palm tops to digital TV - e-politics will become much more accessible and adapted to voters’ lifestyles.

The 2001 election witnessed a watershed in voter disengagement. This may have been related to the particular circumstances of one election, but even if this is so, it is consistent with a long-term loss of interest or trust in the traditional democratic process by a number of socio-demographic groups.

Not only did 2001 see the lowest voter turnout since 1918; perhaps more importantly, it was the first election in which it was considered ‘cool’ to disengage. This was made pretty explicit on the web site of the popular Big Brother programme:

If future e-campaigns – by the parties, candidates and pressure groups – can capture the playfulness and voter-centredness of the joke, game and spoof sites that abounded in 2001, the internet may well play a key role in politically re-energising a turned-off generation. Rather than seeking to compete with traditional media for the attention of an ageing and dwindling population of news consumers, e-communicators should turn their attention to the majority for whom electoral politics has to be re-invented before it becomes fashionable.

We will not have to wait for the next general election to evaluate the significance of e-politics in the UK. If and when there is a referendum on joining the euro the net will play a key role. This will be a single-issue debate, involving passionate views on each side and a complexity of information that could be well served by the depth qualities of the net. The scope for streamlining online communications - by not having catch-all ‘Vote Yes’ or ‘Vote No’ web sites, but target sites for specific social groups - could contribute tangibly to voters’ sense of feeling informed or uninformed.

The next general election, expected in 2005 or 2006, will not simply be the UK’s second internet election, but possibly the last election in which personal computers will be the main access platform to the internet. The Government’s declared aim to switch off digital TV by the end of this decade means that the election after next could well be Britain’s first digital TV election – with all sets having interactive functions, including internet access and e-mail. Arguably, the incorporation of e-interactivity into the traditional domestic sphere will be the real coming of age of the net. In this sense, 2001 and the next elections could be seen as dress rehearsals for the coming arrival of universally accessible e-politics.

Dr Stephen Coleman

Director, Hansard e-democracy programme

e-democracy@lse.ac.uk

Spinning On The Web

This was the election in which everyone had to have a web site, though many who had them were not quite sure what to do with them. It was often a case of technology in search of a real purpose. In this chapter we look at how the parties used their web sites and other ICTs; how non-party web sites provided new features which gave voters more control over the election; how the traditional media went online; and what the public made of it all. Subsequent chapters will examine candidates’ sites, discussion sites and sites devoted to first-time voters.

Election campaigning is a form of political marketing. It is about selling a product (the party) to consumers (the electorate). E-campaigning is about using the internet and electronic communications, such as e-mail, SMS, PDA, WAP, digital television, online chat and discussions to enhance more traditional marketing methods.

In this section we look at how the three main parties used e-campaigning to complement traditional campaigning via television, radio, print, telephone and billboards. The similarities and differences between the e-campaigns of the three major parties are explored and the extent to which the parties utilised the potential of the internet to connect with the electorate is assessed.

The evidence presented here is based on daily monitoring of the party web sites; in-depth interviews with the three party web masters before and after the election period (Justin Jackson, Conservative Party Web master, Kate McCarthy and Andrew Saxton, Labour e-campaigns and Mark Pack, Liberal Democrat Web master) and a national poll, conducted by MORI specifically for this research.

The internet offers four advantages over traditional campaign media:

1. Multimedia – the internet offers the capacity to combine the visual, audio, print and video qualities of other media and can distribute text via e-mail for much less than the price of a postal mail-out.
2. Personalisation – the internet provides targeted information at any level of depth for individuals and interest groups; it can adapt delivery according to users’ preferences via personalisation of content, e-mail and ‘narrowcasting’.
3. Interactivity – the internet is dialogical, not monological as is the traditional media. Interaction, dialogue and feedback between hundreds of users is possible via ‘clickable’ links, e-mail, bulletin boards, discussion forums, chat rooms and newsgroups.
4. Unmediated – the internet gives the parties direct access to the electorate and vice versa, without the intervention and manipulation of the media. For political parties, this means getting a message across to the electorate without intervention; for citizens this means getting information straight from the horse’s mouth.

How far did the parties capitalise on these four advantages and what did the internet campaigns really achieve? With the exception of tactical voting - considered below - there is little evidence that the internet was a decisive influence on voting. However, the success of an e-campaign can be judged on more than mere voting outcomes. This chapter argues that the e-campaigns were successful as far as they went; but failed to exploit the full potential of the internet.

The main advantage of the internet to the parties was that it offered them a chance to address themselves directly to the electorate, without the intervention or interpretation of the media. When interviewed before the election was called, the three parties identified different reasons for running e-campaigns.

• Conservative webmaster, Justin Jackson, identified the internet’s interactivity and feedback as important: ‘What other medium is there where you can actually listen to people and get feedback on a continual basis? It’s the whole idea of ‘narrowcasting’. It’s the first time in my political lifetime that you can have an ongoing political dialogue with individual people about political issues.’

• For Kate McCarthy of the Labour Party, the e-campaign was part of a tool-box supporting the party structure: ‘Anything that we are doing online is to convert people into the next stage along in the process.’ The web was being used to support the party by converting people into a more active role – urging inactive members to work actively for the party and persuading supporters to join, donate to party funds or volunteer time. The Labour Party aimed to get its site into the top 20 most viewed web sites during the campaign period, and claim they achieved this.

• For Mark Pack of the Liberal Democrats, the internet created a level playing field where smaller, less well-funded parties could compete on equal terms with the larger parties: ‘The web site will give us another way of getting that information out - hopefully to a slightly wider group of people. If we just put it on the web site…it’s effectively a cost-free exercise.’

All three party e-strategists agreed that e-campaigning was just one tool alongside others. E-campaigning would serve a variety of purposes, some of which could also be done offline and some of which could only be done online.

Party web site features

Parties offered the following:

• Public web site – Users could visit a web site to gain information and interact with the three parties.

• Homepage – All three web sites opened with identifying features such as party colours, logos and promotional graphics or adverts/campaign ‘posters’ and links to the various sections of the site.

• Daily news stories – Visitors could read the campaign news headlines and top stories (which were updated up to 10 times a day), with instant rebuttals of stories and events throughout the campaign. The parties could mediate information and content as they wished, highlighting certain stories or incidents and glossing over others.

• Join the party online – Users could join via the web site by either paying online or printing-out and posting a membership form. This option made it possible to bring membership to people’s attention via prominent display on the web site. For users, this proved a simple method of joining the party, fitting into the e-commerce model of transacting online with which people are becoming increasingly familiar. It worked – the Labour Party claims that as many people joined it online as joined via the telephone during the election period.

• Make a donation online – This transaction was reported as being particularly successful in the US presidential election in 2000, but was much less of a phenomenon in this election due to tighter restrictions on fundraising in British electoral law. People could donate money online without having to commit to being a party member. This was the online delivery of a transaction that in the past had happened over the telephone.

• Contact the party online – Users could interact with the party via an online e-mail form or e-mail address. This was the main online route for interactive feedback to the parties. The parties claim that they usually responded to e-mails within 24 hours, but this was not as reliable as it should have been. It is likely that some slipped through the net. (See box about the test questions e-mailed to the parties.)

• Policy information – During the campaign the parties focussed on their manifesto. The manifestos were available to download online (and were available in different languages on the Conservative site). On the Labour site, additional manifestos, including ones directed at youth and business, were available. Detailed policy information on a range of issues was provided free of charge in this way whereas, previously, people would have had to buy a copy of the manifesto from their newsagent.

• Party Election Broadcasts – These were available to download in a video/audio clip. To watch them, users needed Real Player software, a sound card and speakers, which are not available on lower range computers. These were probably used very little by the general public - who rarely complain about missing election broadcasts. Having these available was more of a statement of the parties’ technological ability than an addition to the democratic process.

• Links to candidate information - Users could find out who their candidate was via the party web sites. All three parties gave online information about their candidates. The Liberal Democrats best utilised the potential of the internet in this capacity by providing a database (searchable by name and constituency) of all candidates, including a biography and link to their web site (if they had one). The Conservatives offered a ‘Find my Candidate’ function, searchable by postcode, which provided a short biography of all candidates. Labour only provided an alphabetical candidate list in a Word document - this lacked the interactive features that could have made it more useful for users.

• Links to other sites – Visitors could use the party web sites to gain access to related organisations. All three main parties included links to sister parties or organisations, such as Conservative Future, Liberal Democrat Youth and Students, other European Labour organisations or candidate web sites.

• Speeches – Labour offered a list of the week’s main speeches, the Conservatives and Lib Dems offered ‘click-throughs’ where appropriate. These allowed people to get full versions of the scripts rather than just sound-bitten extracts that usually appeared on other traditional news media. This took advantage of the textuality of the internet and its ability to store and deliver large quantities of information, allowing people to directly access the news source.

• Free Downloads – Users could download free cartoons, screen savers and posters from the party web sites. This is certainly something that could not have been delivered prior to e-campaigning and it added a ‘fun’ element to the campaign. This feature was not available on the Liberal Democrat web site.

• Daily e-bulletin – Users could sign up for daily e-mail bulletins on campaign news. It was possible to request certain types of e-mailed information – such as ‘health’ or ‘education’. The three parties sent e-mails out daily with ‘click-through' links to the full story on their web sites.

• Online application for a postal vote – This feature allowed people to ‘click through’ to the postal vote application web site, as an alternative to telephoning. For voters, this was important information, since it made the possibility of a postal vote better known. This feature was not available from the Liberal Democrats.

• E-mail a page to a friend – This encouraged users to share a page with a friend via e-mail and therefore disseminated the party’s material more widely. Labour confirmed, when interviewed, that the public used this feature surprisingly rarely. This feature was not available from the Liberal Democrats.

• Party-only extranet – A password-protected area for party members, including downloadable campaign material, graphics, advice on how to respond to voters’ questions and reflections on the day’s events and news. The Labour Party extranet included an area for members to e-mail in their campaign experiences to share with other members. The Labour Party extranet for councillors included a bulletin board on which they could exchange views and experiences. The Conservative extranet offered graphics for candidates to use on their own web sites and published around 100 documents a day - with suggested party lines to take - including all party press releases. The parties confirmed that extranets proved a successful and cheap way of disseminating information and templates within the parties.

• Internal SMS – All the parties used SMS (text messaging) and mobile telephony as internal organisational tools, as successors to using pagers.

• Media centre – Labour and the Liberal Democrats offered media centres with searchable press releases and candidate information. ‘It is a resource for the media. We have downloadable press releases or press conferences so you can really get access to them.’ said Kate McCarthy from the Labour Party.

• Web cast press conferences – Labour and the Conservatives web cast their daily press conferences. In Labour’s case this was done via mobile telephony when on location away from London. This benefited journalists, particularly those outside London and on the campaign trail. It also benefited the parties by making their message and news agendas more widely spread across the country.

• WAP/PDA – Users could sign up for daily downloads of news and other features to their WAP phones or PDAs. The Conservatives confirmed that PDA proved a popular method of keeping up to date and offered a portable alternative to the web. This feature was not available from the Liberal Democrats.

Each of the parties offered certain unique functions:

• My Manifesto – This was as close to genuine interactivity as any party got. Users answered a set of questions on the Conservative web site about their socio-demographic profile and were then presented with a personalised manifesto based on their answers. So, if you were recently married, the ‘Starting a Family’ section of the manifesto would be highlighted. This was an innovative attempt to personalise internet content. The idea of personalising content - and particularly policy - to suit users’ interests is one of the strengths of the internet and was under-explored in this election. My Manifesto took a step in the right direction, but it was not detailed enough to produce truly individualised results.

• Live web cast interviews – The Conservative site web cast four live interviews with senior shadow cabinet members during the election. Site users could e-mail in their questions for the shadow ministers prior to the web cast - which comprised a face-to-face video recording where an interviewer put the public’s questions to the politician. For the party, this provided an opportunity to ‘produce’ its own television-style programme without the constraints of balance and time pressures. Although the questions were supplied by the ‘audience’, they were selected by the party. All that this amounted to was the transfer of a broadcast model to the internet - it was no different from calling a radio phone-in or posting a question to a BBC web cast. In fact, these were less interactive than the BBC’s web casts, in that the public’s questions were asked by an intermediary. The public’s voice was not heard on the internet and the public did not have any chance to respond to, or interact directly with, the politicians.

• Public use of SMS – In the last week of the campaign, users could send a text message to a friend’s mobile phone from a choice of about 15 messages on the Labour Party web site. Four mass text messages were sent out to a list of about 100,000 previously collected mobile phone numbers. One message was sent at 10.45pm on the final Friday night of the campaign to target younger voters - focussing on changing the licensing laws. A further two were sent on polling day to encourage people to vote. The fourth, sent on 8 June, was to say ‘thank you.’ It was hoped that viral marketing would encourage the spread of these messages across the country. This was the most innovative use of SMS during the campaign, seeking to create positive news coverage and cultivate an image of Labour being in touch with younger voters.

• Ruup4it web site – The Labour Party were the only party to create a new web site specifically targeted at younger voters. It covered the launch of the youth manifesto and enlisted celebrity support as well as providing information about voting and Parliament. For the party, this was a key part of their youth initiative; for most younger voters, the effect was probably unnoticed. (See chapter on the internet and first-time voters.)

• In Your Area – This feature allowed users to click on an interactive map or type in their postcode to find out what Labour had done in their area on a series of issues. One third of the visitors to the site used this feature. For the Party, this was an effective and interactive way of presenting policy information about achievements of the Labour Government to local campaigners and to non-party users. For users, it provided up to five pages of detailed, local policy information about 41 different policy areas. It was the most systematic and comprehensive method of presenting policy information of all the parties.

• Mortgage Calculator – This feature allowed users to type in the value of their mortgages and calculate how much money they would save under Labour. For the Party, this was yet another way of presenting campaign material; for the public, it offered little explanation of how the sums added up or how the calculation was made.

• Cut ‘n’ Run game – The web site offered a game where users could propose cuts to public services in the packman-style of older computer games. This served to highlight and ridicule the Conservatives’ tax plans. For the Party, it was intended as a humorous way of getting a message across. The game was forwarded to an estimated 200,000 e-mail addresses as an ‘exe’ file through people forwarding e-mails.

• Tony Blair message – The site included an audio/video welcome message from the Prime Minister. By providing footage online that was unavailable elsewhere, the Party could attract people to the site. Labour had intended to use more dedicated web site-only footage to attract users, but this never reached fruition because of time constraints on senior politicians.

• Campaign diary – The site included a daily diary, with photographs and short notices sent in from campaigners across the country. ‘It will be more out-and-about, less ‘newsy’ based, and will be a dynamic and changing area of the site,’ said Kate McCarthy from Labour e-campaigns. Five digital cameras were on the campaign trail sending footage to Millbank Tower for uploading. This section aimed to get supporters motivated and to demonstrate the ‘human’ side of the election campaign as experienced on the ground - it proved popular with activists across the country.

• Shop online – The site included an online shop for buying merchandise. This resembles most closely the e-commerce model of online marketing for any product (from fizzy drinks to football teams).

• Charles Kennedy web cast – The party leader participated in a live web cast interview, similar to the Conservative Party web casts. In the case of the Liberal Democrats, this offered voters the chance to see more of their leader, who is often overshadowed by coverage of the larger parties.

• Pop-up box – The Liberal Democrats were the only party to use a pop-up box: a small screen that ‘floats’ over the web site’s home page. This is particularly used for ‘pushing’ content at first-time visitors to the site. In this case, the box encouraged people to join the party, and was apparently successful - the Liberal Democrats claim that 1.5% of their current members have joined via the internet. Boxes were widely used in the US election, with considerable effect, but were rejected this time by Labour and the Conservatives for being intrusive. If pop-up boxes are over-used, they tend to become intrusive and annoying. The Liberal Democrats used ‘cookies’ so that the boxes did not appear when the visitor returned to the home page.

• Online petitions – The Liberal Democrats were the only party to include an online petition. This utilised the web to allow more people to sign - but could equally have been done offline.

• Leader’s web site – Charles Kennedy was the only party leader to have his own web site, separate from the party site.

Parties stood to gain from e-campaigning far more than the electorate. For the parties, the internet made campaigning easier, enabling cheaper, faster, broader, more efficient delivery of their messages to the electorate. All the benefits of audio (radio), visual (television) and textual (press and posters) forms could be combined so that the parties could express themselves on their own terms, without mediation by traditional media. The internet allowed the parties to store and present unlimited volumes of information and to generate, speed-up and automate supportive activities, such as fundraising and volunteering.

For those voters with access to the internet, the e-campaigns provided them with easier access to a selection of party information, such as specific sections of manifestos, speeches or party election broadcasts, retrievable at times that suited them, for as long as they wanted, without the selective and possibly biased interpretation of the media. The e-campaign undoubtedly gave voters direct access to more information from the parties than would have been disseminated to the public in previous elections. However, very little of what was available online was unique to the internet; much of it was merely the reformatting of existing offline content.

The internet was primarily used by the parties for the online delivery of previously offline marketing material. What was previously done on a billboard or leaflet was ‘e-ified’. In general, there was a lack of connection with the voters. Interactivity was limited to ineffective e-mail feedback channels and tentative attempts to create personalised content - such as the Conservatives’ ‘My Manifesto’ feature. Voters could not ‘answer back’ to the parties any more than they could before the arrival of the internet – and indeed, could respond a good deal less than in the days of local public meetings.

Of the four advantages of the internet mentioned earlier in this chapter, the parties have taken advantage only of the unmediated nature of the internet and, to some extent, its multimedia potential. They have not yet capitalised upon its interactivity or its personalisation abilities. As Kate McCarthy stated, ‘We won’t be [‘narrowcasting’] because we have limited resources and limited time. There are other things for us, bigger priorities.’

The parties’ failure to exploit the net’s interactivity and ability to personalise and ‘narrowcast’ content is reflective of the parties’ inability to interact with the public more generally. As party membership levels decline and voter turnout falls, the parties must address this question and reassess their e-campaign as part of a wider problem of disconnection. The internet is not a panacea for the problems of democracy, but it may serve, if its true capabilities are optimised, to strengthen the connection between parties and voters, as well as citizens and Parliament.

Much has been made of the open, interactive and often anarchic nature of the internet. Unlike broadcasting, it eludes centralised control mechanisms and can easily host a plethora of many-to-many communications.

Much of the literature on the development of online communication has predicted that the internet will become increasingly dominated by the major offline institutions and interests - such as corporations, governments, big parties and established media. This is sometimes referred to as the normalisation thesis. By contrast, others have advanced a mobilisation thesis, seeing the internet as providing for an opening up of the communication environment to greater opportunities for traditionally excluded, marginalised or under-resourced social groups and interests. Our research in this election did not attempt to explore fully the normalisation/mobilisation theories. To do so satisfactorily, one would need to have examined how marginal, fringe or independent candidates used ICTs for campaigning and whether the relatively inexpensive access to these new media resulted in significant pay-offs. For example, one would have wanted to look at whether the 10 Green candidates who saved their deposits operated a particularly strong online campaign - or whether candidates from less-resourced parties had new opportunities to further their political agendas and connect with voters as a result of e-campaigns.

Without seeking to draw any conclusions about normalisation or mobilisation, we can note that the internet opened some spaces for new kinds of information-sharing and communicating in the 2001 election which probably would not have emerged without it. These new opportunities benefited voters (and non-voters) by providing channels for a public mood of disenchantment with traditional electoral politics. This mood seemed to have been rooted in the following attitudinal trends:

• a breakdown in traditional deference to authority and institutions, accompanied by a more critical challenging of all propositions about governance;
• frustration about the predictability of the election result;
• frustration with the politics of spin and stage management;
• a popular feeling that the public is not listened to;
• a disenchantment with the style and apparent exclusivity of much political discourse - especially as shown on TV.

The public felt under-represented in the political process as they perceived it - so the new opportunities offered by the internet served as strategies of the represented to make their feelings known. In an instrumental sense, none of these strategies could be seen to have produced tangible electoral effects (with the possible exception of online tactical voting.) But in an election where over 40% of the eligible population did not choose to vote, one should not judge political communication strategies purely in terms of their effects on votes cast.

Online irreverence

The 2001 election witnessed a mushrooming of political humour web sites. Almost daily e-mails would arrive with links to new sites, funnier caricatures of well-known candidates, more inventive (and destructive) ways of reconfiguring political images and new games loosely based upon electoral themes. There was a fervour about the spread of these sites, particularly among young people, that was unmissable.

Overall, online humour and games successfully tapped into a popular feeling about the disconnectedness of politics from people - especially young people. The parties should learn from these sites that the public (or a significant section of the online public, at least) wants a much more interactive use of web sites and a different style of relating to politics. This was the public that felt more comfortable with Have I Got News For You than the News at Ten.

Tactical voting existed long before the advent of online politics. It has never been an officially sanctioned party policy, so channels have not existed for party supporters in different constituencies to swap votes. The web is a perfect medium for such distant transactions.

Did tactical voting, organised online, change any results? In two constituencies there is strong evidence that this did happen:

• In Dorset South, Conservative MP, Ian Bruce (ironically, one of the most e-friendly Conservative MPs) was ousted by a majority of 153 votes - with 185 pledges received on the tactical voting web sites.

This was the first UK election in which traditional media coverage moved online. In 1997 no national newspaper or broadcaster ran an online election service of any sophistication. The GE97 web site, set up by a commercial company called Online Magic, was unique in covering the election online. In 2001, every major broadcaster and broadsheet newspaper (though not the tabloids, which remained resolutely offline) had an online presence.

Thanks to the online media sites, the 2001 electorate was exposed to more information - freely available and from several perspectives - than any generation of voters since the rise of the mass franchise. It is easy to overlook the extent to which the internet has established an era of information abundance. But what were the information bonuses for voters from the online media? What could voters find online that was new and useful?

Two media web sites excelled above all others in 2001: BBC News Online and the Guardian Politics site. The former started life in 1996; the latter was launched just before the 2001 election was called. Both offered a number of key information bonuses:

• the main issues in the election and a concise, accessible account of the main parties’ policies;
• a guide to the key marginal constituencies;
• a full list of candidates in each constituency across the UK;
• analyses of opinion polls as they were released;
• an Online 1000 panel who were surveyed on various issues throughout the campaign;
• a Persuade me to vote feature, in which the public tried to urge intended non-voters to participate in the election;
• a Virtual Vote feature, allowing users to calculate the results using an online ‘swingometer’;
• an archive of recordings from BBC coverage of elections since 1945;
• links to Newsround and an If U Were Prime Minister feature in which young people could put forward their own policies;
• a guide to the voting system;
• a guide to the local elections;
• regular, archived web casts;
• a range of discussion areas.

• the Aristotle feature – a search engine enabling users to find MPs and candidates for their constituencies, biographical information about candidates and a capacity to search for lists - such as all MPs who went to Oxbridge or all Conservatives who were married etc;
• a daily e-mail newsletter - sent to 3000 people - including a pithy round-up of the day’s election stories, a fictional candidate’s campaign diary and a fictional floating voter’s comment on the day’s events;
• election cartoons by Steve Bell;
• election posters past and present;
• a feature tracking MPs who had changed their policies over time;
• a discussion forum, including a variety of topics.

These sites proved to be immensely popular. On average, there were half a million page views on each day of the campaign for BBC’s Vote 2001. The high point for the site was election night and Friday, 8 June when people wanted immediate, specific information - often about their own constituencies. After the polls closed on 7 June, the BBC site clocked up 2 million page views; on Friday it had 15.75 million page views – 50% more than the number of pages viewed at BBC News Online in last November’s US election coverage.

The Guardian’s Election 2001 site … (stats to come)

Features like BBC News Online’s Persuade me to vote really went to the heart of the ‘apathy’ debate (as did C4’s Politics Isn’t Working); the Guardian’s Aristotle database enabled users to seek politically useful information that would have been difficult and time-consuming to find; access to online poll data allowed users to interpret the poll trends for themselves; and features such as BBC News Online’s sound and video archives of past elections were real gems for political junkies.

How did the public use the internet during the election campaign? To find out, some poll questions were commissioned from MORI; these were placed on MORI’s General Public Omnibus Survey and were asked to a representative sample of 1,999 adults aged over 18 in face-to-face interviews at home between 21 and 26 June 2001.

How many of them had access to the internet?

• 33% reported having home internet access.

• 33% said that they had access to e-mail.

• 69% had mobile phones.

• 32% used text messaging (SMS).

• Only 13% said that they used digital television for interactive services - such as shopping, games or e-mail.

• Males were 11% more likely to have internet access at home than females.

• Members of socio-economic group ABC1 were more than twice as likely to have home internet access than C2DEs.

• 46% of Liberal Democrat voters, 37% of Conservative voters and only 29% of Labour voters had home internet access.

US polls about e-politics have tended to find that online citizens are significantly more likely to vote than those without internet access. This was not the case in the UK election of 2001, where 23% of respondents without internet access did not vote as against 25% who were online. This is explained by the high number of young non-voters with internet access being outweighed by the high number of older voters who are least likely to be online. The only party that had significantly more votes from online than offline voters were the Liberal Democrats.

We then asked those respondents who did have access to the internet or e-mail what they used it for during the election campaign:

• 82% of them did not use the internet or e-mail for any election-related activities. But almost one in five did.

• Over one in 10 (11%) said that they visited a media web site, such as BBC Online, to read about the election.

• 7% used web sites or e-mail to find out information about the election, parties or candidates.

• 5% sent or received e-mails about the election.

• 4% sent or received e-mails or visited web sites with humour or games about the election.

Men were more likely to do most of these activities than women (for example, twice as many men as women visited media sites to find out about the election), but more women than men sent or received e-mails about the election.

5% of Labour and Lib Dem voters went to the humour and games sites, but only 3% of Conservative voters. But, interestingly, visitors to the irreverent humour sites were not mainly disaffected non-voters - only 1% of non-voters went there compared to 6% of those who voted.

What kind of information were those who were online looking for?

• Over one in 10 (11%) were searching for the parties’ policies.

• Almost one in 10 (9%) sought information about the parties’ national campaigns or the candidates in their constituencies.

• 3% of respondents sought information online about how to vote tactically - with women being more likely than men to do this.

We would have predicted that Liberal Democrat and Labour voters would have been considerably more interested in using the internet to find out more about tactical voting, but found that exactly the same number of respondents from each main party did this - perhaps Conservatives were visiting such sites to size up the threat.

Interestingly, one in five (21%) of 18-24 year-old respondents used the internet to find out what the parties’ policies were, compared with only 8% of 25-44 year-olds and 12% of 55-64 year-olds. Young people are more used to the internet as a source of information and are turning to it in significantly high numbers to make sense of the policies on offer to them.

We then asked how important overall the internet and e-mail were in providing our respondents with information that helped to decide how they voted.

• 6% said that it was very or fairly important;

• 66% said that it was not at all important.

The internet and e-mail influenced the voting choices of twice as many Liberal Democrats (9%) as Conservatives (5%) and had much more influence upon 18-24 year-olds (17% of whom reported that the internet was a very or fairly important influence on their voting) than upon older voters, under 5% of whom reported any e-influence upon their voting.

These findings point to a trend: younger voters are much more interested in the internet as a route to politics than are older voters; these are the voters of the future, so e-politics is here to stay and in future elections this generation of voters and those following them will be targeted much more successfully by e-campaigners. The lesson for the euro referendum, if it happens, is that there will be many younger voters, whose votes may well be decisive, looking to the internet to explain the issues to them in their own terms.