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COPYRIGHT 2004 Western States Communications Association
OVER THE COURSE of the past decade, the World Wide Web has played a progressively increasing role in political campaigning. Gary Selnow (1998) noted that 1996 was the first year that political campaigns used the Web for mass campaigning, since then its use has increased dramatically in local, state, and federal elections (Benoit & Benoit, 2000; Bimber, 1998; D'Alessio, 1997, 2000; Dulio, Goff, & Thurber 1999; Poupolo, 2001; Schneider & Foot, 2002; Whillock, 1997). By early summer 2003, for example, ten presidential campaigns had already established an active Web presence for the 2004 presidential race. Indeed, former presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign Web site played a prominent role in Dean's overall campaign strategy.
The present study will focus on campaigns for U.S. House during Autumn 2002. As in other federal election categories, House candidate campaign Web sites have increased in number since 1996 when only 16 percent of House candidates had their own sites. That percentage increased to 40.6 percent in 1998; 53 percent in 2000; and 62 percent in 2002. (1) Many reasons exist for these increases. Candidates for Congress have discovered that their campaign sites provide a relatively low budget mechanism for soliciting campaign contributions and mobilizing volunteers. These sites also serve as points of origin for information about the campaign. And they are widely used by the press to identify candidates' stands on the issues, planned appearances, and responses to opponents' criticisms and issues raised by the public.
As one political consultant observed, campaign Web sites have developed from "a token tool to an absolutely must have tool" (Williams, 2001, p. A17). This notion is widely accepted by political consultants and trade journals such as Campaigns & Elections (Cornfield, Safdar, & Seiger, 1998; Dorsey & Green, 1997; Faucheux, 1998). Web sites have made such an indelible mark on the campaign process that the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet (IPDI, 2002) published Online Campaigning 2002: A Primer. Targeted at candidates and campaign managers, this primer offered instruction on how to strategically use the Internet in campaigns and outlined a set of "best practices" for Internet campaign Web sites. Ultimately, as Schneider and Foot (2002) suggest, most campaigns feel there is a need for some Internet presence.
Although political campaigns see the necessity of Web-based campaigning, campaign Web sites have yet to realize their full potential as a medium to improve communication between candidates and Web users and to influence voters. Their failure to do so is partly due to many candidates' inclination to treat their Web site as if it were a static campaign flyer. In contrast, the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet (IPDI) advised campaign managers to avoid "brochureware" (by which they meant print campaign materials that are merely uploaded to a campaign Web site) because such an approach neither attracts and engages Web users nor effectively utilizes the Web medium. Foot and Schneider (2002) argued that although most campaigns in the 2002 election used basic features (termed brochureware), and adaptations of other traditional campaign practices (online donation, news and press releases), few campaigns used features for which the Internet is particularly well adapted such as interactive polls, alternate language versions, disabled access versions, and site specific search engines. We contend that an important element in the move away from brochureware will involve developing campaign sites that harness the interactive potential of the Internet.
In this essay, we offer a rhetorical perspective to what has been a largely media-based discussion of interactivity in political campaign Web sites. Drawing from previous literature in interactivity and Bakhtin's dialogism and heteroglossia, we argue for a new framework--text-based interactivity--through which researchers can attend to previously understudied aspects of interactivity (elements of rhetorical form, content, and design). Our purpose in this essay is to show how the use of text-based interactivity on political campaign Web sites complements Internet-enabled features (such as email links and interactive polls) and enhances user engagement with the site. Through articulating this concept, we hope to influence both the general understanding of political campaign sites and the specific Web-design choices made by political campaigns.
We begin with a discussion of interactivity. Next, we offer an articulation of the text-based interactivity framework. Third, we present a case study to illuminate the concept of text-based interactivity and demonstrate the value of such a framework in analyzing campaign sites. Our case study is a rhetorical reading of the uses of actual and text-based interactivity in Democratic and Republican candidate campaign Web sites from seven competitive races in the 2002 House elections (see Appendix for list of races and Web sites). We will conclude with discussion of the value and further applications of this framework for researchers of Web-based political texts.
Interactivity and the Web
The IPDI includes interactivity as one of the "best practices" for an online campaign strategy. They argue, "when a campaign extends interactive features to the public, it signals a willingness to listen and learn from the people. That is a good image for a campaign to live up to" (IPDI, 2002, p. 25). This is only one of the potential benefits of interactivity on campaign Web sites. Interactivity as a concept remains unclear, however, and is the subject of a vigorous conversation among new media scholars. While the potential for interactivity is considered a unique factor of new media, especially the Web, scholars are still trying to develop precise definitions of the concept (McMillan, 2002; Stromer-Galley, 2000; Sundar, Kalyanaraman, & Brown, 2003).
Sally J. McMillan (2002) attempted a move in this direction by tracing the history and emergence of the interactivity concept as it applies to new media. She identified three forms of interactivity in Internet environments--user-to-system, user-to-user, and user-to-document. Here we will describe each of these forms and place our own concept of text-based interactivity in relation to them.
User-to-system interactivity exists on all Web sites and refers to the interaction between individuals and the computer. McMillan explained it as "computer-controlled interaction [that] assumes that the computer will 'present' information to learners who will respond to that information" (2002, p. 174.) User-to-system interactivity includes clicking on hyperlinks, customizing site features (such as font size and image display), and some gaming operations. This form of interactivity is initiated by the user and occurs between the user and the system technology. Since we are primarily interested in communication-related aspects of interactivity, user-to-system interactivity will not be a focus of our study.
User-to-user interactivity consists of communication that occurs between users and is often referred to as computer-mediated communication. Examples include Internet chat, instant messaging, and discussion boards. On political sites, this form of interactivity also occurs in town hall forums and moderated discussions. Observers of online campaigning advise candidates to use such forms with caution (IDPI, 2002). Indeed, such interactive forms are rarely used on candidate sites (Kamarck, 1999; Davis, 1999; Foot, Schneider, & Xenos, 2002). Jennifer Stromer-Galley (2000) inquired as to why these user-to-user forms occurred so infrequently. To do this, she interviewed campaign managers and staff, who reported that they did not use such features because using them was burdensome to the campaign. Furthermore, user-to-user features involved the risk of losing control of campaign discourse as covered by the media, as well as loss of strategic ambiguity on the issues, which is often an important part of campaign strategy. None of the 14 sites in our study included direct user-to-user interactivity, and so we will not discuss its use in this essay. (For discussions of a few candidate campaign sites in which user-to-user interaction occurred, see Stromer-Galley, 2000 and Puopolo, 2001)
Another form of "user-to-user interactivity" (more appropriately labeled website author(s) to users, or vice versa) exists but was not explicitly identified as such by McMillan. In this case "user-to-user interactivity" is somewhat of a misnomer because it brings to mind an image of site visitors interacting with each other. In regard to our sample of sites, the candidates and their campaign staffs functioned as the point of origin for website content and thereby played an authorial role. This form of actual interactivity--campaign-to-user or user-to-campaign interactivity--includes any feature that enables campaigns and users to communicate with each other, or which provides the potential to do so. "Actual interactivity" on political campaign sites as discussed in this study includes, but is not limited to features such as onsite polls, events postings, "contribute,"...
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