The hypertext technology of the Internet's World Wide
Web appears to have provided a means for voters to pursue and browse issue
information when and how they want. Because it is fairly inexpensive to store
information on the Internet, published material does not disappear soon after
it is published, but remains active and available for long amounts of time.
Additionally, numerous meta-indexes and search engines help users sort through
the vast amounts of information to find exactly what they are looking for. In
the realm of politics and elections, this means that voters now have the
ability to look beyond media-reported images and strategy decisions and gather
meaningful information about the candidates and the issues that are important
to them in making their electoral choice.
Political information sites on the Internet provide voters with information at
the click of a mouse and the tools exist to help users find this information.
Advocates say that this technology will fundamentally change the ways in which
we communicate, causing a higher level of political awareness and activity.
Others argue that the Internet is merely another method of transmitting the
same information that is currently presented in the print and broadcast media,
and in much the same fashion. A first step toward examining this issue is to
determine how voters used available Internet resources in 1996, the first
presidential election in which the Internet played a visible role. Are voters
making the effort to search out meaningful information, or are they using the
Internet for entertainment and other purposes? How do different political sites
present their information and how is it being utilized by the public who are
surfing the Internet? What specific types of information did voters seek out
during the 1996 election, and how may that have shaped their votes?
This paper will explore this issue by examining the experience of the Reform
Party web site during the 1996 campaign. The Reform Party site offers a
particularly interesting case study because of the party's emphasis on new
technologies, grass-roots organization and electronic democracy as means of
changing traditional political practices. The Reform Party is also worthy of
analysis because of the interactive means by which it sought to use its web
site as a vehicle for promoting party organizational activities and for
distributing information to voters.
The Internet is a very young and rapidly developing
technology. What was true in the 1996 election cycle is not likely to hold
true by the time the next presidential election is held in November, 2000.
However, the patterns that we see developing now, the lessons of 1996, will
provide a guide for determining the future patterns of political information
presentation and utilization on the Internet. The big question is whether or
not people are using the Internet the same way they are using the newspaper and
the evening news, or if are they using its capabilities to look beyond the
horse race coverage and find more substantive information to decide their
votes.
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