The changing representation interface: democracy and direct contact with politicians

The interface between politicians and the electorate is a vital component of the infrastructure of democracy and politicians now have many more tools available to communicate and engage with the electorate. Direct contact between politicians and the electorate is associated with increased levels of civic engagement. In this article, we examine the responsiveness of politicians in the UK by conducting: (i) an innovative test of responses to an undecided voter's email and (ii) follow-up interviews with electoral candidates. We found that a majority of electoral candidates had an identifiable email address and more than half responded to our undecided voter's email. However, there were considerable differences in the content relevance of the responses. There were also very few follow-up emails or further contact from the electoral candidates, suggesting only limited evidence of an integrated communication strategy. Electoral candidates also expressed concerns about communicating in a way that was ‘on record’. The findings provide a unique insight into the dynamics of communication between politicians and the electorate and the changing nature of the representation interface. Whilst the Internet has the scope for more personalized and two-way communication and for electors to hold politicians to account, it seems that politicians are more focused on campaign advantage rather than renewing the representation interface

Politics as usual? Assessing the extent and content of candidate-level online campaigning at the 2015 UK general election

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15–30; Lee, B. 2014. “Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election.” Politics 34 (1): 45–57; Southern, R. 2015. “Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 12 (1): 1–17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use