This paper discusses research-in-progress on a longitudinal study of technology usage by incumbent members of the U.S. Congress on their official Congressional homepages to “routinely” communicate with the public and with their constituencies as well as technology usage on campaign homepages for the purpose of political campaigning. By examining the types of information technologies embedded on and linked to from both types of homepages, we propose to track technology usage over time in order to study the diffusion and adoption of information technologies within the political arena. Drawing on diffusion of innovation and institutional isomorphism as our theoretical framework, we propose that examining patterns of diffusion of three categories of information technology – Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Social Networking technologies – will provide us with insights into the changing nature of political communication strategies enabled by information technology, as well as insights into factors underlying institutional technology diffusion
