The Role of Weblogs in the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Research Topic

The aim of this research is to analyse the structure and content of the official weblogs of the main presidential candidates (Obama, Clinton and McCain) in order to measure their effectiveness in attracting and, above all, involving electors. In particular, the situation will be compared to the one of 2004 (during the Bush & Kerry campaign) in order to highlight if and how the phenomenon of the political blogosphere has developed.

Scope of the research and Research Method

In order to gather sufficient material for this research, the three official weblogs of the main candidates have to be analysed during a period of one to two weeks. The choice of the blogs has not been a random one: the web, indeed, offers a great variety of blogs for all three candidates, most of them selfdefining “official”ones. Thus, it seemed to be more appropriate and more objective to focus the research only on the blogs contained in websites with the same formal structure, that means www.hillaryclinton.com, www.barackobama.com and www.johnmaccain.com.

The research is mainly a discourse analysis based on the content of the blogs. Qualitative research prevails the quantitative one, because of the nature of the topic. However quantitative analysis will be present, when significant.

Preliminary Background

Although the phenomenon of weblogs is relatively recent (the first online diaries appeared in the mid-90’s), their popularity has grown at a very impressive speed in the last years, in particular thanks to the development of specific websites aimed at encouraging new bloggers to create their own cyberspace.

Soon the phenomenon left the private domain to cover any kind of topics and goals.

While the internet was becoming more and more invasive in the life of millions of citizens, many politicians started to use the web as a tool to be known and to reach new sympathisers by creating their own websites.

Soon, the addition of a blog to these websites improved the possibility to put in touch politicians (as far as our research is concerned) to their possible electors, letting people foresee a future more democratic society, based on the direct contact and the immediate feedback between politicians and citizens.

During the last presidential campaign, in 2004, the phenomenon seemed to have its first real, even if still perfectible, debut.

Rationale, Object and Questions

Since 2004 many events have changed the perception of American citizens about their politicians. Events such as the chaotic war in Iraq, the scandal of Abu Ghraib and the questionable position of Guantanamo prison have caused an increasing demand for controlling more directly what will be the effective policy adopted by the candidates, once they are elected. Thus, this research is focused in measuring the level of effective contact existing between candidates and citizens and the way in which the blogs create it.

For this purpose, different features of the blogs are analysed: the different symbols, slogans and common myths used by the candidates to attract more electoral audience; the links present in the blogs and connecting to external social network websites, the graphic used, the number of comments present for every post, the kind of comment (are there only supporting or also opposing comments?) and the main audience.

The questions on which this research is based are:

Q1: which are the most evident differences between this campaign and the precedent one?

Q2: are there substantial differences between the democrat and the republican candidates?

Q3: which strategies are used to reach the audience and how feedback is expressed?

Hypothesis

The hypothesis preceding the research foresees an increase and improvement of the use of blogs by the candidates in comparison to 2004. However, a substancial difference will be present among the different sites according to the particular audience to which the candidates seem to address. In particular, the blog of Obama seems to be the one most oriented towards the big population and, particularly, towards young people (perhaps mainly young people of colour?) while the McCain’s one seems to be the less suitable to reach young people and, for this reason, would be, perhaps, more detached.

Given the impressive growth of social network websites (Facebook in primis), it is probable that a huge number of links towards them will be present in all blogs.