Cyber-Campaigning in Denmark: Application and Effects of Candidate Campaigning

ABSTRACT We set out to analyze the application and effect of cyber-campaigning among candidates at the 2011 Danish general election campaign in order to provide hard evidence on whether new technologies are electorally decisive, or whether traditional offline campaigning still makes sense. First, both Web sites and Facebook sites are popular among candidates, but other features such as blogs, feeds, newsletters, video uploads, SMS, and Twitter are used by less than half the candidates. Second, only age and possibly education seem to matter when explaining the uptake of cyber-campaigning. The prominent candidates are not significantly more likely to use cyber-campaigning tools and activities. Third, the analysis of the effect of cyber-campaigning shows that the online score has an effect on the interparty competition for personal votes, but it does not have a significant effect when controlling for other relevant variables. The online rank of candidates within party and constituency is more important for intraparty competition; in fact, it has a significant effect: it matters to be more online than fellow candidates. In sum, the effect of cyber-campaigning is limited, but it matters more to the contest among same-party candidates than among parties in an open list, multimember constituency electoral system like the Danish have.

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