Politics as usual, or politics unusual? Position taking and dialogue on campaign websites in the 2002 US elections

Many consider the World Wide Web to be nothing more than an additional medium alongside others in which established patterns of political behavior and information flows are played out anew; others contend that the special characteristics of the Web hold the potential to produce fundamentally different patterns of political behavior than those found offline. This article analyzes the occurrence of position taking and issue dialogue on campaign websites associated with a random sample of 200 races from the U.S. 2002 election cycle. Though this study found some similarities between online and offline campaigning, it also identified ways in which the individual messages and overall political information environment created by candidates and available to voters through the Web in 2002 did not conform to the usual patterns found in the offline world of print and broadcast communication.