Page 193 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: GYG/IJD/IBA/IJD
18:0
August 14, 2002
CY101-Bimber
CY101-04
0 521 80067 6
Political Organizations
throughout the entire Clinton administration until it was terminated in
January 2001 by the Bush administration.
None of the 1992 experiments had any plausible bearing on election
outcomes. They amounted to nothing more than minor experiments in
campaigning, conducted apart from the main business of campaign pol-
itics. The story was largely the same in 1994, and again in 1996, though
by that time, the web had come into use by a number of campaigns and
experimentation by candidates was much broader. In 1996, all major
presidential candidates used web sites, as did about three-quarters of
U.S. Senate candidates. 180 A few citizens visited these web sites, although
campaign staff could not be sure who they were. A few citizens signed
up for electronic mail–based news and information, but in no cam-
paign did these activities rise to the level where they might potentially
affect the outcome of a race. 181 For most candidates in 1996, use of new
information technology to communicate with citizens amounted to little
more than joining an inexpensive bandwagon with few costs and little
risk. The best examples are the Dole and Forbes campaigns. Dole’sweb
site was operated in Tempe, Arizona, by two Arizona State University
students. 182 Forbes’s own Internet manager describes his web site as a
novelty item in the campaign, added as an “afterthought” to the cam-
paign plan. 183 Although the Internet had yet to become meaningful in
political campaigns in 1996, optimists began predicting that in the next
cycle or the one following, new communication techniques would prove
decisive in a race for the first time, as television had apparently been in
the Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960.
The 1998 elections did see several substantive developments in Inter-
net use, although expectations comparing the Internet to television were
premature, to say the least. One of the most important developments was
higher production values in web sites and generally more sophisticated

180
Robert Klotz, “Virtual Criticism: Negative Advertising on the Internet in the 1996
Races,” Political Communication 15, no. 3 (1998): 347–365.
181
Reliable counts of use of web sites in House races and by candidates for state of-
fices are not available, but it appears that experimentation with the new media was
correlated with level of office: the higher the office, the more likely the candidate to
experiment. A number of nonpartisan voter-information operations such as Project
Vote Smart also opened Internet-based operations in 1996, providing a variety of
voter guides, town-hall functions, and other civic information.
182
John Whalen, “A Doleful Mission: Two Guys from Tempe Aim to Force Virtual Vigor
into Bob Dole’sOfficial Web Page,” New Times, Aug. 24-Sept. 4, 1996, http://www.
newtimes.com.
183
Mike Low, Internet consultant to the Forbes campaign, personal correspondence
with Eric Patterson for the author, Sept. 15, 2000.
176