Page 194 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Campaigns for Office in 2000
technology-based efforts by professional political consultants and public
relations firms. Yet for most candidate organizations, the new technology
still remained largely symbolic, a mechanism for signaling technological
progressivism at a time when engineering culture was becoming “cool.” A
few candidate organizations began to gain the first real political traction
from using information technology, however modestly. Their experi-
ments demonstrated four major principles of political communication
on the Internet. The first was that a fundamental difference exists in the
nature of broadcast political communication and Internet-based polit-
ical communication: audience self-selection. Although little systematic
polling data was available, it became clear that Internet-based audiences
were vastly different from the citizens exposed to broadcast campaign
commercials. Not only were Internet-using citizens socioeconomically
selective, but citizens viewing candidates’ web sites and signing up for
electronic mail messages had passed through a filter of intentionality:
They were sufficiently interested in the campaign to seek out informa-
tion and interaction. That made web sites fundamentally different from
television advertising and news coverage. The emergent wisdom among
campaignsin1998wasthattheaudienceforacandidatewebsitewaslikely
comprised chiefly of supporters, a few undecided voters, and journalists.
The second lesson of 1998 was that as a means for communicating
with citizens and journalists, effective information technology was not
cheap. In earlier election cycles, low levels of sophistication meant that
operating internal communication systems and web sites was compara-
tively inexpensive. By 1998, larger numbers of candidates on line, more
sophistication about the technology, and a fading novelty effect among
citizens resulted in greater competition among candidates for attention
ofcitizensthroughtheInternet.Asaresult,productionvaluesatwebsites
rose substantially, as did the sophistication of customized messages and
interactive techniques. Running an effective Internet-based campaign
operation was far less expensive than mounting a broadcast advertising
campaign, but it still required a substantial investment. Any candidate
could create a web site for $5,000 or less, which was certainly less costly
than television. But really competitive web sites in 1998 cost ten times
that much, and so better-endowed candidates again had the advantage.
By 2000, the cost of top web sites would be yet another order higher
than that, running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These new
economics of web sites solidified the relationship between level of of-
fice and use of new media. One analysis for 1998 estimates that about
86 percent of campaigns with total budgets exceeding $1 million had

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