Acknowledgements: Online Action in Campaign 2000: An Exploratory Analysis of the U.S. Political Web Sphere

This study examines the nature of political action on and between election-oriented Web sites during the 2000 election season in the United States, based on Web files and interviews with political Web producers. Our analysis focuses on 3 facets of online action: coproduction, carnival, and mobilization. We suggest these portend an evolution of political communication, and we point to ways in which the 2000 political Web re-shaped the U.S. electoral process. Through this paper we seek to contribute to both the emerging literature on Web studies in general and on the impact of the Internet on electoral politics. The current trend in both popular and scholarly discourse is to downplay, if not reject outright, the revolutionary impact of the Internet on democracy. This argument suggests that politics on the Internet resembles closely politics offline-- and that what happens online is inconsequential since there is no clear evidence yet of it affecting election outcomes. What has been called the "normalization" hypothesis (Margolis & Resnick 2000) seems to be reinforced by the failure of commercial models of Web-based political information distribution in the United States during the 2000 election campaign. This view, it seems to us, mistakes the lack -- to date -- of election outcome evidence for a lack of significant impact. A focus on the apparent lack of impact of the Web on voting behavior may overlook the fundamental changes in the campaign process, and thus the political system manifested in the thousands of political Web sites -- and the links between them -- that surfaced during the 2000 election season. We suggest that analyzing what political actors actually do on the Web reveals a rapidly evolving political system. In this article, we identify and characterize th..