Young voters and political web sites as means of deliberation. How young Americans and Germans use political web sites to get information, participate in discussions and get involved in politics

Katherine Murray
Dept. of Communication / Stanford U

Daniel Schneider
Dept. of Communication / Stanford U

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     Last modified: May 8, 2005

Abstract
Can political web sites facilitate deliberation, political discussion, and political participation of voters? This paper views this question within particular circumstances and in two different political cultures.
The paper studies political web sites from a user-centered perspective, looking at the motivations of and impacts on users of political web sites. We review perspectives on two different countries, Germany and the United States, and we discuss differences and similarities between the countries. We focus on two specific types of political web sites: in the American part of our study, we discuss the usage of campaign web sites during the 2004 presidential election; in the German section, we discuss the results of an online survey conducted on web sites of youth political organizations web sites.
Part of the study is based on a non-randomly selected sample of young American voters (n=287) and focuses on the relationship of usage of campaign web sites and other media and political involvement. The second part is based on an online survey that was conducted directly on the web sites of three different youth organizations of major political parties in Germany (SPD, CDU, Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen (Green Party)). This study used an nth-visitor method to create some degree of randomness but cannot claim true representativeness due to the common weaknesses of online surveys (Best et al. 2001). The sample used is part of a larger study on web sites of political parties, politicians, parliamentary groups, and political youth organizations which are the focus in this paper (n=174 for youth organizations; n=1531). This study is especially interested in the structure of motivations of the respondents and the differences between first-time users and frequent users of the web sites in question, and it employs an approach based on the Uses & Gratifications tradition to determine those structures.