New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen

Description

The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.

Philip N. Howard is an assistant professor in the Communications Department at the University of Washington. He has published an edited collection with Steve Jones entitled Society Online: The Internet in Context (Sage, 2003) as well as articles in New Media & Society, American Behavioral Scientist and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Howard has worked as a consultant to the World Resources Institute, the Canadian International Development Agency, and has served on the advisory board of the Survey 2000 and Survey 2001 Projects.

'In this important book, Philip Howard looks at the use of the internet and of digital retrieval systems in contemporary political campaigning ... I ... am extremely grateful to Howard for writing this excellent book, and I will be recommending it to students and colleagues.' Political Studies Review