Cyberdemocracy and cyber-campaign: A difficult marriage? The case of Spain's 2008 General Elections

Abstract

The article examines the applicability of the concept of “cyber-campaign” in southern Europe, in the light of data from two specific surveys devised by the authors on the use of digital devices and political information consumption during the 2008 General Election. The first survey addressed general Internet users, and the second users go online more often, referred to here as “intensive Internet users”. Our survey results are compared with patterns of political Internet use by the public in Spain and abroad. Our findings show only limited use of the political resources available online (independent from the slower degree of Internet adoption), along with multi-media consumption of political information (with inherited inertias from traditional mass media consumption) in which the most interactive devices have the least importance. These characteristics are explained by the imbalance between citizens’ demand for online political action during elections and the kind of technological devices and content offered on the Internet by political actors. We detected the existence of a qualitatively important, highly active minority of Internet users that justifies the use of the Net for electoral purposes. Nevertheless, the limitations of the Internet are revealed by the fact that intensive Internet users do not show a higher degree of interest or increased participation in cyber-campaigns than general Internet users.