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PAPER NÚM. 6
(Papel nº6/Paper 6)
Bruce Bimber
At the heart of many expectations about the Net and politics is the idea of mobilization. A common refrain in dialogue about the Net is the possibility that it will facilitate the engagement of citizens, creating new patterns of involvement for those who already participate in public life, and reducing non-participation by drawing back into politics some of those citizens who have opted out. Grossman, for instance, asserts that "telecommunications technologies... are breaking down the barriers of time and distance that originally precluded the nation's people from voting directly for the laws that govern them," (Grossman 1995, 6). Some observers focus on the possibility that the Net reduce costs and coordination problems for activists and political professionals seeking to mobilize or persuade citizens. Anecdotal evidence of the Net facilitating forms of collective action that would otherwise be unlikely are being reported. The main political effects of the Net, in this view, will be that interest groups, political parties, and others can more quickly and efficiently communicate with constituencies, members, and potential members (Bonchek, 1995; Abramson, Arterton, and Orren 1988). In 1996 the US held its first national election in which the Net played a visible role. Winston (1996) claims that about 10% of voters obtained information about candidates from the Internet. Schubert (1996) puts the figure at 6% of the total adult population in the state of California, and 23% of adults who subscribe to an on-line service in that state. Another survey reports that 86% of adults in the US express interest or strong interest in using the Net to communicate with elected representatives, 78% in on-line voting or referendums, and 73% in engaging in community forums on-line (Interactive Consumers 1996). It is appropriate to begin asking systematic questions about the real impact of the Net on political communication and mobilization. While changes are occurring rapidly, it is not too soon to inquire about the extent to which important forms of political communication may have shifted onto the Internet from other media, such as the telephone or traditional mail. If more than three-quarters of adults are enthusiastic about conducting political communication and action on-line, how many are actually doing so? In this paper I take up that problem, using data from surveys of political users of the Web. In framing this study, I have made an important distinction that bears explanation. One of the great difficulties in assessing the political importance of the Internet involves distinguishing between active and passive forms of communication and on-line participation. Clearly much of what passes for political activity on-line is little more than the individual gathering of information, independent of any specific action that could be called political. While more purposive in nature--and probably more informative--than watching political advertising or reading campaign news, on-line browsing by citizens should be separated from more active uses of the Internet when measuring "cyber-politics." While browsing and information gathering opportunities afforded by the Net may turn out to be important in the long run, I choose to set these more passive forms of political participation aside here in order to focus on two concrete types of political action: contact between citizens and elected officials, and contact between organized groups and voters. I address the following two specific questions in this paper. How active were citizens in using the Internet to contact elected officials for any reason during 1996? How active were political organizations in using the Internet to contact voters during the 1996 election season? Using a sample of highly politically engaged Internet users, I find that in both cases the answer is "not very much." The most "wired" of political participators did made some use of the Net to communicate with their elected officials, but for the most part traditional means of communication were still much more important. One exception to this finding concerns the White House, where Internet-based communication appears to have displaced telephone and mail contact for my sample of citizens. Where mobilization is concerned, political organizations appear to have made little widespread use of the Internet as a tool of communication and persuasion--yet. Although the Internet may already be significant as a passive information resource about public life, I find that it is still far from transforming active political communication on a wide scale.
About the Survey and the Sample The Web survey provides the main basis for answering the questions posed in this paper, because it contained several sections of questions about political behavior and contact by political organizations, and because it surveyed people while they were in the act of using the Net to learn about government or politics. A survey invitation and links to an on-line survey instrument ran from July 1996 to the present at the US Congress's THOMAS site, the US League of Women Voters site, about ten state government information sites, and others (only data from 7/7/96 to 11/6/96 are reported here). All survey sites were broad, non-partisan, and non-issue specific in political or governmental focus; no campaign sites, party sites, or other issue-specific sites were included. During the period reported here, the survey received 1,239 valid responses from adult citizens in the US. Some researchers have used unweighted, unadjusted data from Web surveys such as this one as the basis for demographic estimation. This practice has been widely criticized, because self-selected Web surveys do not produce a random sample. In this paper I avoid attempts at estimating population parameters and other forms of statistical inference that are inappropriate from a non-random sample. Instead, I treat the sample of twelve hundred adults generated by the survey as a form of indicator group for on-line political action. I describe their behavior without treating them statistically as a population sample. Comparison between the RDD telephone survey and the Web survey indicates that the Web sample is biased in two major directions. It oversampled frequent users of the Net, and it oversampled politically active adults. That is, this group of citizens contained in my Web sample constitute highly politically engaged users of the Internet--not a surprising result for a survey administered to citizens visiting government and politics oriented web sites. This sample, then, is dominated by just the type of individuals most likely to be involved in political acts on-line. If a nascent on-line polity is emerging, it should be visible in a sample of this sort long before it is visible in random samples of adults--after all, only about 1 in 10 adults is presently a regular user of the Net in the US. The logic of my analysis below rests on this assumption. If the Net appears to be playing a role in citizen-government contacts or in the efforts of organized groups to mobilize or persuade voters, then the effect should be visible first in a group such as this one. Political Identity and Traditional Participation by Respondents Respondents in this sample are certainly highly engaged politically. Ninety-six percent reported being registered to vote, and the same number reported the intention to vote in the 1996 election. About 74% report that they have tried to persuade others how to vote during the election season, 29% attended political meetings, rallies, speeches or dinners, 34% report having displayed a campaing button, bumper sticker, or yard sign, and 30% report having donated money to a candidate or campaign. About 5% work for an organization involved in campaigning or lobbying, and 12% work as a volunteer for such an organization. The demographics of the group are consistent with what one would expect given the high levels of political engagement and Internet use. The median age of the sample is 41. The median household income is $52,500; 23% have a household income of $30,000 or less, and 24% $80,000 or more. Ten percent have a high-school diploma or less education, 63% have a four-year college degree or better. 45% are women, 89% are white, 2% black, 1% Native American, 1% Asian, 2% "mixed race," and 4% Latino.
Citizen-to-Government Communication Using Electronic
Mail The picture is different when one turns to the White House. Somewhat fewer respondents have contacted the White House or president than Congress, but at all levels of contact, use of electronic mail exceeds use of the US mail or telephone. For instance, 21% have contacted the White House once or twice using the Internet, while only 12% have done so using telephone or the US Mail. (...) For this group of respondents, use of e-mail has surpassed use of the mail or telephone for communication with the White House over the last year. The pattern of communication is further fleshed out with data on communication with state government offices. State-level electronic communication shows the largest gap between Internet and traditional means: while a slim majority of the sample (52%) reports having contacted state government by traditional means at least once over the last year, less than a third (30%) reports having done so via electronic mail. (...) The conclusion that may be drawn here is two-fold. First, politically-engaged Internet users have begun using electronic-mail to contact elected officials, and in some cases electronic mail has displaced telephone and physical mail in frequency of use for this group. Second, users choices between Internet and other media for contact with government are affected by the nature of the office they are contacting. Quite clearly the accessibility and publicity given electronic mail addresses is a key variable likely producing some of this variation. The White House was substantially ahead of Congress and many state governments in establishing a significant presence in the Internet, and so the greater use of its e-mail address may be simply a function of public awareness and the availability of electronic mail addresses. It is also possible, though, that other factors shape citizens' choices about how to communicate with government. Some citizens may believe that electronic mail is sometimes discounted or otherwise treated as less important than other forms of communication by certain types of government office. Citizens who follow politics closely, for instance, may believe that legislators are less responsive to electronic mail than is the White House, which has been aggressive about promoting the Internet. At present there are no data by which to test for either the presence of such a perception on the part of the public or the presence of a real effect of this nature.
Elite Mobilization and
Persuasion Efforts Using Electronic Mail vs. Traditional Means To what extent did mobilization efforts take place through the Internet versus contacts by phone, letter, or in person? The survey asked about such contacts by eight categories of potential mobilizers: candidate organizations, interest groups, unions, professional associations, local community organizations, church or religous organizations, employers, and other organizations. The data show that all categories of organization made some attempt to contact voters via electronic mail, in addition to using traditional means, but in every case use of electronic mail was much less frequent than use of traditional means--often by an order of magnitude or more. (...) The most active organizations in contacting these voters, after political parties, were not surprisingly candidate organizations and interest groups. About 49% of the sample was contacted by a candidate organization using traditional means, and about 38% by an interest group. In comparison, only about 5% were contacted by such organizations using electronic mail. While the fraction of the sample contacted by other organizations using tradition means varies from about 4% to 15%, no other single category of organization contacted more than 1% of the sample using electronic mail. For instance, unions and professional associations contacted a significant fraction using tradition means (11% and 15%, respectively), each reached only around 1% of the sample using electronic mail. All together, 74% of the respondents were contacted by any organization by telephone, mail or in person, and 24% were contacted by any organization using electronic mail. We also inquired about whether mobilizing groups attempted to persuade citizens to use the Internet to take part in politics in some way, by asking them to use the Net to donate money, to contact an official or candidate, to write to others, etc. (...) Interest groups were more active than any other kind of organization in making this kind of appeal. About 8% of the sample was asked by an interest group to become engaged in political activity using the Net. Political parties with 7% and candidate organizations with 5% followed closely.
Conclusion If an electronic political community is to emerge on a nation-wide scale, it is likely to appear in a group such as this one long before it engages the broader public. Has the Net become an important medium of political communication and mobilization for this group? Not yet. It is clear that the Internet is making in-roads into political communcation and mobilization efforts. But it is equally clear that even for this group of highly "wired" political participators, it is premature to declare an "electronic republic" or "cyberocracy" to be upon us--to choose two terms that have been used in just that way. Citizens may be visiting political web sites and gathering information on a comparatively broad scale, but it appears that active forms of political communication are lagging behind these more passive forms. The data on contact with the White House shows the potential for citizen use of electronic mail for citizen-to-government communication, yet the data on mobilization efforts suggests that organizations have made little use of the Net so far to reach the wired citizenry. That is, individual acts of political communication on the Net are at present outpacing efforts at collective action and mobilization by organized groups and political professionals. Two large question-marks hang over the implications of these findings. One concerns the trajectory of change. These data represent a single chronological snapshot, since this is the first presidential election cycle in which it has been possible to measure political communication on the Net. Additional data from future elections will help establish trend lines. We can assume that the volume and frequency of Internet-based communication is growing rapidly, but until more data are available, it will be impossible to know just how fast that change is occuring. The second question concerns the general population, which is not represented in this survey sample. These data show that the effects of the Net are just beginning to be visible in the advance wave of on-line political participators. But what about the rest of the Internet population that exhibits no particular interest in politics? Will they respond to on-line mobilization efforts, or will they transfer their habits of non-participation to the on-line world? And of course three out of four American adults do not have Internet access at all yet, and so they remain outside the ambit of these on-line political developments. The state of political affairs of the Net in the late 1990s resembles somewhat the political state of affairs for television forty years ago. In the 1950s, black-and-white television was booming into American households, new modes of advertising and selling products were being devised, and candidates and political professionals were experimenting with how to best take advantage of the new medium. It was of course impossible then for even the most astute observers to predict the course that television's impact on politics would take in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, just as it is impossible now to predict the course that the Net will take in the early decades of the 21st Century. Yet it appears we have some time to wait for even the first Net-equivalent of the televising of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. At this stage, the dissemination of political information is preceding the spread of organized political action on the Internet.
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