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Positive Spin: Senate Campaigning on the Web

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert Klotz
Robert Klotz*
Affiliation:
Washington University, St. Louis
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Extract

“I'm extremely excited to have a prescene [sic] on the Web.”

The perpetual greeting from the campaign home page of Senator Carl Levin (1996) shows that as with the adoption of any new technology, Internet use by political candidates will undergo some early rough spots. The early stages of a technology also tend to prompt divergent claims about the merits of the new technology. Thus, while political scientist David Canon has praised campaign sites as a “positive development” for allowing the transmission of extensive information, Ted Becker, another political scientist, has been highly critical of the sites calling them “cyberfluff” (Skiba 1995). By systematically studying the content of 1996 Senate candidate home pages, this article offers some hope for reconciling the divergent claims about Internet campaigning.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1997 , pp. 482 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1997

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Footnotes

*

Special thanks to Anna Broome, Steve Ceccoli, James Davis, and Jonathan Rapkin

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