Michael Margolis’s research while affiliated with University of Cincinnati and other places

The Internet, with its rapidly growing worldwide community of users, provides the means to develop a new public space that facilitates democratic participation in politics adapted to advanced post-industrial societies. We describe models of electronic democracy that derive from the power of the Internet to enhance citizens' participation in politics. We then explain how we developed and administered a survey to collect data on how people use the Internet to participate in civic life. After reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of our data collection, we analyze and report the results. Finally, we evaluate our results with regard to the validity of the models of democracy with which we began, and we comment on some of their broader substantive and methodological implications for democratic theory.

This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combination of interview data, content analysis of sites and analysis of online and offline media coverage of the election is used to investigate these questions. Conclusions are drawn about the similarity of Web campaigning across the two countries and about the increasing dominance of the major parties, particularly in the UK.

This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combination of interview data, content analysis of sites and analysis of online and offline media coverage of the election is used to investigate these questions. Conclusions are drawn about the similarity of Web campaigning across the two countries and about the increasing dominance of the major parties, particularly in the UK.

This article examines the prominence of Web sites of major and minor parties in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparing features such as search capabilities, membership forms, information on party organization and issues, characteristics of graphics, and currency of updates as well as their relative quality and sophistication.We also look at the prominence of major and minor parties in newspapers and magazines and in various search engines and sites for political junkies. We find that minor parties have a greater presence on the Web in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but even so, the sites of major parties in both countries are more prominent and sophisticated than those of minor parties, and major parties generally receive more media coverage than minor parties, both on-line and off-line.The data suggest that the established interests dominating most of the communications, transactions, elections, and political processes of advanced industrialized countries are extending their influence to these processes in cyberspace.

Third Voice, a new "browser companion service" allows users to place annotations on any Web page they visit. These notes can afford an opportunity for netizens to use Third Voice to express their own views about content and communicate with each other. Advocates proclaim that this could this bring a rebirth of the democratic spirit of the Net, but Third Voice has proven to be very controversial. In its first few months it has mostly produced spam, graffiti, hyperlinks to pornographic sites and flame wars. Moreover, those who create the Web presentations that form the core of the new Internet resent a technology that, in effect, allows the audience to paint mustaches on their masterpieces. We argue that the controversy is beside the point. Third Voice or similar browser companions, such as Gooey, are unlikely to amount to much because they require initiative on the part of users. The future of the Internet does not lie in recovering its more egalitarian and participatory past. It has become a mass medium used mostly by relatively passive consumers, and as such major content providers will dominate it.

Will cyberspace bring new forms of participatory democracy as computer-mediated communication reduces organizational costs? The Internet has the potential to change the nature of American electoral politics, but we doubt that it will. The character and popularity of cyberspace are more likely to foster an on-line electoral environment that replicates the real world, albeit in a slick electronic form. Notwithstanding the novelty and explosive growth of campaigning on the Internet, we foresee the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, as more likely to reinforce the existing structure of American politics than to change it.

The Internet provides a virtual frontier to expand our access to information and to increase our knowledge and understanding of public opinion, political behavior, social trends and lifestyles through survey research. Comparable to other technological advancements, such as the telephone and the computer, the Internet presents opportunities that will impact significantly on the process and quality of survey research now and in the twenty-first century. Cyberspace permits us to move beyond traditional face-to-face, mail and telephone surveys, yet still to examine basic issues regarding the quality of data collection: sampling, questionnaire design, survey distribution, means of response, and database creation. This surveys include those posted on LISTERV mailing lists, USENET newsgroups, and the World Wide Web. A survey on politics and civic life, conducted by the authors, is used as a case study.