Political Blogging in Campaign and Political Communication: Campaigning for Political Leadership 2.0?

About

The extended use of Internet facilities within the generalization of social access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the advanced societies has contributed to both the diffusion and instrumentation of new digital systems of social organization and mobilization and the emergence and development of virtual communities, by expanding the collaborative principles of the so called Web 2.0 Philosophy (Musser and O’Reilly 2006). Indeed, this actuality is progressively transcending the communicative behavior of the citizenship to take roots in the political ground: the political blogging phenomenon probably being the most outstanding symptom of the impact that e-communication is making on the political arena (Barrero et al. 2006; Coleman 2004; Pole 2006).

Needless to say, the introduction and strengthening of the blogging practice into the political game attaches new links to the large chain of unsolved questions that ties up the democratic political leadership issue (Martínez Fuentes 2006). Does political blogging give a new meaning to the communicative dimension of the democratic political leadership? Does it introduce a transformation into the classical relational dynamics between political leaders and followers?

A tentative approximation to such subject matter and its features in Spanish casuistry is presented in this paper. In so doing, we propose a conciliation of leadership studies and ICTs theories to focus on the significance that political blogging may have within the classical Spanish pattern of relation between political leadership and political partisanship.

Setting out this theoretical framework, we hypothesize that the political blog tool might entail mostly either partisan campaign-seeking nature – the political blog then being a new electoral tool for the old purpose of the partidification of the political relationships between the voters and those who aspire to represent them in the institutions – or personal leadership network-seeking nature – contrary being the political blog a new instrument for the transformational goal of the personalization of the political relations between the electors and those who are or aspire to be elected.

In order to test this hypothesis, we follow a comparative case study methodology, conducting a descriptive analysis of the political blog of a selection of majors competing in the electoral campaign for the local government election of May 2007.

References

• Barrero, D., Criado, J.I. and Ramilo, M.C. (2006) Política y Web 2.0. Paper presented in the III Congreso del Observatorio de la Cibersociedad, Ciberespacio, 20 Nov-3 Dec.

• Coleman, S. (2004) Blogs as Listening Posts rather than Soapboxes. In: R.Ferguson and M.Howell (eds) Political Blogs. Craze or Convention? (Hansard Society: London), pp. 26-30.

• Martínez Fuentes, G. (2006) Una estrategia analítica para el estudio del liderazgo político en democracia. Presented in the I Congreso Internacional de Historia de Nuestro Tiempo ‘Crisis, Dictaduras, Democracias’, Logroño, 2-4 Nov.

• Musser, J. and O’Reilly, T (2006) Web 2.0. Principles and Best Practices. Available at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf (accessed: 14 June 2007).

• Pole, A. (2006) Congressional Blogging: Advertising, Credit Claiming, and Position Taking. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia.