Den online-skabte virkelighed: Et speciale om internetkampagner i lokalpolitik

Andreassen, Jeppe

4. semester

Politik og Administration, Kandidat

2010

2010-06-14

68 pages

This thesis focuses on local politicians’ use of Internet tools in their political election campaigns. Internet and digital media have increasingly been used as tools for political campaigns during the previous decade. By drawing upon different scholarly analysis and descriptions of political uses of the Internet, this thesis tracks the development of different political uses of the Internet and presents this in the thesis’ theoretical chapter. Based on this theoretical description, the thesis formulates a series of theoretical assumption about politicians’ use of Internet in political campaigns. These theoretical assumptions are being tested empirically on five local politicians from Aalborg, representing the two largest parties, the Liberals [Venstre] and the Social democrats [Socialdemo-kratiet]. Through qualitative interviews with these politicians, who all were elected in the munici-pality election in 2009, their uses of the Internet, as well as their utterances about new media, are being analyzed. The empirical analysis covers the advantage and disadvantages that the politicians experiences in their practical experiences with the Internet during their campaign in 2009. The analysis shows that while the political candidates were using the Internet in their campaigns, they simultaneously continued to use traditional media in order to reach potential voters. The thesis concludes that while the empirical study on the local Danish politicians do confirm some of the theoretical expectations, it cannot confirm all of them; for instance the politicians’ practice does not confirm an expectation about that politicians will use the Internet because it offers a finan-cial cheap way of campaigning; rather the empirical data shows that using Internet as a campaign tool is an expensive affair for the local Danish politicians.

Internet ; online medier ; online campaigning ; Danish politicians

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