The Digital Election: Bubbling but not boiling

The 2010 general election campaign has begun, and a number of different online tools have been created by the parties themselves and third-party organisations to help us make up our mind.

Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party have set up their own online campaigning tools; the Conservatives have deployed MyConservatives.com, an online community for organisers and campaigners (be they members or not), whilst Labour are using Campaign Creator, a back-end organising tool for their members. The Conservatives, Labour Party, Lib Dems, Greens, and UKIP have created their own mobile applications that allow varying levels of input from users.

Twitter has emerged as a preferred campaigning tool amongst PPCs in this election, but it’s not without risk as Labour PPC Stuart MacLennan discovered after being sacked over offensive tweets he sent out over Twitter. However at this stage it appears that the press and those in the ‘Westminster bubble’ are the biggest audience here, with citizens paying more attention to the mainstream media.

A number of third-party websites and tools have also been created during this election, such as a site that hosts parodies of David Cameron’s poster campaign, policy-matching tool voteforpolicies.org.uk, democracy campaign POWER2010, and the David vs. Goliath campaign on Progressonline which worked to raise funds for Labour Party candidates targeted by Lord Ashcroft’s donations. These have all appeared to attract a good deal of interest and support, however they do not appear to be setting the agenda during this campaign.

As our previous research has shown, UK elections are far less candidate-driven, and attract far fewer donations than in the United States. Whilst the parties have evidently invested in online front-end tools during this campaign, there has been little evidence that they have created any meaningful increases in participation during the campaign. What will prove to be important will be the internal use of the internet within the party and campaign offices in order to organise their efforts on the ground. Digital media serves to inform the press about developments during the campaign, and these will then trickle down to the mainstream.

So far, it does not appear that a direct link has been created online between citizen and candidate/party in this election.

Freddy Fallon - Researcher, Digital Democracy