Maria Laura Sudulich

The internet has been expected to modify the very nature of the political discourse by delivering a democratic surplus. It has frequently been regarded as the medium though which the right balance between participation and representation can be achieved. The vary nature of the medium has generated great levels of interest and debate on what type of political activity could be performed online. This paper studies the heuristics of online participation in Ireland and, by addressing the issue of who participates online, it investigates the type of scenario that can be expected to develop in the near future. Using survey data from the Irish National Election Study 2007, this article offers an insight on the process of gathering politically relevant information online and on whether such an activity may lead to further political engagement. Evidence of quite limited but possibly escalating forms of online engagement is found.

This article explores the impact of cyber-campaigning on candidates' electoral performance in the 2007 Irish general election. As such, we investigate the extent to which previous findings in this area are generalizable, testing them in a new political context. Our methodological approach seeks to deal with some of the critiques that have been leveled against the validity of previous findings regarding the electoral effects of cyber-campaigns. We do so by controlling for levels of candidate campaign expenditure, as well the extent to which candidates were viewed as “favorites” or “outsiders” to win seats during the campaign. Finally, we present the first analysis in this field of whether the effects of cyber-campaigning are constant across constituencies with varying technological profiles.

This article addresses the factors that influenced candidates' likelihood of cyber-campaigning in the 2007 Irish General Election. We consider the roles of party affiliation and support as well as intra-party competition, candidates' monetary and political resources and the marginality of the electoral race. We also provide the first empirical test to date of whether candidates' decisions to cyber-campaign are influenced by the behaviour of their direct political opponents. Monetary resources, party affiliation and the behaviour of opponents are found to have statistically significant effects on the probability of a candidate conducting a cyber-campaign.