Online politics: a cross-national explanatory analysis of political websites

This study provides a systematic investigation of party and candidate websites in five European countries: Germany, Romania, Hungary, The Netherlands and Great Britain. It examines three features of online political communication that are presented on political websites (interactivity, personalization and mobilization) and investigates to what extent country, party and website characteristics explain differences in usage of these features. In total, 61 websites and 416 pages in the five countries were subject to a systematic content analysis. The findings suggest that differences in country, party and individual characteristics do in fact explain the variation in levels of mobilization, interactivity and personalization used on political websites. In general, results show that the differences between countries may be less important; differences in the adoption of different functions may be best explained by also examining differences in party (e.g., party size) and website characteristics (e.g., individual vs. party website).