Rachel K Gibson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4239629 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel K Gibson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel K |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibson |
| SIGNATURE | GIBSON R K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 600 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to reach, young adults are less mobilized and vote less often, creating a vicious circle of demobilization. However, new forms of political communication—including online and text messaging—have creat…
Voter mobilisation in context
This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaign…
Getting out the vote in the social media era
This paper compares the spread and impact of new digital modes of voter mobilization with more traditional methods (phone, mail and in person canvassing) in recent national elections in the US and UK. We develop hypotheses regarding the relative effects of online contacting and test them using election study data. Our findings show that while online contact is generally less frequent than the offline form in both countries, this gap is particular…
Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning
A core question addressed by parties and internet scholars is whether the medium is equalising or normalising levels of inter-party competition, Are minor parties better placed to compete for voters' attention online (equalisation), or do major parties continue to dominate (normalisation)? To date, most research has supported the latter scenario through ‘supply-side’ comparisons of website content in a single election. This article re-examines th…
Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning
This article argues that digital media are introducing a new grassroots-based mode of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ (CIC) that challenges the dominant professionalized model of campaign management by devolving power over core tasks to the grassroots. After defining the practice through reference to the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and online parties literature, we devise a measure of CIC that is applied to UK parties in the 2010 election. Our …
New media, elections and the political knowledge gap in Australia
This article tests the hypothesis that the internet is exacerbating an existing knowledge gap in Australia. The data come from the Australian Election Study, which has measured voters' political knowledge and internet use since 2001. The results support the knowledge gap hypothesis: while internet access is expanding, consumption of political information online is narrowing among a younger, better educated and politically interested group, and is…
Online Social Ties and Political Engagement
While positive effects of social interaction on political participation have been widely confirmed, questions have been raised about whether the relationship holds in the online environment. This article uses data from the 2007 Australian Election Study to address this debate by testing whether greater online social interaction predicts increased political engagement, and whether this differs for interactions within homogenous (bonding) versus he…
Party organizational change and ICTs
This paper examines the relationship between unofficial party blogs and official party sources in the UK using a mixed-method approach. Specifically we combine interview data with content analysis, user surveys and usage data, and finally hyperlink analysis to profile the emergence, popularity, audience and online prominence of four major party blogs since 2005. The core question posed is how far the blogs are challenging parties as the focal poi…
Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election
Studies of Web use during elections have focused mainly on the content of Web sites and on the major factors driving parties' and candidates' adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of Web campaigns have been more limited. This article examines the nature and extent of Web use by voters and parties in the 2007 Australian federal election, focusing particularly on the consequences of Web 2.0 campaigning for candidate vote s…
New Media and the Revitalisation of Politics
This article considers whether the new media can provide a basis for reinvigorating one of the more established arenas of conventional politics – the election campaign. To do so we draw on the web campaigning efforts of Barack Obama during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election and consider how far such techniques can ‘travel’ outside of the American election context. To understand what lay at the heart of Obama’s successful use of the new media in …
Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning
This article develops and tests a new multidimensional index — CAMPROF — that is designed to measure and compare parties' use of professionalized campaign techniques during elections. Based on the extant literature, we identify and operationalize the essential components of this new form of campaigning to create a 30-point index that is applied to the case of the 2005 German federal election. The results show the CAMPROF Index to be: (1) successf…
Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain
This paper provides a comparative analysis of the distribution, drivers, and contents of Web campaigning at the local level in British and Australian national elections. After comparing the extent of Web campaigning among candidates in the 2004 Australian and 2005 British General Elections, analysis of the factors linked to Web campaigning in each country is undertaken and the contents and style of their Web use systematically recorded and compar…
Online Participation in the UK
This article offers a new test of the mobilisation thesis of Internet effects on individual political participation using data from an NOP survey of 1,972 UK adults during May 2002. The analysis differs from that of previous studies in that it significantly widens the understanding of the dependent variable—online participation—as well as introducing new Internet-specific variables as explanatory factors for this new type of participation. Using …
Election Campaigning on the WWW in the USA and UK
This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combinati…
Virtual Campaigning
This paper examines the impact of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media? We examine these questions with two types of data-a questionnaire of party communicati…
New Parties, New Media
UK and US-based studies have revealed certain patterns in the way parties use the World Wide Web. These patterns may or may not be repeated elsewhere. This article explores the extent to which Italian parties are exploiting the Web; the impact of the specificities of the Italian institutional context on parties' use of the new medium; the impact which the medium can be expected to have on party competition in Italy. Analysis of their websites rev…
U.K. Political Parties and the Internet
This article reports the results of a study that examined the effects of U.K. political parties' use of the Internet on intraparty democracy and interparty competition. Using party official questionnaire data and content analysis of party Web sites, the study explored the extent to which parties are using the World Wide Web (WWW) and email to promote their members' views and examined whether the Internet provides minor parties with more equal acc…
Right‐Libertarian Parties and the “New Values
Among the most noted and studied societal tendencies of recent decades have been those associated with structural change in industrial societies becoming postindustrial. Within political science, much attention has been focused on the behavioural and institutional effects of value change accompanying that transition, and especially on the diminishing impact of class and ideology on politics. Among the institutional effects have been (at times and…
Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning
This article argues that digital media are introducing a new grassroots-based mode of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ (CIC) that challenges the dominant professionalized model of campaign management by devolving power over core tasks to the grassroots. After defining the practice through reference to the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and online parties literature, we devise a measure of CIC that is applied to UK parties in the 2010 election. Our …
Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning
A core question addressed by parties and internet scholars is whether the medium is equalising or normalising levels of inter-party competition, Are minor parties better placed to compete for voters' attention online (equalisation), or do major parties continue to dominate (normalisation)? To date, most research has supported the latter scenario through ‘supply-side’ comparisons of website content in a single election. This article re-examines th…
Election Campaigning on the WWW in the USA and UK
This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combinati…
Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning
This article develops and tests a new multidimensional index — CAMPROF — that is designed to measure and compare parties' use of professionalized campaign techniques during elections. Based on the extant literature, we identify and operationalize the essential components of this new form of campaigning to create a 30-point index that is applied to the case of the 2005 German federal election. The results show the CAMPROF Index to be: (1) successf…
Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election
Studies of Web use during elections have focused mainly on the content of Web sites and on the major factors driving parties' and candidates' adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of Web campaigns have been more limited. This article examines the nature and extent of Web use by voters and parties in the 2007 Australian federal election, focusing particularly on the consequences of Web 2.0 campaigning for candidate vote s…
Online Participation in the UK
This article offers a new test of the mobilisation thesis of Internet effects on individual political participation using data from an NOP survey of 1,972 UK adults during May 2002. The analysis differs from that of previous studies in that it significantly widens the understanding of the dependent variable—online participation—as well as introducing new Internet-specific variables as explanatory factors for this new type of participation. Using …
Getting out the vote in the social media era
This paper compares the spread and impact of new digital modes of voter mobilization with more traditional methods (phone, mail and in person canvassing) in recent national elections in the US and UK. We develop hypotheses regarding the relative effects of online contacting and test them using election study data. Our findings show that while online contact is generally less frequent than the offline form in both countries, this gap is particular…
U.K. Political Parties and the Internet
This article reports the results of a study that examined the effects of U.K. political parties' use of the Internet on intraparty democracy and interparty competition. Using party official questionnaire data and content analysis of party Web sites, the study explored the extent to which parties are using the World Wide Web (WWW) and email to promote their members' views and examined whether the Internet provides minor parties with more equal acc…
Virtual Campaigning
This paper examines the impact of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media? We examine these questions with two types of data-a questionnaire of party communicati…
Party organizational change and ICTs
This paper examines the relationship between unofficial party blogs and official party sources in the UK using a mixed-method approach. Specifically we combine interview data with content analysis, user surveys and usage data, and finally hyperlink analysis to profile the emergence, popularity, audience and online prominence of four major party blogs since 2005. The core question posed is how far the blogs are challenging parties as the focal poi…
Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain
This paper provides a comparative analysis of the distribution, drivers, and contents of Web campaigning at the local level in British and Australian national elections. After comparing the extent of Web campaigning among candidates in the 2004 Australian and 2005 British General Elections, analysis of the factors linked to Web campaigning in each country is undertaken and the contents and style of their Web use systematically recorded and compar…
New Media and the Revitalisation of Politics
This article considers whether the new media can provide a basis for reinvigorating one of the more established arenas of conventional politics – the election campaign. To do so we draw on the web campaigning efforts of Barack Obama during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election and consider how far such techniques can ‘travel’ outside of the American election context. To understand what lay at the heart of Obama’s successful use of the new media in …
New Parties, New Media
UK and US-based studies have revealed certain patterns in the way parties use the World Wide Web. These patterns may or may not be repeated elsewhere. This article explores the extent to which Italian parties are exploiting the Web; the impact of the specificities of the Italian institutional context on parties' use of the new medium; the impact which the medium can be expected to have on party competition in Italy. Analysis of their websites rev…
Online Social Ties and Political Engagement
While positive effects of social interaction on political participation have been widely confirmed, questions have been raised about whether the relationship holds in the online environment. This article uses data from the 2007 Australian Election Study to address this debate by testing whether greater online social interaction predicts increased political engagement, and whether this differs for interactions within homogenous (bonding) versus he…
New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to reach, young adults are less mobilized and vote less often, creating a vicious circle of demobilization. However, new forms of political communication—including online and text messaging—have creat…
Right‐Libertarian Parties and the “New Values
Among the most noted and studied societal tendencies of recent decades have been those associated with structural change in industrial societies becoming postindustrial. Within political science, much attention has been focused on the behavioural and institutional effects of value change accompanying that transition, and especially on the diminishing impact of class and ideology on politics. Among the institutional effects have been (at times and…
Voter mobilisation in context
This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaign…
New media, elections and the political knowledge gap in Australia
This article tests the hypothesis that the internet is exacerbating an existing knowledge gap in Australia. The data come from the Australian Election Study, which has measured voters' political knowledge and internet use since 2001. The results support the knowledge gap hypothesis: while internet access is expanding, consumption of political information online is narrowing among a younger, better educated and politically interested group, and is…
Right‐Libertarian Parties and the “New Values
Among the most noted and studied societal tendencies of recent decades have been those associated with structural change in industrial societies becoming postindustrial. Within political science, much attention has been focused on the behavioural and institutional effects of value change accompanying that transition, and especially on the diminishing impact of class and ideology on politics. Among the institutional effects have been (at times and…
U.K. Political Parties and the Internet
This article reports the results of a study that examined the effects of U.K. political parties' use of the Internet on intraparty democracy and interparty competition. Using party official questionnaire data and content analysis of party Web sites, the study explored the extent to which parties are using the World Wide Web (WWW) and email to promote their members' views and examined whether the Internet provides minor parties with more equal acc…
New Parties, New Media
UK and US-based studies have revealed certain patterns in the way parties use the World Wide Web. These patterns may or may not be repeated elsewhere. This article explores the extent to which Italian parties are exploiting the Web; the impact of the specificities of the Italian institutional context on parties' use of the new medium; the impact which the medium can be expected to have on party competition in Italy. Analysis of their websites rev…
Virtual Campaigning
This paper examines the impact of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media? We examine these questions with two types of data-a questionnaire of party communicati…
Election Campaigning on the WWW in the USA and UK
This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combinati…
Online Participation in the UK
This article offers a new test of the mobilisation thesis of Internet effects on individual political participation using data from an NOP survey of 1,972 UK adults during May 2002. The analysis differs from that of previous studies in that it significantly widens the understanding of the dependent variable—online participation—as well as introducing new Internet-specific variables as explanatory factors for this new type of participation. Using …
Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain
This paper provides a comparative analysis of the distribution, drivers, and contents of Web campaigning at the local level in British and Australian national elections. After comparing the extent of Web campaigning among candidates in the 2004 Australian and 2005 British General Elections, analysis of the factors linked to Web campaigning in each country is undertaken and the contents and style of their Web use systematically recorded and compar…
New Media and the Revitalisation of Politics
This article considers whether the new media can provide a basis for reinvigorating one of the more established arenas of conventional politics – the election campaign. To do so we draw on the web campaigning efforts of Barack Obama during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election and consider how far such techniques can ‘travel’ outside of the American election context. To understand what lay at the heart of Obama’s successful use of the new media in …
Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning
This article develops and tests a new multidimensional index — CAMPROF — that is designed to measure and compare parties' use of professionalized campaign techniques during elections. Based on the extant literature, we identify and operationalize the essential components of this new form of campaigning to create a 30-point index that is applied to the case of the 2005 German federal election. The results show the CAMPROF Index to be: (1) successf…
Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election
Studies of Web use during elections have focused mainly on the content of Web sites and on the major factors driving parties' and candidates' adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of Web campaigns have been more limited. This article examines the nature and extent of Web use by voters and parties in the 2007 Australian federal election, focusing particularly on the consequences of Web 2.0 campaigning for candidate vote s…
Party organizational change and ICTs
This paper examines the relationship between unofficial party blogs and official party sources in the UK using a mixed-method approach. Specifically we combine interview data with content analysis, user surveys and usage data, and finally hyperlink analysis to profile the emergence, popularity, audience and online prominence of four major party blogs since 2005. The core question posed is how far the blogs are challenging parties as the focal poi…
Online Social Ties and Political Engagement
While positive effects of social interaction on political participation have been widely confirmed, questions have been raised about whether the relationship holds in the online environment. This article uses data from the 2007 Australian Election Study to address this debate by testing whether greater online social interaction predicts increased political engagement, and whether this differs for interactions within homogenous (bonding) versus he…
Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning
A core question addressed by parties and internet scholars is whether the medium is equalising or normalising levels of inter-party competition, Are minor parties better placed to compete for voters' attention online (equalisation), or do major parties continue to dominate (normalisation)? To date, most research has supported the latter scenario through ‘supply-side’ comparisons of website content in a single election. This article re-examines th…
Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning
This article argues that digital media are introducing a new grassroots-based mode of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ (CIC) that challenges the dominant professionalized model of campaign management by devolving power over core tasks to the grassroots. After defining the practice through reference to the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and online parties literature, we devise a measure of CIC that is applied to UK parties in the 2010 election. Our …
New media, elections and the political knowledge gap in Australia
This article tests the hypothesis that the internet is exacerbating an existing knowledge gap in Australia. The data come from the Australian Election Study, which has measured voters' political knowledge and internet use since 2001. The results support the knowledge gap hypothesis: while internet access is expanding, consumption of political information online is narrowing among a younger, better educated and politically interested group, and is…
Voter mobilisation in context
This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaign…
Getting out the vote in the social media era
This paper compares the spread and impact of new digital modes of voter mobilization with more traditional methods (phone, mail and in person canvassing) in recent national elections in the US and UK. We develop hypotheses regarding the relative effects of online contacting and test them using election study data. Our findings show that while online contact is generally less frequent than the offline form in both countries, this gap is particular…
New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to reach, young adults are less mobilized and vote less often, creating a vicious circle of demobilization. However, new forms of political communication—including online and text messaging—have creat…
Political science (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Public relations (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · World Wide Web (10 works) · The Internet (9 works)