[LINK] Use of the Internet in the Australian Federal Election

[Tom Worthington]

Professor Rachel K. Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of 
Manchester, is researching how the Internet was used in the last UK and 
Australian elections. She will talk on this in "What is 
‘E-Participation’?", 4pm, 19 April 2011, at the Australian National 
University in Canberra: 
<http://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/seminar/rachel-gibson>.

I bumped into Rachel at an e-government lunch in Parliament House 
yesterday. She commented that green voters were more active on-line in 
Australia and Liberal Democrats in the UK. She suggested this was 
because small parties have less money and so have to make more use of 
low cost tools. However, I suspect that the Greens and Liberal Democrats 
have a less centralised structure which allows grass roots membership 
participation: 
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/04/government-20-at-parliment-house.html>.

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     Seminar - Professor Rachel K. Gibson - Tuesday 19 April at 4pm 
Professor Rachel K. Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of 
Manchester
     4pm on Tuesday 19 April in the LJ Hume Centre (First Floor Copland 
Building)

     What is ‘E-Participation’?

     This paper uses original survey data from the 2010 UK election to 
address the question of defining and measuring e-participation. Despite 
over a decades’ worth of research being conducted into the topic of 
e-participation, a clear and commonly accepted definition of the 
activity itself remains elusive. The talk will focus on ways in which 
e-participation has been studied both conceptually and empirically, 
drawing on the extensive literature that has examined offline 
participation. Is e-participation simply an extension of existing forms, 
differing only in mode? Or does it offer a new and qualitatively 
different form of political engagement. After developing a typology of 
e-participation we test it using confirmatory factor analysis. The 
results indicate that different forms of e-participation can be 
identified and that they have potentially different implications for 
mobilisation of citizens.

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-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra