2008 election epolitics

Another must read from Bryce Edwards:

How well were electronic forms of politics utilised in last year’s general election? How effectively did the political parties and electorate candidates use websites, email, social networking in their campaigning? What about bloggers and the mainstream media? These questions are addressed in a chapter by Peter John Chen about ‘the role, use and impact of online media in New Zealand’s 2008 election’, published in Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig of the University of Otago Politics department). This blog post is the fourth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book (which I also have a chapter in).

Most of the focus is on how parties and candidates used online media, rather than the role of blogs by non candidates. Still very interesting. Labour gets caned for their 2008 e-campaign. No surprise as they had three different websites running.

They also reveal Labour spent around 10% of its advertising budget online and National spent zero.