THE LEVEL OF WEB ACTIVISM BY CANDIDATES IN THE LOCAL ELECTIONS 2010 (MINSK CITY)

This study is an extenstion to previous research on political web activ¬ism in Belarus: during the local elections 2007 (Kryvalap, 2007: 56-63) and the parliamentary elections 2008 (Chrapavicki, 2009: 110-120). The web activism during the presidential campaign 2006 was not deeply studied and was briefly referenced in the aforementioned and some other publications (Mieljancoŭ, 2006: 32-41). There are two reasons to explain the scarcity of studies on web activism during electoral campaigns of different levels. Firstly, it is only since 2009 that a significant increase in the number of Internet users in Belarus has been observed. Whereas in 2003, the overall number of Belarusian world web users was 1,391,900 and 2,795,100 in 2007, in the years of 2008 and 2009 it went up to 3,100,700 and 4,436,800 respectively (Electroname.com, 2010).