The Visibility of Political Websites during Electoral Campaigns

This paper discusses how political parties and candidates try to enhance the public visibility of their websites during electoral campaigns, through a process that the author proposes calling the “meta-campaign.” This process significantly depends on the actions of journalists and the way in which they cover electoral campaigns. The discussion is based on an exploratory and qualitative study of the Portuguese campaign for the 2009 European Parliament election. The main reason the authors chose this election was that European themes, being less familiar to Portuguese citizens than national ones, would highlight the need for information about the salient issues as well as the tools for attaining this information, with the websites of political parties and candidates clearly being one of the latter.