The use of the Internet for Electoral Campaign Communication by South African Political Parties

Electoral campaigns have an effect on the aggregate direction in which a country heads and accounts for the importance all stakeholders attach to them. This drives political parties and candidates to seek effective means of communicating with the electorate. The Internet has gained prominence over time as a channel for electoral campaign communication as studies have shown. However, there is still a void on studies focusing on the usage of the Internet for electoral campaign communication in South Africa. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of the Internet for electoral campaign communication by South African political parties through the analysis of selected campaign websites. The study employed quantitative content analysis of websites of the top nine political parties in South Africa, based on the results of the 2009 national elections. The websites were analysed based on two major categories of evaluation criteria: (1) features on the websites, and (2) the way they addressed issues of concern to South African voters. The features evaluated include dissemination of campaign news, organization of supporters, use of social networking media, availability of rich multimedia content, presence of fundraising facility, blogs, and download support. The issues of concern to voters include corruption, crime and security, housing, education, employment, health care, and the economy. Findings show that the majority of political parties in South Africa have embraced the Internet as a channel for electoral campaign communication. This is reflected in the campaign websites broadly addressing the issues of concern to the electorate. However, parties need to improve the features on their websites. Results indicate that majority of the parties limited themselves to only communicating with the electorate and did not interact with them through blogs and social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter. The results of this study should be of interest to South African political parties, web administrators, and the electorate.