European Parliament Online: Identifying the European Parliament's 2009 Online Communication Strategy

The objective of this paper is to chart the boundaries of the developing phenomenon of the use of information and communication technologies to support politics by large political organizations such as the European Parliament through the analysis of the online strategy of the European Parliament in its campaign for widening participation in the 2009 European Parliament elections. For the first time, during the electoral campaign, the European Parliament decided to lead its own campaign to raise awareness among citizens and increase turnout, and constructed its campaign on an official website and on five social network sites. The authors have concentrated on the European Parliament website, as well as on its profile on three most used social media sites: Facebook, Twitter; and YouTube. Since it is difficult to make a deeper comparison between these different online platforms, the authors have tested them on different communicative functions and campaign elements. Through the use of computer-mediated discourse analysis, this descriptive and explorative study has tried to discover the dynamics of the campaign, the reasons for choosing a specific platform fora particular part of the campaign, and the possibility of complementariness between them.