The Handbook of Internet Politics
Cover Description
The internet is now a mainstay of contemporary political life and captivates researchers from across the social sciences. From debates about its impact on parties and election campaigns following momentous presidential contests in the United States, to concerns over international security, privacy, and surveillance in the post-9/11, post-7/7 environment; from the rise of blogging as a threat to the traditional model of journalism, to controversies at the international level over how and if the internet should be governed by an entity such as the United Nations; from the new repertoires of collective action open to citizens, to the massive programs of public management reform taking place in the name of e-government, internet politics and policy are continually in the headlines.
The Handbook of Internet Politics is a collection of over 30 chapters dealing with the most significant scholarly debates in this rapidly growing field of study. Organized in four broad sections: Institutions, Behavior, Identities, and Law and Policy, the Handbook summarizes and criticizes contemporary debates while pointing out new departures. A comprehensive set of resources, it provides linkages to established theories of media and politics, political communication, governance, deliberative democracy, and social movements, all within an interdisciplinary context. The contributors form a strong international cast of established and junior scholars.
This is the first publication of its kind in this field; a helpful companion to students and scholars of politics, international relations, communication studies, and sociology.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: New directions in internet politics research
Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard
Part I: Institutions
2. The internet in U.S. election campaigns
Richard Davis, Jody C Baumgartner, Peter L. Francia, and
Jonathan S. Morris
3. European political organizations and the internet: mobilization, participation, and change
Stephen Ward and Rachel Gibson
4. Electoral web production practices in cross-national perspective: the relative influence of national development, political culture, and web genre
Kirsten A. Foot, Michael Xenos, Steven M. Schneider, Randolph Kluver, and Nicholas W. Jankowski
5. Parties, election campaigning, and the internet: toward a comparative institutional approach
Nick Anstead and Andrew Chadwick
6. Technological change and the shifting nature of political organization
Bruce Bimber, Cynthia Stohl, and Andrew J. Flanagin
7. Making parliamentary democracy visible: speaking to, with, and for the public in the age of interactive technology
Stephen Coleman
8. Bureaucratic reform and e-government in the United States: an institutional perspective
Jane E. Fountain
9. Public management change and e-government: the emergence of digital-era governance
Helen Margetts
Part 2: Behavior
10. Wired to fact: the role of the internet in identifying deception during the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign
Bruce W. Hardy, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Kenneth Winneg
11. Political engagement online: do the information rich get richer and the like-minded more similar?
Jennifer Brundidge and Ronald E. Rice
12. Information, the internet and direct democracy
Justin Reedy and Chris Wells
13. Toward digital citizenship: addressing inequality in the information age
Karen Mossberger
14. Online news creation and consumption: implications for modern democracies
David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg
15. Web 2.0 and the transformation of news and journalism
James Stanyer
Part 3: Identities
16. The internet and the changing global media environment
Brian McNair
17. The virtual sphere 2.0: the internet, the public sphere, and beyond
Zizi Papacharissi
18. Identity, technology, and narratives: transnational activism and social networks
W. Lance Bennett and Amoshaun Toft
19. Theorizing gender and the internet: past, present, and future
Niels van Doorn and Liesbet van Zoonen
20. New immigrants, the internet, and civic society
Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach
21. One Europe, digitally divided
Jan A. G. M. van Dijk
22. Working around the state: internet use and political identity in the Arab world
Deborah L. Wheeler
Part 4: Law and Policy
23. The geopolitics of internet control: censorship, sovereignty, and cyberspace
Ronald J. Deibert
24. Locational surveillance: embracing the patterns of our lives
David J. Phillips
25. Metaphoric reinforcement of the virtual fence: factors shaping the political economy of property in cyberspace
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. and Kenneth Neil Farrall
26. Globalizing the logic of openness: open source software and the global governance of intellectual property
Christopher May
27. Exclusionary rules? The politics of protocols
Greg Elmer
28. The new politics of the internet: multi-stakeholder policy-making and the internet technocracy
William H. Dutton and Malcolm Peltu
29. Enabling effective multi-stakeholder participation in global internet governance through accessible cyber-infrastructure
Derrick L. Cogburn
30. Internet diffusion and the digital divide: the role of policy-making and political institutions
Kenneth S. Rogerson and Daniel Milton
31. Conclusion: political omnivores and wired states
Philip N. Howard and Andrew Chadwick
Publisher: Routledge
Paperback, 528 pages, December 2009
Also available: Hardcover, EBook
Post-publication Reviews
“In its impressive scope, the Handbook shows the resonance of internet politics as a field of study… The rigor of this scholarly work suggests that a positive orientation is not the product of blind optimism but rather the result of serious inquiry into the broad intersection of the internet and politics.“—Professor Robert Klotz, International Journal of Press/Politics.
“Exploring new territories in political communication, public opinion, citizenship studies and social movements … This rigorous work will certainly serve as an excellent starting point for a growing number of graduate students who are considering doing research in the field … Scholars in the social sciences will find here an essential update on the state of internet studies, which have now become almost everybody’s business.“—Professor Yves Laberge, Political Studies Review.
"Without a doubt the handbook is an excellent reference work on internet politics in its broadest sense."—Dr David Stuart, Online Information Review.
"The Handbook of Internet Politics is a timely contribution… Its deliberative and inclusive approach to the topic makes it recommended reading…"—Johannes Fritz, Political Studies Review, reviewing the paperback edition.
Links and Further Information
— The Handbook of Internet Politics Booksite, with information about the contributors, downloadable sample chapters, and the entire Handbook bibliography—with more than 1,500 references—to download in EndNote and Zotero formats. As of 2024, archived at the Internet Archive.
— Phil Howard’s Website.
