Taking Campaign Strategy Online : Using Candidate Websites to Advance the Study of Issue Emphasis

Previous research into political candidates' issue emphasis strategies has been limited by the difficulty of estimating the amount of attention candidates devote to particular issues. Nearly all existing studies generate their estimates by analyzing either newspaper articles on campaigns or data on television advertising. I present a third alternative for measuring candidate's strategies: the coding of emphasis on campaign websites via automated text analysis. This approach offers a number of advantages over existing methods, chief among them the availability of data for a much greater number of candidates and the greater depth of content than that available from brief advertisements or second-hand reports. In this paper, I describe the process for automatically coding candidate websites, discuss some of the challenges involved, and present preliminary results from the coding of websites for 2002 US Senate candidates. These results are used to illustrate the potential for this method of estimating issue emphasis strategies to be used for advancing the study of campaign strategy and finally providing answers to questions that have plagued previous researchers