australian elections and the web

Much less glamorous than the US election; but I promise it took place, some four weeks ago. For the election, Steve Ward, Rachel Gibson and I looked at how many candidates to the House of Representatives had websites, and what they were doing with them.

Quite a depressing enedeavour, as we found only 170 URLs, out of 1092 listed candidates. That makes it 16 % if you have no calculator in reach. Of course, if you limit the analysis to the three main parties (Lib, ALP and Nats), the percentage grows to a whopping - well, not - 46 %.

However, and this was the striking findings, only 10 % of total candidates actually had a working site - no 404, spoof, etc - behind the URL facade. The figure for main parties also suffered, from 46 % to 26 %.

Too early to draw conclusions though, we will look more closely at the data soon. Stay tuned for the results.

Another, separate project is looking at a wider array of political actors during the 2004 election, led by Maria Pieter Aquilia at SiRC, NTU, Singapore. This is part of the Internet & Elections project, which looks at election and the Internet in Europe, Asia and the US (now, that's more exciting). I am curious to examine their final figures for Senate candidates.