Political Challengers or Political Outcasts?: Comparing Online Communication for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the British Liberal Democrats

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of grants from the British Academy (International Potential, National Limits: Investigating the Role of the Russian Internet in Constraining the Social Agenda), the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (Decoding the Online Sphere in the Post-Soviet Region), and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-22-4159, The Internet and Everyday Rights in Russia) in research for this article.This article compares the web presence of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the British Liberal Democrats in order both to analyse the ability of the internet to strengthen parties as political institutions as well as to reflect upon the relative democratic value of parties online in different types of regimes. The article compares the party websites in early 2010 through an analysis of online audience, web links, content posted by parties and user-generated material linked to the two parties. The research found that the online potential of party communication, despite the universal availability of powerful tools of information distribution and social networking opportunities, was far more closely tied to national political culture than to cyber-culture in general. The Communist Party web activity tended to parallel the party activity offline, failing to craft the appearance of a more modern or inclusive party. At the same time, supporters of the British Liberal Democrats made greater use of external social networking and were apparently more connected with the broader political sphere, although perhaps at the expense of party branding and control. The findings demonstrate the need to understand how national political organisations and attitudes can play a much stronger role than technological potential in shaping the democratising forces of the online sphere.