The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.

Philip N. Howard is an assistant professor in the Communications Department at the University of Washington. He has published an edited collection with Steve Jones entitled Society Online: The Internet in Context (2003) as well as articles in New Media & Society, American Behavioral Scientist and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Howard has worked as a consultant to the World Resources Institute, the Canadian International Development Agency, and has served on the advisory board of the Survey 2000 and Survey 2001 Projects.

Introduction: the hypermedia campaign; 1. Political communication and information technology; 2. Producing the hypermedia campaign; 3. Learning politics from the hypermedia campaign; 4. Organizational communication in the hypermedia campaign; 5. Managed citizenship and information technology; Appendix: Method notes on studying information technology and political communication.