Skip Navigation


Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on February 10, 2006
Parliamentary Affairs 2006 59(2):366-374; doi:10.1093/pa/gsl006
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
59/2/366    most recent
gsl006v2
gsl006v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ferguson, R.
Right arrow Articles by Griffiths, B.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Thin Democracy? Parliamentarians, Citizens and the Influence of Blogging on Political Engagement

Ross Ferguson

Ross Ferguson is Director of the E-democracy Programme at the Hansard Society

Barry Griffiths

Barry Griffiths is Project Manager for both the Citizenship Education and e-Democracy Programmes at the Hansard Society.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

IN 2003, Tom Watson became the first member of Parliament (MP) to use a weblog. This online application (which may best be described as a website with a standardised yet flexible structure and content management system) is viewed by some to have the potential to boost and, perhaps, transform political engagement. In an effort to explore this potential, in July 2004, the Hansard Society eDemocracy Programme undertook a study of the UK’s first handful of political blogs—citizen, civic and parliamentary—using a citizen jury to assess their content and nature.

The finding of our study, published in Political Blogs: Craze or Convention?, revealed that blogging may be intriguing to the media, academia and technologists, but it was failing to excite the body politic more generally. Our jury, consisting of individuals with varying degrees of political experience and little, if any, previous exposure to blogging, was muted in its reaction to . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Motivation
 

   Maintenance
 

   Political content
 

   Networking
 

   Development
 

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?