State Legislators’ Web Presence:  Frequency, Content, and Design

 

Julie M. Still

Paul Robeson Library

Rutgers University

300 N. 4th St.

Camden, NJ 08102

 

still@camden.rutgers.edu

 

Abstract:  While the use of web sites in national political campaigns has been researched from a variety of angles, little attention has been paid to the use of the web at the state level.  This study of web sites for state legislators in three states (Arizona, Missouri and New Jersey) looks at the number of legislators who have web sites other than the brief space allotted on the state’s web site, what sort of districts are represented and the content and design of these sites.  In two of the states roughly 10% of the state legislators had an easily located web site.  The third state had a higher ratio but the sites were more frequently identifiable as being less frequently updated.  Republicans and women are more likely to have web sites.  There is little standardization of the type of information presented on the sites.

 

 

 

Contents

 

Introduction

 

The influence of the world wide web on politics is easily visible, especially at the national level, in presidential, senatorial and congressional races.  Little study has been done, however, on the use of the web at the state level, especially the state house.  If the web is being used as a communications, public relations, and campaign device on the national level, is the same thing happening at the state level?  There is usually less money in these races, so the amounts to be spent on web designers, hosting, content providers, and maintenance is smaller.  How many state legislators use the web?  What do they use it for?  These questions have as yet been unanswered and this study is designed to offer some initial information on the use of the web at this level of politics. 

Kaye and Johnson (2002) have found that there are four primary motivations for seeking political information online:  guidance, information seeking or surveillance, entertainment, and social utility.  In the 1996 presidential campaign, it is estimated that 29% of Americans used the Internet to find information on candidates or political issues (Gibson and Ward, 2000).   Web users in that race were more likely to look for news than voting decisions.  Candidates who did have a web site were more likely to see a higher number of votes cast in that race. (D’Alessio,1997).   Unfortunately this did not translate into a higher percentage of Americans voting (McManus, 2002).  A more recent survey by the Democracy Online Project showed that 37% of independents likely to vote seek political information online, although they may seek information from more objective sources than candidate or legislative web sites. (Munro, 2000).   While the Internet is often said to democratize society and it is clear that people are using the web to locate information on candidates, there is criticism that politicians use the web for their purposes but do not necessarily invite greater interaction with their constituents (Stromer-Galley, 2000).  All levels of elections have been given at least cursory study, but most have focused on the national level.  This study will look at the campaign web presence of state legislators, and see how it compares to the study of national politicians. 

 

History and Literature Review

 

In 1995, the U.S. House started placing the texts of bills and other legislative materials on the web.   The U.S. Senate was the first to add individual pages for each senator (Davis, 1999, 123).  In 1998, 72% of all senate candidates had campaign web sites (Gibson and Ward, 2000, 301). By 2000, this had increased to 88% (Puopolo, 2001).  Although many must have appeared late in the campaign; by the end of July 2002, only about half of all house or senate campaigns had a web site.  Incumbents were less likely than challengers to have a web presence (Vaida, 2000).  This may be in part because those in office often have a very basic web page provided for them by the office.  Also in 2002, every Democratic and 92% of the Republican gubernatorial candidate had a website (Chinni, 2002).  A 1996 survey of US Congressional web sites found that the information most frequently provided were biographies and contact information (over 90% of house and senate sites) and press releases (74.7% of house sites and 65% of senate sites).  No other items were found on more than half of the sites surveyed (Davis, 1999, 131).  A study of the web sites of male and female Congressional representatives found no real differences by gender (Niven and Zilber, 2001).  Adler, Gent and Overmeyer (1998) found in the early stages of federal congressional web presence that Republicans, younger legislators and those from affluent districts were more likely to have a web site, but that Democrats and those who could not count on an easy victory were more likely to use a site that solicited feedback and problems from uers.

Web sites, at least campaign web sites, are also effective in fundraising.  John McCain’s presidential campaign claims to have raised more than $7 million over its web site (Munro, 2000).  More recently, Howard Dean used the Internet to energize segments of the population that had previously been inactive.  While his web site was not  technically sophisticated in and of itself, what made it particularly valuable was the addition of tools that allowed Dean supporters around the country to meet each other in real time (Cornfield, 2004).  Traditional techniques, letters and phone calls, can be expensive, eating up almost half (40%) of the amount raised.  Internet appeals are very inexpensive, especially if free email services are used, and generate a higher response rate (Munro, 2000).  While simple e-mail services to a limited number of recipients is still free, more complex email with personal domain names is available for a fee, and it certainly is true that it is often cheaper than paying for printing and postage, or hiring staff to make cold calls or automated call services.

Email usage to communicate with voters goes both ways.  A 2001 study of Tennessee state legislators found that voters were increasingly using email to communicate with their state legislators.  This went across all age demographics, although racial minorities were less likely to use email.  Female legislators were more likely to be contacted electronically than their male counterparts.  The legislator’s attitude towards constituent services was also a factor.  The more emphasis a legislator put on constituent service the more likely he or she was to receive email from voters.  (Richardson, 2001).  A 2000 survey of state legislators in California, Georgia, and Iowa also found extensive use of email by politicians at this level, not only to communicate with constituents but also other policymakers, both in and out of office (Cooper, 2002). 

The U.S. Senate as well as the U.S. House offer simples web sites for their members, but these do not provide for much space or information.  On the state level, many states also provide simple sites for members, giving contact information, committee assignments and such, in a uniform fashion, not allowing for any individuality or personal expression.  States usually have a standard one screen web page for all legislators providing a photo and basic information.  These cannot be used for campaign purposes and often provide little information other than contact points.  They cannot be used for blatant campaign purposes, such as the solicitation of volunteers or contributions.  Legislators who wish to communicate further with their constituents must maintain their own personalized web pages (Legislative, 2002).  This also is problematic.  A site managed by the legislator’s office staff during office hours, or using public funds in any way, cannot be used for campaign purposes.  Thus many sites do not look like campaign sites, but the fine print states they are paid for by the “committee to elect” and so can, during election season, be used for fund raising and campaigning.  Even so, as previously mentioned, they are less likely to have personal sites than challengers, who, unless they currently hold another office, must have a personal site or page to have any web presence at all.

The acquisition and maintenance of a web site is not as easy as the average computer user might think.  National candidates can afford professional consultants who will design and manage the site.  State candidates, working on a much smaller budget, may be dependent on volunteers, both for hosting and maintenance.  Finding someone with the necessary equipment and skills within their district, if this is an issue or requirement, narrows the choices dramatically.  Even selecting the domain name (web address) can be complicated.  Finding web address names for candidates without having them in advance or finding them in a search engine can be difficult.  The variations are endless.  If Bob Smith is running, would the URL (uniform resource locator, or web address) be bobsmith.com, voteforbob.com, smithforcongress.com, smithcampaign.com or some other combination of terms?  Web savvy politicians will purchase something simple that can be used across a number of elections and offices and make sure the domain name costs are paid every year.  The consistency can help keep it in the mind of voters.  If the URL changes with each election (bob2000.com, bob2002.com, and so on) published materials have to be updated, and everyone reminded of the change.  Hacking can be another problem.  Volunteer sites may not have all the security measures of a professional firm.  One New Jersey candidate for a state level office withdrew from the race and shortly thereafter her site was altered to contain adult images without her knowledge (Foot, 2002).  Thus, the site must be monitored.  It must be updated to keep it fresh and make sure links are working.  Only the most basic “brochure-ware” sites, those conforming in appearance to a print brochure and seldom updated, will need minimal tending.  While design and development are expensive and time consuming, it is the maintenance and upkeep that are the most wearing.  Even national campaign sites tend to be dormant between elections. 

Web sites at the state level may be put up on the fly without much information going through party lines.  A 2001 TeamGOP web site for Missouri listed official web sites for all 76 candidates for state representative, but listed only one personal site.  Yet research for this paper turned up personal sites for five others.  This would be an indication that candidates are posting web sites without assistance or guidance from the state party, or that the state party did not update their site often.

 

Methodology

 

This study looks at the web sites of state legislators, using a data sheet to collect information on a uniform set of topics.  The researcher selected 3 states, New Jersey, Missouri, and Arizona, to represent geographic diversity.  The research was done between the months of June and August 2001. The sites found were either legislative or campaign, and in some cases functioned as both, but all were personal sites of the legislator, and not the generic site provided by the state.  It is also a study of the ease of locating these web sites.  Assuming that a constituent was researching a state representative, but did not have the URL of the representative’s site, how would the constituent be most likely to go about looking for it?  Some might just type in a few guesses.  More sophisticated users might try a search engine 

State web sites provided the names of all current congressmen (called assemblymen in New Jersey).  These names were entered in the Google search engine, in conjunction with the name of the state (i.e. “Jason Crowell” Missouri).  Google was selected as being the example of a search engine in common use, and one that the research felt had a good reputation for being well-constructed and thorough.  All entries (or the first 100 if a large number were retrieved) were examined to see if the legislator had a web site other than that provided on the state legislature page.  The state web sites in these 3 states provide a one-page template site for each legislator and this acted as a control mechanism.  If this site did not show up on the first screen of hits the researcher knew she had likely made a typo or other error in the search and tried again.  Variations on the names were searched in these cases, for example, use of nicknames or middle initials.  Google provides a “cached” copy of each website at the time it was indexed, thus, “ghost sites,” which once existed but are no longer available on the web, can be retrieved in a search.  It is entirely possible that some state legislators have pages that did not show up in this research.  However, if it could be located in this way, it is likely that constituents would be unable to find it unless they had the URL in front of them.  In those cases the politician is then making good use of the site only if the URL is disseminated widely enough that the average person would be able to type it in from memory or have it next to their computer.  

This method, in addition to gathering information about the format and content of any available sites, also provides information on which legislators have web sites and how accessible the sites are.  The greatest majority of the sites located appeared on the first screen of hits in the Google results.  This placed them in the top 10 sites retrieved.  The official state site most often appeared on this results page as well.  One factor in retrieval is the commonality of the politician’s name.  New Jersey’s two Bob Smiths provided a real challenge, as did Tom Green of Arizona.  While Bob Smith, even when used as a phrase and searched in conjunction with the word Jersey, was too common a phrase to provide workable results, Tom Greene is hampered by having a name that is both the name of a county in Texas and a popular comedian.  Thus, even going through the first 100 hits for these searches did not provide the type of results usually retrieved.  This provides a warning to those in office and those who aspire to be:  if your name is common or shared with others in the media spotlight, find some way of making it unique  You might adopt an unusual nickname, use a full name (first middle last) or a middle name or some other variant.  If either Bob Smith began referring to himself with a full name, such as Robert Allen Smith or Tom Greene as Tom “Arizona” Green, locating information about them on the Internet would be much easier.  However, even in these cases, their sites would not have been retrieved in this study unless the names used were those found on the state site.  Formally using some form of a nickname or making sure it is listed on official state sites might help constituents locate information.  Another way of ensuring better visibility of the site would be using metadata or keyword terms.  These are included in the coding of the page and are invisible to viewers but readable by search engines.  To see whether or not a page has these select “view” on the menu bar and then either “page source” or “encoding” or something similar.  Keywords and metadata appear near the top of the screen and can include key issues, place names, party affiliations, and name variations.  For example, one New Jersey legislator used keyword coding to make sure his site could be found under either Francis Blee or Frank Blee.  This study showed the relative lack of sophistication in web design at this level of campaign sites.  Many pages did not have titles, let alone metadata terms.  They were retrieved as “untitled” and the researcher had to look at the accompanying web addresses and relatively few words retrieved with each site to decide whether or not the anonymous pages were related to the politician being searched.

The data sheet used (see Appendix 1) was designed to capture snapshot data on any web site located, recording information on domain name, policy content, update date, email link, forms and biographical information, as well as level of sophistication and accessibility to multilingual or disabled users.  Some parts of the data sheet, which worked well in initial tests, proved untrustworthy in the actual study.  The date of birth and year elected were not always easy to find, certainly not on the web pages studied, although sometimes on the state site.  The level of sophistication, initially considered by the number of pages in the site and use of images or photos proved a poor measure of quality.  Many sites with numerous screens lacked titles for any of them, making them difficult to find.  Photos and images were often grainy, ill-sized, unflattering, and poorly placed.  The level of sophistication proved to be an artistic measure not easily captured in anything but the eye of the beholder.  Some of the sites were beautifully designed and written (Rick Johnson of Missouri comes to mind).  Just by viewing the site and reading the biography the researcher would gladly have written him a check had her checkbook been handy.  Others were breathtakingly horrible.  Just like a train wreck, it was hard to look away.  Some pages had inconsistent font sizes (within paragraphs of text), choppy appearance, poor images, and a long list of other design flaws.    

 

Results

 

Who has a web site?

 

In New Jersey, of the 80 assemblymen, only seven had active web sites; there were three ghost sites.  While the legislature was at that time almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats (45R to 35D) all of the currently used web sites were for Republicans.  Of the three ghost sites, one was for a Democrat. The division between gender was more aligned.  Eighty-one percent of the assemblymen were male, and seventy-one percent of those with web sites were male (all three ghost sites were for men).  A higher percentage of women in the legislature had web sites than men, but not by that much.  Three of those with web sites were in leadership positions (Deputy Speaker, Majority Leader, Majority Conference Leader).  All but one of the pages doubled as campaign and legislative pages.  Marion Crecco maintained both types of pages as separate entities. 

In Missouri there is a similar pattern. Only 17 of the 163 legislators had active web sites. Of the 163, 46.5% are Republican, but of the seventeen with web sites 58.8% are Republican.   Although women make up only 25.1% of the legislature, 41% of those with web sites are women.  Again Republicans and women are more likely to have a web presence.

Arizona presents a break in some of these patterns.  Of the 60 legislators, there were 18 locatable active web sites, but many of these had not been updated recently and referred to the 2000 campaign in name.  Five of the 18 were found in screens past the first screen of results, some as far back as the 8th screen (putting them in with results number 70 through 80, too far back for most web users to look).  There were also two ghost screens.  The legislature is split by 36 Republicans and 24 Democrats, 39 men to 21 women.  Again, however, a greater percentage of the web sites belonged to Republicans (77%), who only control 60% of the house seats.  While women hold 35% of the seats, they have 50% of the web sites.  

 

Web site content and structure:

 

Most web sites across all states had their own domain name (e.g. www.joecandidate.com) as opposed to being part of a larger site (e.g. www.freespace.com/joecandidate).  In New Jersey all the legislators had their own domain name.   In Missouri 11 had their own domain name and five were part of a larger site.  In Arizona 15 had their own domain name and two were part of a larger site.  Having a simple domain name makes it much easier to find the site.  Longer, more complicated URLs, with one or more slashes, are much harder to remember and more difficult to type.

As for policy content (policy positions, voting records, views on upcoming votes, and lists of sponsored legislation), in New Jersey five of the seven sites had some form of policy content; in Missouri 10 of the 17 did, in Arizona, only nine of the 18 had policy content.  Unfortunately this was seldom in depth and comparisons are difficult with so little unstandardized material. 

Providing an update date was not a priority of any of the sites.  In New Jersey only two of the seven sites had one; in Missouri only four of the 17 had an update date, one from 1999 and the other 3 scattered throughout 2001.  In a rather telling commentary a site not updated since 1999 included the following statement:  “We are going to keep this web site up and going.  I hope to use it as a tool to communicate with you in the upcoming legislative session.”  In Arizona, only three of the 17 sites had update dates, two from 2000 and one from 2001. 

Email links were more popular.  In New Jersey four of the seven sites had email (mailto) links).  In Missouri, 12 of the 16 sites had an email link.  In Arizona 11 of the 17 sites had email links.   If as previous research (Richardson) suggests, constituents are contacting their state legislators by email, they are not getting the email address off of the legislator’s personal web site.

Accessibility is not a primary concern to state legislators.  Although federal rules require all federal agencies use technology that is accessible to individuals who may have some impairment, the state legislators’ sites found in this study did not choose to indicate that they were accessible.  This can be done by using standard online evaluations (such as Bobby, at bobby.cast.org).  Nor were languages a concern.  Even in Arizona, where parts of the state have a high percentage of Spanish-speaking residents none of the sites found in this study had Spanish translations.  This is not all that surprising considering that as of mid-June 2002 neither the Republican nor Democratic candidate for governor in California had Spanish equivalents of any part of their sites (Cornfield, 2002).  A study of Hispanic and Asian American candidates on gubernatorial and federal level showed that Hispanic candidates were less likely to have Spanish language web pages as their ethnicity was enough to appeal to Hispanic voters (Nash, 2003), but both George Bush and Al Gore has some Spanish language presence on their campaign web sites (Len-Rios, 2002).

 

Where are the sites?

 

It is also of interest to look at the geographic distribution of the legislative districts represented by current web sites.  Initial expectations might be that those districts with higher incomes, and therefore more likely to have higher levels of Internet access, might be the ones with web sites.  That is not borne out.  However, the districts to tend to cluster in specific areas. 

In Missouri, of the 17 sites, the majority were found near the largest metropolitan cities.  The St. Louis area hosted six, the Kansas City area five.  Five of the remaining six were found near smaller cities, Columbia (home of the state university’s flagship campus), Springfield, Cape Girardeau, Poplar Bluff and Joplin.  The remaining site was in the southeast part of the state.  While the high concentration in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas might be intuitive, one wonders why the other three city’s legislators had a web site and not those from St. Joseph, Rolla, Sedalia, Jefferson City, or other populated areas.  What is, perhaps, more interesting is that the sites tended to cluster, not just in urban areas, but even within those areas, in close proximity.  In the St. Louis area, districts 88, 90, and 105 touch in a stacking formation, one atop the other, with 99 just a hair’s breath away from 90; all west and south of the city center.  Only districts 59 and 69 are geographically separate from the larger cluster (and from each other).  In the Kansas City area a similar arrangement is found.  Districts 52, 56, and 124 are in a stack.  District 45 is one district removed from 56; all on the south and east side of the city center.  District 35 is north of the city.  Three other districts are in close proximity, 154 (Poplar Bluff), and 159 touch, with 158 (Cape Girardeau) almost touching the corner of 159.  Districts 128, 142, and 23 are geographically separate, from each other as well as the other clusters.

In New Jersey there is a similar pattern.    Like Arizona, there are not separate districts for the state and house, but 2 representatives are elected for each state district.  In New Jersey each of the districts with a legislative web presence represented only one assemblyman.  In no district did both assemblymen have a site.  Nor was any site used to represent both.  It was clearly a site for just the one.  Again, there were more sites in the most densely populated part of the state.  Three sites were located in the northern part of the state, near but not touching, New York City.  Districts 34, 36, and 38, are clustered together, each touching the other two.  Atlantic City is represented by district 2.  The other three districts are not in heavily populated areas.  Again, two districts, 11 and 10, cluster one atop the other, along the eastern coast.  District 25 is in the northern part of the state but does not contain any large cities.  It is interesting to note that of the three ghost sites (no longer on the web when the research was conducted but still available as a “cached” file in Google), district 24 is adjacent to 25, and 32 is adjacent to 36.  District 21, the last ghost site, is also in the northern densely populated area but does not touch on another other district represented with a web site.  Like Missouri several larger New Jersey cities, Camden, New Brunswick, and Trenton, were unrepresented in this survey.

Arizona also has the same legislative districts for state senate and house, with 2 legislators elected from each district.  Fifteen of the 30 districts had at least one web site and in three districts (12, 27, 28) both legislators had a web site.  Because of the high percentage of web sites, the large number of districts represented, and the arrangement of the state districts (reflecting the population density), it would be highly unusual for any grouping of districts not to be adjacent in some way.  Indeed, all of the districts with web sites are touching at least one, sometimes two or more, other districts with sites.  Four of the districts are in the Tucson area, the others at least partially in the Phoenix area.  

It is also interesting to look at the demographic data for the districts to see if there are certain characteristics that seem to be either the cause or effect of a legislator having a site.  As demonstrated by the geographic diversity discussed above, districts in large metropolitan areas were somewhat more likely to have a web presence.  However, as city and suburban areas can have income and sociological extremes, it is important to look at other factors as well.  Also, legislative districts do not always follow city or even county boundaries so locating comparative information is not easy.  The Almanac of State Legislatures and State Legislative Elections provide some data, on income, age and education.

One factor to look at is income.  In Missouri, of the 17 legislative districts with sites, 9 had above average income (compared with 61 statewide), and average percentage of households with an income of $50,000 or above.  Only five of the 17 represented districts with more than average percentage of constituents over the age of 55.  Only three had an above average percentage of African Americans (compared with 32 of the 163 districts statewide).  Statewide 60 of the 163 districts had an above average percentage of college educated constitutents.  Of the 17 districts with web sites, 9 had constituents with a higher than average percentage of college degrees.

In New Jersey, only two districts with web pages had an above average income, compared to 18 of the state’s districts and only three had a larger than average percentage of households with an income of over $50,000.  Five had a higher than average percentage of constituents over the age of 55.  Only two had a higher than average percentage of African Americans (compared with 14 of 40 statewide).  Three had a higher than average percentage of college education constituents, compared to 19 statewide

In Arizona, 8 districts had above average incomes, compared to 11 of the 30 statewide, 7 had higher than average households with an income over $50,000.  Eleven had a higher than average population over the age of 55.  Only two had a higher than average percentage African American population (compared to 8 of 30 districts statewide).  Nine had a higher than average percentage of college education constituents, compared with 13 of the 30 statewide.

Looking at the stability of the parties in the districts, only one district with a web site in Arizona had not elected a legislator from the same party from 1992-1996.  In Missouri only four sites were from volatile seats.  In New Jersey none of the districts had switched parties during those years.

 

Conclusions

 

It looks as though only about 10% of state legislators in New Jersey and Missouri maintain an easily located web site, 30% of those in Arizona do, although some are not as easy to locate.  Across all three states Republicans and women were more likely to have web sites than Democrats and men.  Adler, Gent and Overmeyer (1998) found that in the early stages of federal congressional web presence that Republicans, younger legislators and those from affluent districts were more likely to have a web site.  State legislators, still in the early stages of web site usage, may be mirroring those categories.  However, it is clear that there is very little standardization of content on these sites, reflecting a lack of agreement among legislators as to what should be presented to the public and either a lack of generalized public expectation or a failure to meet those expectations.  It is probably a combination of both.  That legislators do not use their personal web sites to keep the public informed of their activities is obvious, especially from the lack of current updates on these sites.  However, national campaign sites are often dormant between elections so this may simply be a reflection of that practice.  As the public becomes more web savvy politicians at all levels may need to be more attuned to their web presence. Since the amount of money raised in these races is unlikely to support or justify the expense of a professional web designers and managers there is probably a greater reliance on volunteers who can only devote a certain amount of time and effort to the job.  The incidence of geographic clustering of sites is intriguing but more research will need to be done among other states to see if this is a national trend or merely a coincidence.

 

 

 

References

 

Adler, E. Scott, Chariti E. Gent, and Cary . Overmeyer.  1998. The Home style home page:  Legislator use of the world wide web for constituency contact. Legislative Studies Quarterly 23 #4: 585-595.

 

Barone, Michael, William Lilley III, and Laurence J. DeFranco. 1998.  State Legislative Elections:  Voting Patterns and Demographics.  Washington, DC:  Congressional Quarterly.

 

Chinni, Dant.  2002 October 29.  How the web is changing election campaigns.  Christian Science Monitor 94 #235: 2.

 

Cooper, Christopher. 2002. E-Mail in the state legislature:  Evidence from three states.  State and Local Government Review 34 #2: 127-132.

 

Cornfield, Michael. 2002. Make your web site accessible to everyone. Campaigns & Elections 23 #6: 48.

 

Cornfield, Michael.  2004.  Politics moves online:  campaigning and the Internet.  New York:  Century Foundation Press, 2004.

 

Davis, Richard. 1999.  The Web of Politics:  The Internet’s Impact on the American Political System.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

 

D’Alessio, D.  1997.  Use of the world wide web in the 1996 US election. Electoral Studies 16 #4: 489-500.

 

Foot, Kirsten A. and Steven M. Schneider. 2002. Online action in campaign 2000:  An Exploratory analysis of the U.S. political web sphere. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46 #2: 222-244.

 

Gibson, Rachel and Stephen Ward. 2000. A Proposed methodology for studying the function and effectiveness of party and candidate web sites.  Social Science Computer Review 18 #3: 301-319.

 

Hart, Roderick P. 2000.  Campaign Talk:  Why Elections are Good for Us.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

 

Kaye, Barbara K. and Thomas J. Jackson.  2002. Online and in the know:  Uses and gratifications of the web for political information. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46 #1: 54-71.

 

Legislative web sites as campaign tools. 2002. Campaigns & Elections 23 #9: 9-10.

 

Lemann, Nicholas.  2000 October 23. The word lab.  The New Yorker, pp. 100-112.

 

Len-Rios, Marie E.  2002. The Bush and Gore presidential campaign web sites:  Identifying with Hispanic voters during the 2000 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 79 #4: 887-904.

 

Lilley, William, Laurence J. DeFranco, and William M, Diefenderfer.  1994.  The Almanac of State of Legislatures.  Washington, DC:  Congressional Quarterly, Inc.

 

Lilley, William, Laurence J. DeFranco, and Mark F. Bernstein.  1998. The Almanac of State Legislatures:  Changing Patterns, 1990-1997.  2nd ed.  Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.

 

McManus, Reed. 2002 Sept.  Digital democracy. Sierra 87 #5: 66-67.

 

Munro, Neil. 2000 April 22.  The new wired politics. National Journal 32 #17: 1260-1263.

 

Nash, Phil Tajitsu. 2003. Reaching out to Asian Americans and Latinos. Campaigns & Elections 24 #2: 40-43.

 

Niven, David, and Jeremy Zilber. 2001. Do women and men in Congress cultivate different images?  Evidence from Congressional web sites.  Political Communication 18: 395-405.

 

Puopolo, Sonia. 2001. The Web and U.S. senatorial Campaigns 2000. American Behavioral Scientist 44 #12: 2030-2048.

 

Richardson, Jr.,  Lilliard E., Linda M. Daugherty, and Patricia K. Freeman. 2001. E-mail contact between constituents and state legislators. State and Local Government Review 33 #1: 23-31.

 

Stromer-Galley, Jennifer.  2000.  On-line interaction and why candidates avoid it.  Journal of Communication 50 #4: 111-132.

 

Vaida, Bara.  2000 August 5. Politicians and the web:  They don’t get it.  National Journal 32 #32: 2531.

suggested citation: Still, Julie M. 2005 State Legislators' Web Presence: Frequency, Content, and Design [available at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~still/poliwebpages.htm]
posted 03/18/05