As voters, we used to have to rely on the information candidates for office fed us - in their TV spots, mailers and print ads. - or on what the press chose to report about each candidate. More and more, the 'news' about candidates has turned into endless analyses of how much money a candidate raises, who s/he was, is or might be intimate with, and how well her/his campaign is spinning a set of carefully nebulous issues. 

Since the mid-nineties, politicians, activists and techno-utopians have hailed the digitizing of information about politics and candidates (at all levels) and its distribution via the web as a dramatic step towards a fully participatory popular democracy. Can this swelling information stream break the deadlock of traditional parties, 'anointed' mainstream candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties, the skill of the spinmeisters, and the raising of hard cash (lots of it) as determinants of electoral behavior and deciders of elections? You decide.

Learning Goals

• understand how a new medium is co-opted into (or challenges) the business of politics
• investigate the role of a new medium in the political process 
• examine the potential for, and limits on, voter choice in the contemporary democratic process and its relationship to the availability of information

For this assignment, we should like you to investigate the potential (or the reality) of the web as an alternative venue (for all voters) for information about candidates' opinions, their actions and their associations. 

I  Choose a candidate, or an issue important to you in the upcoming elections, and investigate in detail the quantity, quality and usefulness to the voter of the information you discover. Include a bibliography of the sources you use in your report.

II  Now think about the process through which you gained that information. How does it differ from the process of gaining information via the traditional media of TV news reports and advertising, mailers, print news stories, print ads. etc. How is your role different/the same? How is the information you uncover different/the same?

III  Now widen your focus. What obstacles might other voters find in this search? How does a conscious search for information shift (or start to shift) your relationship to the political process? How might it influence the relationship of other voters in the country to the political process?

IV  Now think about whether knowing more actually translates into being able to influence to the political process more. For example:

• To what extent can the simple provision of more information about candidates' records and critical election issues, from a wider range of sources, disseminated to more and more people actually change the political process? Or does it just create better informed voters facing the same old choices?
  
• To what extent can more information, made available more cheaply and widely, allow voters and potential candidates to by-pass the traditional (and very expensive) avenues to office? 

Don't forget to relate the assignment to the NCC competencies!