The Radio 2.0 Election

Don’t the media ever get tired of that story about the next Web-fired revolution? There was the whopper about how the Internet would bring democracy to China. And the wishful one about how Twitter was fueling protests that could bring regime change to Iran (where it turns out fewer than 1 percent of people have Twitter accounts). Similarly overblown Web guff dominated the run-up to last week’s British general election. Widely predicted to be that country’s first Web 2.0 election, it was the most exciting contest since the Second World War, but all the key moments came about on technology developed before or shortly after the war.

The moment that changed the campaign was a live televised debate. An innovation in the United Kingdom, televised duels have been standard practice elsewhere for years, including in the U.S., where they have been a staple of elections for half a century. The first 90-minute contest ended in a clear victory for the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, whose support surged by an unprecedented 50 percent afterward. At one point the Lib Dems even went into the lead in the polls, and although their vote subsided as Election Day approached, that one debate changed the dynamic of the entire campaign, all via a medium invented in 1925.

The election’s most memorable incident came when Prime Minister Gordon Brown was campaigning in Rochdale, in the north of England. A 66-year-old widow stopped to give the prime minister a piece of her mind. Brown dealt with the encounter well—the widow even told reporters afterward that she was going to vote Labour. But when he got back in his car he forgot to disconnect his radio mike, which caught him calling the woman “bigoted.” The ensuing “Bigotgate” created a media storm that dominated the headlines for two days. All because of a radio microphone, a technology that has existed since 1949.

The most memorable online moments pale by comparison. Britain had its first political suicide by Twitter (a Labour candidate was found to have posted some crude comments), and a handful of political viral videos achieved half-decent viewing figures. But that’s about it.

None of this means the Internet has not been important. All the U.K. parties take the Web and new social media far more seriously than they used to. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, invested considerable time and money buying up Google ad words, allowing them to target their online message. But it is these less visible aspects of the technology that mattered. A convincing case can be made that the reaction to the first television debate—in which Clegg was declared the undisputed victor immediately—came about because polling companies are now able to use Internet panels, allowing them to provide reliable instant reaction. Without that, the debate’s victor would not have been declared so quickly or decisively, and its effect on those who didn’t watch it live would have been much less dramatic.

For political junkies the Internet provided a mass of information about the campaign, more than anyone could possibly want or need. But for the rest of the population, its impact was less dramatic. Evidence of parties’ contacts with voters showed that the old-fashioned techniques outstripped the new—those contacted by mail and leaflets outnumbered those contacted by all other campaigning techniques combined. Similarly, only 9 percent of voters questioned in a poll for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, conducted by Opinion Matters, said they expected to get information from political Web sites, and 5 percent from e-mails sent by politicians. Compare that with 63 percent who said they would find out about the election from TV, 47 percent from newspapers, and 27 percent from radio. This survey hardly got any coverage in the media; stories about how the Internet isn’t important aren’t deemed sexy enough.

The issue is one of balance, between the “new” and the “old,” in how elections get reported. Direct mail, another age-old campaigning technique, was used extensively by the British parties—which now have fewer grassroots activists prepared to deliver leaflets by hand. Almost no media outlet bothered to talk about that, yet they all ran features about blogs. The U.K. provides proof of a simple rule of political change: just because a tool is new and cool doesn’t mean it will be decisive.

Cowley is professor of parliamentary government in the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham.