Research Papers

Political parties are ever more aware of the potential of the World Wide Web (WWW) and, in particular, of Social Media Services (SMSs), as a medium for effective political communication: for communicating their programs, their campaigns and their day to day ideological messages, fundraising, competing with others over visibility on the WWW and over growing SMSs audiences, or to open their apparatuses to civil society and political participation, among others. Furthermore, as we have recently demonstrated (Rosas, Espírito Santo, Mendes Rodrigues 2011), the Portuguese virtual party system is far from being a replica of the \"real\" party system. Fringe and opposition parties are using the WWW to get online presences and visibility which are, in many cases, non-proportional to their real size and political muscle. In this paper, the authors intend to illustrate how the Portuguese Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Português, PS) has strategically reformed his site, after the July 2011 electoral debacle, as a way to adapt it to a new image of a changing party open to civil society and participation. More concretely, we will try to assess the real scope of that transformation, as well as its main components and their nature, looking for putative models and examining how close they are to the party’ professed goals. In order to do this, the authors will use state-of-the art literature on ICTs and political communication, link analysis and social network analysis in order to analyze PS new website, the patterns of its main connections and their nature.