Flies into spiders?
Norwegian parties and the World
Wide Web

The growth in internet access has happened almost in tandem with the latest wave of democratisation triggered by fall of the iron curtain1. Especially in the 1990s, some scholars interpreted this optimistically as a path towards "cyber democracy", where the internet would be a channel for more active participation from below. More cynical observers saw the internet as an additional instrument for campaigning and propaganda in the hands of political elites. Furthermore, the concept "the digital divide" soon became standard, to describe an uneven advance in internet access and competence, between poor and rich nations, social classes, as well as age groups.

This author subscribes to a more dynamic view than these polarised pessimistic vs. optimistic interpretations, which are mere mirror images of each other. Internet access and -competence have \u2013 after all - spread rapidly in the population of some countries. Although it is used by relatively few for political purposes even there, it is premature to cynically deny its political potential on the basis of the (unrealistic and) failed predictions of the \u201ccyber democrats\u201d. Political actors, such as parties are still in the learning phase of mastering a \u201ckiller application\u201d and those using the internet have not yet learned the role of being a citizen on the web, in addition to the consumer \u2013role2. The learning process is certainly worth a study. Can traditional political actors learn to spin their own attractive parts of the web or are they caught in the web of the professional mass media?

population as clients or consumers, not as citizens. The spread of Internet in Norway seems to have coincided with the spread of New Public Management. Bad luck.

more specifically the parts which are open to the general public3. The general election in September 2005 offered an opportunity to look into how the parties used this new media to communicate with their voters. A first sample of eight out of 21 official Norwegian party websites was taken in week 17, April 2005, to get a basis for comparison with the web sites during campaign time. During the last weeks of the campaign (25. August \u2013 11. September) daily snapshots of the websites were added, the party sample now extended to include all eight parties in parliament4. The parties and website adress is referred in table 1.

A brief overview of the election and the Norwegian party system is provided in the next chapter. Chapter 3 attempts to trace and understand the development over time as processes of organizational learning, before the analysis of the sample of party web sites in chapter 4. Chapter 5 adds some considerations on the systemic effects of party web sites, by asking whether it has pluralizing or cartelising effects on the party system.