Nigel A. Jackson & Darren
G. Lilleker
SEEKING UNMEDIATED POLITICAL
INFORMATION IN A MEDIATED
ENVIRONMENT
The uses and gratifications of political
parties’ e-newsletters
Political parties are increasingly attempting to communicate to sections of the
electorate directly, in order to relay targeted messages. E-newsletters are one
key communication mode that facilitates this strategy, and previous research
indicates that these, like many communications using information and communi-
cation technology, offer much potential for the sender. This research focuses on
the receiver, explicitly taking a uses and gratifications approach to understand-
ing the function of e-newsletters for the UK electorate. Our findings suggest that
the majority of receivers are committed party members who desire to receive infor-
mation directly from the party that will help them in their campaigning and
activist roles. There is, however, a minority of less-active, politically interested,
subscribers who also use e-newsletters to aid their voter choice. The data suggest
that e-newsletters are able to encourage subscribers to develop and build relation-
ships with a political party, possibly becoming more active in their support than
simply offering a vote at election times.
Keywords Uses and gratification theory; UK political party
e-newsletters; UK political communication; online political activism
Introduction
Although the use of the Internet in party politics stretches back no more than
to 1993 (Johnson 2001), online communications have now become a
mainstream campaigning tool (Jackson 2003a; Jackson & Lilleker 2004).
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 10, No. 2, April 2007, pp. 242–264
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13691180701307495

The focus of the research conducted so far has been primarily on how parties
and individual politicians have used websites (Ward & Gibson 1998; Gibson
et al.2003; Jackson 2003a; Ward & Lusoli 2005). The sole focus upon websites
use is perhaps wrong; other forms of e-communications are argued to be more
effective, and more appropriate for political campaigning (Painter & Wardle
2001; Jackson 2004; Jackson & Lilleker 2004). Email has been described as a
killer application, one that has the capacity to change the way people commu-
nicate generally (Downes & Mui 2000), joining letters and the telephone as a
normal everyday means of communication between individuals and organiz-
ations. As a consequence, email represents an opportunity for parties to
communicate directly with party activists, members and floating voters.
Parties, therefore, are starting to offer a range of communication services
that interested voters may subscribe to. Evidence suggests that e-newsletters
are growing in importance; for example, in the 2004 election cycle in the US
some 14 million people subscribed to an e-newsletter to receive the latest
political news (Rainie et al. 2005). Certainly, in the UK subscriptions to
party e-newsletters are on the increase (Jackson 2004); however, parties do
not yet appear to have a clear long-term view of how e-newsletters can be
integrated into a campaign. This research develops an understanding of how
e-newsletters are viewed by subscribers that offers insights into their import-
ance as a campaigning and relationship building tool. The focus is predicated
on ideas borne out of a workshop held by the authors to discuss the potential
of e-campaigning. The political campaigners who attended emphasized email
above other tools at their disposal, integral to which was the e-newsletter.
However, while they believe transmitting their messages to as large a
group as possible is sufficient, they had no tangible data on how communi-
cation was received, by whom, or what they did with the content.
The use of e-newsletters
An e-newsletter is simply a form of email campaign (Chaffey 2003) which can
simply replicate the articles that we might find in an offline newsletter, or
provide website links to help entice the subscriber to elaborate on issues of
interest. E-newsletters, therefore, can be of at least two different formats,
one which is a full newsletter, and one of which is essentially a ‘taster’
which filters the subscriber to stories on websites that might be of interest
to them. However, the key to a successful e-newsletter is the quality of
the list of subscribers (Ollier 1998; Haig 2001; Philips 2001; Chaffey
2003). In order to avoid spamming potential supporters the norm is now
that such a list is based on an opt-in permission basis.
E-newsletters are advantageous for users, they are cheap (Katz 2003;
Mednick 2004; Weil 2004), quick to produce and update (Haig 2001; Chaffey
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