1. See “Conservatives Do It Obama-Style with New Website MyConservatives.com,” by Arun Sudhaman (http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/944017/Conservatives-Obama-style-new-website-MyConservativescom/), and “Germany Fumbles with Obama-Style Election Tactics,” by Madeleine Chambers (http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE57J1S920090820).

2. See “Lessons from the Barack Obama Social Media Campaign,” by J. A. Vargas (http://www.scribd.com/doc/15679573/Lessons-from-the-Barack-Obama-Social-Media-Campaign); “The First 21st Century Campaign,” by R. Brownstein (http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080416_3324.phpl); and “How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics,” by Claire Cain Miller (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-Internet-campaign-changed-politics/).

3. Writing in a range of news outlets, journalists were quick to proclaim that “online is the big campaigning innovation of 2007.” See “Rush for Cyberspace Has Traps for New Players” (Sun Herald, August 12, 2007, p. 31) and “The YouTube Election” (Sydney Morning Herald, July 14, 2007, p. 23).

4. For a fuller summary of the findings from the empirical analyses of voters' responses to and interest in Web campaigning, see Gibson and McAllister (2006 Gibson, R. K. and McAllister, I. 2006. Does cyber-campaigning win votes? Online communication in the 2004 Australian election. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 16: 243–263. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]).

5. See “Politics Is No Longer Local, Its Viral,” by Jose Antonio Vargas (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601131.html), and “France's Mysterious Embrace of Blogs,” by Thomas Crampton (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/technology/27iht-blogs.2314926.html).

6. Figures for broadband and 2007 Internet use are from Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2006–07 (Australian Bureau of Statistics), and refer to use of the Internet in the 12 months prior to the interview (http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/DFEED0F4BFFE51E0CA2573B6001F777B/$File/81460_2006-07.pdf). Figures for 2004 are from the International Telecommunications Union statistics database (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ICTEYE/Indicators/Indicators.aspx). The 2007 level of Internet use is 68%, matching very closely the ABS figures.

7. In the 2007 federal election, turnout was 94.76% of the registered electorate.

8. The AES always includes an item asking whether the respondent would vote if it was not compulsory. The correlation between probability of turnout and frequency of Internet use is .09 (p ≤ .000), suggesting that if voting were voluntary, the Internet would hold some potential for voter mobilization. We do not extend our analysis to include this variable here, however, since the survey question involves intended turnout in a hypothetical context.

9. See “The Ron Paul Money Bomb” (http://www.politicsonline.com/content/main/politicker/politicker_view.asp) and “Campaign 2008 Presidential Hopefuls Star on Google's Stage” (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/04/GOOGLEFORUM.TMP).

10. See http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=impact.

11. See “www.Kevin07.com.au: Rudd Ups the Ante in the Cyberspace War” (The Age, August 8, 2007) and “Labor to Increase Internet Dominion” (The Australian, September 27, 2007, p. 33).

12. See “MySpace Slips to Middle-of-Road as Facebook Surges Ahead,” by Julian Lee (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/21/1192940905046.html).

13. Miskin (2008 Miskin, S. 2008. Politics and technology in the 21st century, Canberra, , Australia: Australian Parliamentary Library.  [Google Scholar]) reports that no political topics were featured in the Google and Yahoo lists of most popular search terms for 2007. Further, while the Kevin07 Web site proved popular with journalists and the party faithful, the proportion of voters visiting the site on a typical day was infinitesimally small (measured at less than 0.01% of the total electorate).

14. See http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Kevin+Rudd+eating+ear+wax+during+Question+Time&dupe_id=3832307318889745409. This is in stark contrast to the less than 100,000 views of John Howard's initial climate change announcement, despite its greater mainstream media fanfare. For the Howard climate change speech, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jtiJPlv4Y&feature=related.

15. The AES is a mail-out mail-back survey, and in line with most other mail self-completion surveys, there is a response bias toward the better educated and English speakers, though the bias is relatively small (Dillman, 1991 Dillman, D. A. 1991. The design and administration of mail surveys. Annual Review of Sociology, 17: 225–229. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Comparisons of Internet use figures do reveal AES estimates to be somewhat higher (approximately 6%) than those reported by the ABS (see Note 6). However, a slightly higher rate of Internet use in the AES sample is not a priori seen as a potential source of bias in estimating its relationship to vote choice.

16. Green candidates had the highest response rate (63.9%) compared to Labor (46.7%) or the Liberal-Nationals (39.9%). Since we analyze the parties separately, these interparty differences in response rates should have no substantive effects on the reported results. For further methodological details on both the AES and ACS, see McAllister and Clark (2008, Appendix B).

17. The reversal in these trends in 2007 was largely due to the increased competitiveness of the election. Labor was seen as having a genuine chance of unseating the Liberal government for the first time in 13 years under the new leadership of Kevin Rudd. See McAllister and Clark (2008 McAllister, I., & Clark, J. (2008). Trends in Australian political opinion: Results from the Australian Election Study, 1987–2007. http://assda.anu.edu.au/aestrends.pdf (http://assda.anu.edu.au/aestrends.pdf)  [Google Scholar]) for details.

18. Similar results were found in France during the 2007 presidential elections (Vedel & Michalska, 2007 Vedel, T. and Michalska, K. Political participation and the Internet: Evidence from the 2007 French presidential election. Paper presented at the International Conference on e-Government. Montreal, Canada. September.  [Google Scholar]; Vacari, 2008 Vacari, C. 2008. Surfing to the Élysée: The Internet in the 2007 French elections. French Politics, 6: 1–22.  [Google Scholar]). However, results from the 2007 Danish parliamentary elections show no such seismic shift toward the use of Web 2.0 tools (Hoff, 2008 Hoff, J. (2008). Can the Internet swing the vote? Results from a study of the 2007 Danish parliamentary election (ITA-08-02). Vienna, Austria: Institute of Technology Assessment Vienna. http://epub.oeaw.ac.at/ita/ita-manuscript/ita_08_02.pdf (http://epub.oeaw.ac.at/ita/ita-manuscript/ita_08_02.pdf)  [Google Scholar]).

19. In 2001, 28% of Green candidates had a personal Web site. In 2004, 47% of Coalition candidates, 42% of Labor candidates, and 50% of Green candidates had a personal Web site.

20. Podcasting and online chats with voters are excluded because of the very small numbers of candidates who said they used them.

21. Issue item wording was as follows: “Here is a list of important issues that were discussed during the election campaign. When you were deciding about how to vote, how important was each of these issues to you personally?”

22. We use a more limited range of controls because of the small number of cases. Using the full range of control variables does not change the substantive results, but it does increase the standard errors and therefore the significance level.

23. Question wordings for items not reported elsewhere are as follows. Length of party membership was worded as “In what year did you join the political party for which you are now a candidate?” Number of party workers was worded as “Approximately how many workers could you count on to work for your campaign on an average day?” Campaign activities was worded as “We are interested in the amount of time you spent in your electorate and what you did there. Thinking back over the past year, about how many hours per month did you usually devote to the following activities within your electorate?”

24. There were no incumbent lower house Green candidates. An alternative method would be to estimate two-stage least squares equations (see, for example, Wagner & Gainous, 2009 Wagner, K. M. and Gainous, J. 2009. Electronic grassroots: Does online campaigning work?. Journal of Legislative Studies, 15: 502–520. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). However, identifying the most appropriate instrumental variables is problematic, especially with surveys of both voters and candidates. For that reason, we took the simpler step of controlling for as many potentially confounding factors as possible.