Abstract
As is the case in many democratic countries, MPs in Switzerland are close to their constituencies and have adapted to the various new means of mass communication as these emerged over the last century: from newspapers to the Internet, via radio and television. Today, a large majority of Swiss MPs have both an e-mail address and a homepage. This paper explores the use of the Internet by the Swiss MPs for their relationship with citizens almost two years prior to the next national elections for the Federal Parliament (2007). It is based on a quantitative and qualitative survey of all the personal homepages of the members of the lower and upper houses conducted in 2005. Particular attention is paid to interactive means of communication (such as e-mail, forums, blogs, online polls, chats, etc.) that are made available in order to foster online dialogue between politicians and citizens. Based on this data, on a few European comparisons, and on some focused observations of particular sites, the paper identifies the new challenges and opportunities that Swiss MPs must face to better interact with their electorate.
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Chappelet, JL., Kilchenmann, K.P. (2006). From Market Squares to Homepages: A Survey of Swiss MPs’ Interactivity. In: Wimmer, M.A., Scholl, H.J., Grönlund, Å., Andersen, K.V. (eds) Electronic Government. EGOV 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4084. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11823100_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11823100_8
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