Stakeholder management online: an empirical analysis of US and Swedish political party web sites

Abstract

Purpose

Given the seeming lack of research on the influence of stakeholder activities on organisations such as political parties in the online environment, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how political parties use their web sites to serve and manage their relationships with stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a qualitative paper, in which a cross‐national comparative analysis has been conducted on four illustrative cases. Personal interviews and web site observations were used as the main data collection methods. Three concurrent flows of activities, i.e. data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis.

Findings

The paper indicate that the stakeholders served by political parties on the web sites studied can be grouped into two categories: internal and external. This paper also revealed that another very important internal stakeholder group overlooked by previous studies is that of core party members.

Originality/value

The paper provides insights and new interesting empirical material which may help to strengthen the theoretical understanding stakeholder management in cyber politics.

Citation

Opoku, R.A. and Williams, E.B. (2010), "Stakeholder management online: an empirical analysis of US and Swedish political party web sites", Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 249-269. https://doi.org/10.1108/14779961011071060