2008
P
ia B
ru
n
d
in
P
oli
tic
s o
n t
he N
et
Örebro Studies in Political Science 21
örebro 2008
Doctoral Dissertation
Politics on the Net
NGO practices and experiences
Pia Brundin Political Science
issn 1650-1632 isbn 978-91-7668-601-0
Pia Brundin (b. 1974) teaches and does research at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Örebro University. Her academic work has mainly focused on civil society uses of new media for political purposes, and environmental politics. This is her doctoral thesis.
Over the past decade, Internet use for external political purposes, such as on-line activism and campaigning, has become commonplace among many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) promoting various kinds of social and/or political change. The Internet can also be used for internal political purposes, to promote engagement and interactivity among organisation members and/ or supporters. This study focuses on how NGOs in Sweden and the USA use and perceive the Internet as a political space. How important is the Internet compared to other, more conventional forms of political action? Do the organisations believe that the Internet has increased their political influence, and, if so, to what extent? Data from two NGO surveys and from content analyses of NGO websites indicate that, overall, the Internet is used primarily for external political purposes. Notably, there were important differences that could be related to the organisations’ national political contexts. For example, the studied American NGOs primarily orient their Internet use towards fairly superficial forms of involvement, while the Swedish organisations are more interactively oriented. Despite the many successful campaigns that have been coordinated at a global level, one conclusion of the study is that we are still far from witnessing uniformly convergent forms of political activism on the Internet; national political cultures will continue to play an important role in how NGOs use and perceive the Internet as a political space.
