Do Candidates Seek Personal Votes on the Internet? Constituency Candidates in the 2009 German Federal Elections

The Internet provides new opportunities for political communication. How strategic are constituency candidates in exploiting these new opportunities and what are the contexts driving their choices? This paper envisions the Internet as a means for personal vote-seeking on the campaign trail adopted by those candidates electorally motivated in this regard. It aims to explore this argument in theoretical and empirical ways and in light of survey data resulting from the 2009 German Candidate Study (GCS 2009). These data cover 38 per cent (N = 790) of all constituency candidates running in the 2009 campaign and enclose numerous questions on their campaign activities online.     

"The World Changed Today": Agenda-Setting and Policy Change in the Wake of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks

The September 11 terrorist attacks constitute a focusing event that have been said to have “changed everything” in America. However, the literature on focusing events, policy change, and the policy process suggests that the “windows of opportunity” opened by focusing events like the September 11 attacks do not automatically equate to policy change. This paper considers whether and to what extent the agenda and policies have changed as a result of the attacks. While the events of September 11 provided the impetus for change, the threat of terrorism was already well established in the policy stream, and September 11 only threw open the window of opportunity for policy change based, in large part, on preexisting ideas; many of these ideas were enacted. And in the case of aviation security, some innovation is evident in the area of cockpit security.