O Recurso aos New Media como Estratégia de Comunicação Política - o caso das eleições Portuguesas para Presidente da República em 2011

Abstract

According to the literature in the field of Political Communication the use of new media played a major role in the election of Barack Obama as the new President of the United States of America in 2008. Web campaigning has become an important subject for other democratic countries, including Portugal. The aim of the present research consists in identifying and analyzing the official websites of the six candidates that run for President in the elections in Portugal in January 2011. Concerning the use of new media, the political communication strategies employed by each candidate were compared. The applied research methodology consisted in the thematic content analysis, used both as a quantitative and a qualitative tool.