Development of UK Political Presence in Open Directory
Introduction
[This article is a draft version of a short research paper, so comments are more than welcome].
The Open Directory (wikipedia article) is a human-edited directory of categorised websites, which has long been treated as an authoritative directory. Traditionally, it is a place to have your website listed to establish favourable rankings in web searches.
The site has lost some of it’s reputation over the last few years - due to alleged partiality by editors - but it is still one way of looking at the internet presence of UK political parties over time.
In this article I’m going to look at how the presence of how the presence of the UK Party Political websites have developed on the Open Directory since 2000. I’ve looked at the UK Political Parties category, and how it has developed since 2000 - taking the first Internet Archive Snapshot of each year (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, no data available for 2005, 2006 and 2007 ).
If you are interested in a “softer” angle, and a look at how listings in sites such as the Open Directory and Wikipedia help get the attention of the internet public, then you should look at my Blog Platform column for Sunday March 23rd tomorrow over on the Wardman Wire.
Overall Totals of UK Party Political Websites
Overall Totals
Note the absence of data in the Internet Archive for 2005. Still - pretty much the trend we would expect as the use of the web has become mainstream.
Total Number of Websites by Party
This graph shows the trends up until the middle of 2007. As of March 2008, the totals for March 2008 are: Labour 493, Tory 594, Lib Dem 695. My reflections:
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How did a much smaller party (Lib Dems) get almost half as many again party affiliated websites listed as the larger Labour Party? There are two possibilities - they either have more websites getting “natural” listings or they are being publicised more effectively or more strategically. I think it is the latter, but we cannot tell whether there is a centrally driven “directory listing” campaign, or a highly aware set of webmasters (perhaps encouraged by workshops at Conference etc).
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The Lib Dems (and to a lesser extent the Tories) clearly had some sort of website creation, or website listing, “internet push” around 2005 - the time of the last election. The trend continuing into 2008 indicates that the Tories seem to have “relaxed” while the Lib Dems have “kept on trucking”.
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To my mind, the Lib Dems are quite effective at targeted Internet campaigning - both around raising awareness of particular issues, but also in taking a long-term, strategic approach. To explain why I’d point to three factors: firstly, it is easier to mobilise and maintain that mobilisation in a smaller body; secondly, a smaller group has less resources - and internet promotion in more or less free; thirdly, the Lib Dems have a greater tradition of prioritising the local - and all this can be done by local activists; finally, the Lib Dems seem (to me) to have a tighter co-ordination between the central Organisation and the web-activists - and a stability in the way the two have worked together over 5 to 10 years.
Whatever the reason, these numbers are quite impressive, and the Tories and Labour have some catching up to do.
And if we remove the MP Websites?
Note that I am generally using websites of UK Parliament MPs - Scottish Parliament and Senedd members are in national categories outside these categories examined in this article.
The results quoted above include websites of Members of Parliament. The comments I have made are even more marked when you consider that the Liberal Democrats should (based on one website per MP) have a maximum of 60 or so websites for MPs, while (in the 2005 Parliament) Labour should have up to around 400, and the Conservatives up to around 200.
What you will actually find is that the numbers are these:
Lib Dem MPs have 118 websites listed (at the time of writing) - roughly 2 per MP on average. In fact it is made up of 19 (more or less the Front Bench of 2 years ago) who have 6-10 websites listed each, and 35 more with one each.
The Conservatives have 301 MP websites listed - 1.5 each. The structure is similar to the Lib Dems. Leaders have around 6-10 sites each.
Labour has only 232 MP websites listed - about 0.6 each. Given that a few leaders have 32 listed between them, almost half of Labour MPs are missing.
The multiple listings are due to the inclusion of MP web pages on sites such as the Guardian’s Aristotle and ePolitix.com. These are listed far more thoroughly for Liberal Democrat and Tory MPs, than for Labour.
These numbers make the differences between the “number of party websites listed excluding MP websites” even larger. From 493 Labour, 594 Tory, and 695 Lib Dem websites, they change to 261 Labour, 293 Tory and 577 Lib Dem websites listed.
In reply to the obvious suggestion that the Lib Dems have more websites in this set because they have far more candidate websites (due to far fewer MPs), I’d comment that candidate websites numbers are 52 (Libdem), 9 (Tory), 5 (Labour). In fact - as you’ll see in the next section - most of the difference in Open Directory listings is in “Local Party” websites.
Totals of “Local” Party Websites
I also looked at the number of websites listed in the Open Directory belonging to “local branches”. These are “Local” websites for Labour, “Conservative Associations” for the Tories, and “Local Parties and Branches” for the Liberal Democrats.
Again, the Internet Archive has no data for 2005. These are the total figures.
This graph illustrates that the Lib Dems have more “Local Party” websites listed than either the Tories or Labour, and how the number listed has increased in steps and jumped around the time of the last election.
It looks as though someone had a clear out in 2001, but I have not dug deep enough into the history to comment.
Conclusions
This article has looked at the numbers of party websites listed in the Open Directory, as a lens to study how the main UK Political Parties presence on the web and/or the communication of that presence has progressed.
There are a whole raft of questions outside the scope of this article:
- Are we observing a “natural” or “managed process?
- How far (and how) is it accepable to promote our political parties using this kind of approach?
- Is it likely to make a difference?
Caveats
This has been an analysis I did in a morning because I was interested, and is not to be intended to be anything like rigorous.
There are many types of possible “noise” on the data - from categorisation changing over the years in the directory, through “The Open Directory is irrelevant now”, to the parties having more than one sort of “local” organisation (e.g., I counted “Conservative Associations” but not “Conservative Clubs”).
Wrapping Up
If you want to look at this data yourself, my Excel spreadsheet is http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20080322-party-sites-in-dmoz.xls.
I have tried to keep my conclusions broad to draw useful lessons and stimulate a conversation - and I am open to critique (or demolition).
Supporting Screenshots showing Data
These are screenshots taken from the Internet Archive record of the Open Directory UK Political websites categories. I’ve looked at the UK Political Parties category, and how it has developed since 2000 - taking the first Internet Archive Snapshot of each year (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, no data available for 2005, 2006 and 2007 ).
Data for year 2000
Data for year 2001
Data for year 2002
Data for year 2003
Data for year 2004
Data not available for 2005.
Data for year 2006
Data for year 2007
Phew
Phew. Time for a Coffee. Comments and debate are welcome below.
Tags: lib dem, conservative, labour, open directory
Categories: Number Crunching
Couple of points:
1) You aren’t taking in account that many party political sites are also listed in other parts of directory, like here. If the submission strategy of one party is to submit all the sites only in the regional subcategories, you won’t see them in the number of the party category.
2) Of course much depends of the activity of the volunteer editors. Each of the “big three” party categories used to have its own editor, but as you can see from the web archive, the category of the Conservative Party haven’t had an editor for a while.
Some parties, like Lib Dems, have also made it more easy to find their local websites. If you look for instance the website of Lambeth Liberal Democrats, you’ll find a list of hundreds of other Lib Dem sites. Labour sites don’t offer anything alike, so they have made it much more difficult for ODP volunteer editors (to say nothing of other people with less experience and skills of websearch) to find their sites and to add in the directory. Of course it is also possible, that the local Labour branches have been more lazy than the local Lib Dem branches in putting up websites.