Hungarian party websites and parliamentary elections
Norbert Merkovity
(University of Szeged, Hungary)
ABSTRACT: Analysis of party websites was one of the popular research fields of political communica- tion in the 1990s. It was an interesting question as to how politics and the Internet are becoming connected to one another. However, with the appearance of Web 2.0, these surveys have become pointless, since the emphasis has moved to websites supporting the emergence of online communities. Research of Hungarian party websites has not yet been completed. Adapting to this new trend, researchers have begun to turn their attention to a completely new field of investigation. This study makes an attempt to analyse the changes in the informative and interactive functions of Hungarian party websites on the basis of three different eras (the 1990s, the mid-2000s and the present). Finally, with an international comparison, it evaluates the situation of websites in 2010.