Inventing the Election: Civic Participation and Presidential Candidates’ Websites

In this article I propose a three-part schema for analyzing and categorizing the civic participatory potential of three presidential candidates’ websites. Focusing my analysis on the sites of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, I examine how the rhetorical and technological features of the sites’ interfaces promote robust, moderate, or superficial participatory invention, interaction, and dialogue. My research highlights the ways in which the design of websites may enable users to become more active agents in political campaigns and in the election process. In addition, the three-part schema I propose provides what I hope will be a useful analytic lens for writing instructors to use when seeking to engage students with civic rhetorical analysis.