Hearts in the Highlands, Fingers on the Keys: Online Discourse and the 2007 Scottish Elections.

In May 2007, Scottish voters elected into office a party and a political leader publicly committed to holding a referendum on independence from Great Britain within four years. This study offers one of the first in-depth looks at user-generated content on a newspaper-affiliated website in the context of a national election. It seeks to unite two strands of earlier work: research into how news media are accommodating a networked environment in their political coverage, and parallel research on the evolving nature of online political communities and the tantalizingly elusive "virtual public sphere." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]