Impact of the legislative body websites of democratic countries upon the internet : an exploratory study into the use of web impact factors

Abstract

Legislative body websites are expanding with more official information being available, however the impact of the availability of this information is unknown. One way to look at the impact of a website is to study the effect it has upon the internet through the use of Web Impact Factors. Web Impact Factors show how many other websites are linking to the website being studied and can express the value relative to the size of the website based on webpages. A new Web Impact Factor based on population size is also introduced and discussed. 28 countries are included, with results being compared to the level of democracy within each country. Webometric data was collected using the Yahoo! search engine. No definitive conclusions can be drawn due to the wide spread of results. Discussion is given on issues relating to data collection from legislative bodies and on potential further exploration into legislative body websites.