public to access information and express perspectives. If history is any indicator, statistics reflect a growing trend. Between 1994 and 2005 communications to Congress increased four fold. Most importantly, all of these were based on Internet communications as opposed to traditional communication methods such as postal letter writing (Fitch, Goldschmidt, Fulton, & Griffin, 2005). One of the first applications of interactive media within the general political environment was to that of campaigning. Candidates and organizing committees realized the potential that new communication methods held and began experimenting with ways to harness these resources for political advancement. One such example was the utilization of netroots movements. This is a process by which voters across the country would employ online tools to unite others who share common passions and perspectives, as represented by a political candidate or party. Most importantly, the use of these online resources enabled the orchestration of actual, physical events at designated locations (Feld, & Wilcox, 2008). The pairing of online capabilities with political campaigns presented a new means of active involvement for citizens in politics, whereas previously they may have played a passive or non-existent role. Political organizers have continued to refine how campaign material is made available to supporters to such degrees that a campaign manager can send highly specific, and potentially different, information to targeted supporters in different locations (Howard, 2006). Even with these tactics at the ready, attempts were still made to further capitalize off of supporters’ motivations. Political candidates began incorporating subcategories of interactive elements into their campaign websites in order to further solidify support from active campaign participants. These steps may signal further progression of campaign websites becoming more than merely simple information posting platforms but rather hubs of diverse campaign activity. Prime examples of reliance upon interactive tools were seen in the run-up to United States presidential election of 2004. In these instances, candidate’s websites displayed varying types of interactive tools such as encouraging visitors to blog on the respective sites and providing links allowing users to make monetary campaign contributions (Feld, & Wilcox, 2008). When considering the relation of interactive media to politics, it is helpful to classify the relationships into two groups. E-government is the more wide ranging and broadly applicable of these two groups. One can surmise it is due to this broader application that a precise and widely agreed upon definition of e-government is absent (Carrizales, 2008). One particular definition focuses on e-government as providing greater transparency in order to better utilize resources for the public to which the government is meant to serve. In turn, this results in more effective governmental performance (Pascual, 2003). E-democracy focuses more specifically on the concept and practice of public participation in government. This classification is not as broadly defined in that it relies upon the idea that citizens are a necessary component to result in actionable participation. This stands in contrast to e-government, which incorporates many other operations where the public is not necessarily involved (Carrizales, 2008). Within the framework of this paper the examination of interactive media as it relates to politics will be guided by two primary concepts. The first is transparency, which can be defined as focusing attention and resources upon the activities and decisionmaking processes of an organization (Welch & Fulla, 2002). To an extent, the concept of