Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

websites. Many parties, e.g. the Alternative People and For the Poor did not even have
any central office personnel working with the site and the Union for Free Finland only
had two volunteers working with the website. Several parties did, however, state that their
local branches were assigned to maintain their own sections on the party server. The
actual number of people working with parts of the websites is thus probably higher than
the figure reported here. Nevertheless, some parties, especially the NCP, appear to have a
quite large pool of central personnel working with the party website. It should be noted
that the NCP’s information official stated that all of the people working with the website
were not chiefly assigned with the task. Pertaining to the degree of central planning, Table
1 shows that, on average, the parties have decentralized planning and formation of
strategies concerning their websites [mean=8.73 equals 42% of the index total].
Unsurprisingly, the fringe For the Poor-party, with the central office consisting of
practically one person, is the only party scoring near the maximum for the index.
Interestingly, not even the parties perceived to be hierarchical (Sundberg 1996, 74;
Zilliacus 2001, 39), i.e. the NCP, Centre Party, SDP and Christian Democrats, score
especially high on the central planning index.
Turning to the remaining indexes, the Finnish parties appear to have a relatively
positive view of the web. The mean [0.29] for the general opinion index is clearly on the
positive side. The parties appear to perceive the advantages of the party websites to be
greater than the drawbacks. The SDP, however, found the drawbacks to be slightly
greater then the advantages. Particularly, the party’s information official stated that the
main problem with the website was that the party’s core supporters could not be reached
through it. Interestingly, the three major parties in Finland, i.e. the SDP, Centre and NCP,
are less enthusiastic about the web than the three fringe parties, the Alternative People,
Union for Free Finland and For the Poor, included in the analysis. Possibly, the ‘net gain’
is more unclear for the major parties than the fringe parties (cf. Sadow & James 1999, 5).
The Green League and the True Finns also have a very positive general opinion of party
websites. The information official of both of these parties rated all of the advantages very
highly while the problems were not regarded as especially significant. Concerning the
importance of the website compared to other communication channels, the Finnish
parties also rank their websites relatively highly. The mean [11.09] for the index equals 69
per cent of the possible index maximum score. As to the individual parties, especially the
Alternative People, but also For the Poor and the SPP, scored low on this index.
Surprisingly, the fringe Alternative People and For the Poor parties ranked the website
lowly compared to traditional communication channels, both in terms of internal and
external communication. The fringe parties in Finland do not appear to have a favourable
view of their websites as compared to other communication channels (cf. Gibson et al.
2003b, 102).
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