Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

a website. The officials of the three major parties were, however, slightly less enthusiastic
than the officials from smaller parties. Thirdly, both on average and for all individual
parties, the Finnish parties preferred to use the website for information dissemination
above engaging the users. Engagement was not, however, regarded as unimportant as
several parties scored highly on both the informative- and engaging communication
index.
Turning to the second descriptive research question – what do the Finnish parties’
websites look like as to the actual content of the site? – the content analysis revealed some
noteworthy findings. Firstly, the Finnish parties generally use their websites for different
types of top-down information. The parties mostly used their sites for internal
administration and information. Additionally, website features related to general
information and campaigning were quite common on the websites. The websites of the
Christian Democrats and the Green League were the only sites scoring near the maximum
on the participation and bottom-up communication index. Secondly, concerning website
presentation and sophistication, the findings revealed a significant gap between the major
and fringe parties. In fact, the three major parties were the ones scoring the highest on the
index.
Discussion
The ambition of this study was explicitly explorative; the plausibility of the actorconstructivist
view on party use of websites (Römmele 2003) would be further explored.
In order to carry out this task, a theoretical backdrop consisting of four circumstances:
party goals, party organization, party size and party voters, was developed. Thereafter, the
findings regarding the Finnish parties’ opinions concerning the importance and use of
their websites, as well as the contents of their actual websites, were exploratively assessed
in light of this theoretical backdrop. Pertaining to this theoretical framework and the
explorative ambition, what conclusions can be drawn from this study?
One crucial conclusion from this study is that the view which I have called “actorconstructivist”
in this article is very difficult to study empirically. Concepts such as party
goals and organization, for instance, are hard to operationalize in a readily measurable
manner. Consequently, most of the analyses and conclusions to be drawn are explicitly
explorative and tentative in nature; i.e. they give some indicative results and direction for
future research but can not be regarded as providing any decisive answers. Regarding the
first explorative research question – are there any patterns in the parties’ opinions
concerning the importance and use of their website which are traceable to the parties’
character in terms of party goals, organization size or composition of primary supporters?
– the answer provided in this study is negative. The automatic clustering algorithm
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