Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

goals, organization types or target voters. This is further indicated through the noted
significant correlations between scoring highly on the labour input scale and higher scores
in three out of four website content scales. Taking the inconclusive findings concerning
the influence of party traits on their opinions concerning the importance and use of their
website into consideration, this finding is interesting. Even if party size did not appear to
influence the parties’ ‘inside view’ of their website, it nonetheless appears to restrain what
the parties do with their website (cf. Gibson et al. 2003a, 50; Löfgren 2000, 60; Nixon et
al. 2003, 240).
In conclusion, what are the lessons learnt form this study regarding the plausibility of the
so-called actor constructivist view and the role of the political parties in shaping their use
of party websites? First and foremost, the article has served to demonstrate that
systematic empirical test of how the character of political parties are linked to how they
look upon and use their websites are hard to conduct. Many of the theoretical
circumstances usually regarded as important to party conduct are complicated concepts
which are hard to operationalize for empirical research. Consequently, the knowledge
gained through such analyses must be regarded as tentative, as providing indications
rather than final answers. Secondly, while some of the Finnish parties’ opinions
concerning the importance and use of their websites, and also the actual content of the
websites, can be traced to party characteristics, the study has demonstrated the difficulty
of generalizing from such specific findings. Thus, to better understand how ICTs will be
implemented by political parties, one should indeed take the influence of the users of the
technology into account (Gibson et al. 2003b, 86-90; Löfgren 2001, 23-30), but one should
not assume that the findings concerning one party are per se applicable to other comparable
parties. Thirdly, in influencing the content of party websites, it appears as if size and
associated resources play an important role. In light of this finding, money seemingly does
‘talk’ when it comes to party websites (cf. Gibson et al. 2003a, 50; Margolis et al. 2003, 57-
58). Therefore, in conclusion, the actor-constructivist view appears to be very actor-specific
when it comes to the parties’ opinions regarding their websites, and quite resource-dependent
when it comes to the construction of party websites.
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