Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

of user preferences. If internet politics is ‘preaching to the converted’, the activity on the
political forum ought to be lower than on its non-political counterpart.
The research method of this study is quantitative. The activity on all selected
discussion boards was examined through the ‘discussion threads’. A thread is constructed
as a network of messages concerning the same topic, posted to a discussion board. In
essence, a thread is a written transcript of the electronic debate. The threads can consist
of different numbers of messages on different levels of the debate. Hence, some messages
are replies to the thread’s initiating message while others are replies to other replies. Each
discussion thread was coded for length (number of individual messages in thread), depth
(number of discussion levels, i.e. the extent of replies to replies) and debaters (the number
of citizens participating in the thread). However, whether a quantitative method is the
most appropriate method for answering the research questions of the study is somewhat
questionable. Hence, the validity of the findings and alternative methodological
approaches are further discussed in the concluding section of the article.
In order to analyze the data, several indices measuring the activity on the discussion
boards were constructed. The coding procedure was divided into three time periods in
order to answer research questions RQ3 and RQ3a. Thus, the activity on the forums was
first coded in a period of ‘electoral peace’ between the 11 th March 2002 and 24 th March
2002 (this period is referred to as T1 in the rest of the paper). Secondly, the forums were
revisited prior to the Finnish parliamentary election 8 between the 3 rd of March 2003 and
the 16 th of March 2003 (referred to as T2 henceforth). Finally, the activity on the forums
was coded between the 26 th of May 2003 and the 8 th of June 2003 (Henceforth T3), in
order to control for eventual election-effects in the previous time period (T2) and to
provide a wider picture of longitudinal development of the electronic debates in Finland.
The two boards on the web portal jippii.fi were only coded in the first coding period as
the web portal has introduced registration of users since then. In coding the activity, a
delay of two days 9 was applied in order to allow the debates to develop.
4. Findings
4.1. Activity on the discussion boards
In total, 2,847 discussion threads were coded during the three coding periods. A
comparison of the activity on the different discussion forums reveals that the activity on
the board of the National Coalition Party (NCP) dominated the total activity. Table 1
pictures the spread of discussion threads.
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