Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

Notes
1 According to the Nua Internet Surveys website;
URL: http://www.nua.com/surveys/how_many_online/europe.html accessed June 2003.
2 According to the Nua Internet Surveys website;
URL: http://www.nua.com/surveys/how_many_online/europe.html accessed June 2003.
3 I was able to gain access to the discussion board only after I signed up for membership in the Centre
Party.
4 According to the Centre Party website; URL: http://www.keskusta.fi/keskusta/jasenyys accessed June
2003.
5 Since the strongholds of the Centre Party are in the rural parts of Finland where internet penetration
amounts to roughly 50 %. Source: Nordic information Society Statistics 2002. Available on-line: URL:
http://www.stat.fi/tk/yr/tietoyhteiskunta/nordic_iss_02.pdf
6 According to the election statistics of Statistics Finland:
URL:http://www.stat.fi/tk/he/vaalit/vaalit2003/vaalit2003_vaalitilastot_aspuoluekannatus.html accessed
June 2003.
7 According to Alexa web rankings URL: http://www.alexa.com, accessed June 2003, the web portal
jippii.fi had the highest number of users of all web portals in Finland during the first six months of the
year 2003. Hence, the potential number of users is high.
8 A special thank you to graduate student Tom Sörhannus who coded the data for this period. The intercoder
reliability was tested according to the formula suggested by Holsti (1969: 140), the result was a
highly satisfactory r=.91.
9 The open forum of the Centre Party was coded with one day’s delay due to technical problems. Some
uncertainty in the comparisons with other forums are thus apparent. Intra-forum longitudinal
comparisons are not affected.
10 Obviously, this is hardly surprising as both the measure for liveliness and the equivalent for intensity are
based on the total number of individual messages in each thread. The correlation between the two
measures was R=.351 p