Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

perspective, the articles have been concerned with the relative strengths of different
political actors in the on-line political environment as described in the theories of
normalization and equalization (Margolis & Resnick 2000, 53-76). The order of
presentation in this section is structured according to the empirical research questions.
The findings of the individual articles are, however, mainly summarized and discussed
with reference to the theories of normalization and equalization.
2.1.1 The on-line political actors in Finland
Three of the thesis’ articles, numbered two, three and four, have provided an assessment
of the Finnish parties’ and candidates’ on-line presence. The political activity on-line of a
wide array of different political actors – i.e. parties, candidates, NGOs, the news media,
government, labour unions, web portals, business organizations, citizens, educational
organizations – prior to the 2004 election for European Parliament was examined in the
second article (Carlson & Strandberg 2005). The article gave a broad overview of the
political actors dimension. As for the question of who the political actors of the Finnish
on-line political environment are, this study provided a rather clear cut answer: the
traditional off-line political actors, i.e. political parties and candidates, made up the bulk of
the electoral web sphere. These were followed by governmental- and media websites. The
noticeable focus on parties and candidates in this thesis thus appears valid as they
apparently are the dominating Finnish on-line political actors in terms of having websites.
The third and fourth articles (Strandberg 2006a; 2007) further scrutinized the web
presence of the Finnish parties prior to the 2006 presidential election and the candidates
prior to the 2003 Parliamentary election. These studies revealed findings quite similar to
the second article in regards to “who” the on-line political actors in Finland are. Firstly, all
major and minor Finnish parties have party websites while several fringe parties lack
websites. Secondly, the dominance of the major parties is also replicated in terms of the
web presence of the Finnish candidates. A larger share of the major party candidates were
on-line than those of minor and fringe parties. Belonging to a major party was likewise
the strongest predictor of candidate web presence when entered as one of several
predictors in a logistic regression model. Both of these empirical observations lend
support to the normalization theory. The major parties, and their candidates, have a
dominant presence in the on-line political environment in Finland.
In summary, concerning who the on-line political actors in Finland are, the current
on-line political environment in Finland is seemingly dominated by traditional political
actors, i.e. the parties and candidates. Among these, there is a noticeable dominance by
the larger parties and their candidates. This influence of the major traditional political
actors is interesting, seeing as Finland has several contextual circumstances which could
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