Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

Political actors
Normalization
Equalization
Citizens
Reinforcement Mobilization
A
Finland
B
C D
Figure 1. The Finnish on-line political environment
Evidently, the findings regarding the political actors have almost unanimously pointed in
the normalization direction. There is little evidence of on-line activity being particularly
different from ‘politics as usual’ in Finland (Margolis & Resnick 2000). This is interesting
seeing as Finland is both technologically developed and its off-line political context
contains elements which could spur innovative, dynamic use of websites by political
actors and provide preconditions and incentives for smaller political actors to emphasize
internet campaigning (Cunha et al. 2003, 70; Gibson 2004, Norris 2003, 25). This thesis
has highlighted several findings which support the normalization theory. It has
demonstrated that on-line politics is not disconnected from the off-line nationalinstitutional
context or the political actors employing the technology. Both external
context and the actor-specific conditions lay their mark on the on-line communication by
political actors. This thesis also found that the dominant off-line political actors, i.e. the
parliamentary parties and their candidates, have a dominant presence in the Finnish online
political environment as well. Finally, even though the websites of the Finnish parties
and candidates by-and-large resemble “electronic brochures” (Kamarck 1999), there is,
nonetheless, a gap between the mainstream actors – e.g. the major parties and, to some
extent, the minor parties in parliament, the incumbent and competitive candidates – and
the parties and candidates on the margin in refernce to what they are doing on their
websites. On-line electoral competition, both between parties and individual candidates,
appears to be quite normalized even in the candidate-centred Finnish election system and
corresponding campaign culture. While the internet might have provided the smaller
political actors in Finland with a more egalitarian platform than they have in off-line
Finnish politics (Norris 2001, 239) – this has not been empirically examined here – the
thesis has showed that the internet “cannot eliminate the power of traditional
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