Parties, Candidates and Citizens On-Line - Åbo Akademi

YLE, the state-owned Finnish Broadcasting Company, attracted approximately 60,000
different visitors during the last week of the campaign. All in all, the selector was visited
by more than 100,000 different citizens during the period 1–13 June and by more than
80,000 in May. 5 The selector provided by the largest daily, Helsingin Sanomat, was visited
approximately 188,500 times during the campaign. 6 Moreover, the candidates were very
responsive when giving their answers to the questionnaires that made up the five
selectors; the answer rates ranged from 77 to 87 per cent. 7 In addition, two parties set up
their own selectors on their sites allowing for a comparison between the issue views of
the site visitor and the candidates of the party in question. In sum, by considering this
additional feature, and its’ popularity, the election-related information provided by the
news media’s sites in the 2004 campaign is put in a more favourable light.
4.3. Engagement opportunities provided
The provision of engagement opportunities to the voters is reported in a two-fold way.
First, an additive index assigns one point for the presence of each of 11 engagement
features on a site (Appendix A). Thereafter, we examine the prevalence of each
engagement type on the sites by the different actors. Concerning the actors’ index scores,
the most striking observation is that all actors offered the voters a small range of
engagement opportunities; the mean score for all actors is remarkably low (1.66).
Moreover, the differences between the actors are fairly small. Yet, the parties did
somewhat better (2.27) than the other actors (scores ranging from 0.80 to 1.60). Table 3
gives a detailed overview of the various engagement features provided by the actors.
5 The figures provided by researcher Eija Moisala at YLE’s Audience Research unit. About four million
citizens were entitled to vote in the 2004 elections.
6 The figure provided by Mr. Marko Hamilo at Helsingin Sanomat.
7 The figures were available at the webpages providing the candidate selectors.
70