Avoimen vuorovaikutteisuuden ideaalista sisäisen mobilisaation realiteettiin? : puolueiden digitaalisen vaalikampanjoinnin strategiset ulottuvuudet ja dilemmat

This dissertation “From the ideal of open interactivity to the reality of internal mobilisation? The strategic dimensions and dilemmas of parties’ digital election campaigning” examines parties’ strategic digital election campaigning in the context of a hybrid media system, i.e. it identifies and analyses the communicational-structural and campaign organisational factors that explain parties’ online campaigning strategies. The infrastructure of parties’ online campaigning consists of campaign websites and digital marketing, social media pages and groups, as well as discussion platforms and voting advice application communication. Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of these elements, the research concludes by presenting a set of strategic dilemmas of the parties’ digital campaigning. The parties studied in this research are the Centre Party, the Christian Democrats, the Finns Party, the Greens and the Social Democratic Party, and the research focuses on their online campaigns in the 2011 and 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections. In addition, the research monitors the development of digital campaigning up to the summer 2021 municipal elections, with a particular emphasis on the 2019 parliamentary election. The data include semi-structured interviews of personnel responsible for the target parties’ online communication, the parties’ candidate guidance materials and parliamentary election programmes, an archive of digital clips collected from the parties’ campaign websites and social media platforms, and a collection of media articles reporting and analysing online campaigning. The research methods are qualitative and based on content analysis, and they focus on the analysis of features common to the parties’ campaigning, as earlier research has shown the campaigning of professionalised parties to be largely homogeneous. In the research, an overall picture of the strategic dimensions of parties’ online campaigning is formed mainly based on the data, but also by combining theoretical reflection and empirical ...