To identify issues with Finnish VAAs developed for 2019 parliamentary election, content analysis along with expert evaluation was performed. The results showed that the Finnish VAAs lacked transparency, user interactivity and visualizations that would allow for candidate comparisons. Based on the findings a new VAA design was envisioned, which consisted of two phases. The suggested design aimed to give users more power over VAA designers in the process and improve the quality of the voting advice.

We find that ideological positions of candidates matter for their electoral success in Finnish parliamentary elections, using data from three Finnish elections (2011-2019). The effect of ideological distance is large enough to be a decisive factor in intra-party competition between the last candidate that was elected and the first one that was not.

The paper shows that the effect of geographic remoteness depends on local party strength and the degree of urbanization. Moreover, empirical results confirm that nearby located localized co-partisans decrease a candidate’s own vote share. These findings have important implications for politicians’ careers, party nomination strategies and future empirical research on intra-party competition.