We find that there are on average, three different forms of electoral harassment (most commonly spreading disinformation, defaming campaigns, and website jamming or harassment of online accounts). Nearly half of the voters do not observe any forms of harassment. For both voters and candidates, young age and exposure to social media increase the tendency to observe electoral harassment, while affiliation with center-right parties has a negative association.
We find that there are influential effects on vote-earning in political experience variables (e.g., incumbency) and campaign spending. The Finnish electoral system provides an advantage for well-known and established candidates.
We find that estimating party positions with computational methods (wordscores and wordfish) for Finnish parties 2003-2019 prove to be insufficient in comparison to traditional methods such as expert surveys, the Manifesto Project and voter estimates.
We find no mass polarization among the Finnish electorate. However, some movement to the extreme ideological positions is observed in 2019.