Abstract
Finland's three largest established parties won about two-thirds of the vote cast for the parties studied here, but drew well under half of their Facebook engagement. I use 38,729 posts from eight Finnish party pages, January 2010 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. The Finns Party, the main challenger, is not in the data, so all shares are among the parties that are. Because CrowdTangle's capture of photo posts changed in May 2015, I compare shares within periods. From June 2015, the Centre Party, the National Coalition and the Social Democrats together drew 44% of interactions against 67% of the vote among the seven continuing parties. The Left Alliance drew 26%, 2.6 times its vote share, and led every year from 2016 to 2019. The Christian Democrats drew 2.5 times their vote share, mainly by posting far more. Movement Now, launched in 2018, drew 11% of interactions in the month before the 2019 election, when it won 2.3% of the vote. The Greens went the other way: their share of interactions fell from about a third in the second half of 2015 to under a tenth in 2019, as they posted less and their posts gained less than others', while their vote rose from 8.5% to 11.5% and to 16.0% at the European election. Being in government made no clear difference to a page's engagement once the capture change is allowed for. Small parties looked larger on Facebook than at the ballot box, but in these data engagement shares did not anticipate who would gain votes.
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Hotham, T. (2026). Small Parties, Big Pages: Engagement and the Vote among Finnish Parties on Facebook, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418593