1 PAPER PRESENTED FER CENMEP CONFERECE “POLITICIAN ONLINE: ANALYSES OF ESTOIAN CANDIDATES’ USE OF WEBSITES IN THE 2009 EUROPEAN PARLIAMET ELECTION CAMPAIGN”

This article examines the ways how Estonian candidates were implementing Web 2.0 applications during the European Parliament elections in June 2009. The study considers effectiveness of the candidates ’ websites presentation. Several web-specific features, the ability to use multimedia and interactivity are taken into consideration. The paper also looks at how the phenomenon of personalisation of politicians ’ reflects in the Estonian web-campaign environment. Conclusions are drawn as to whether political web pages offer opportunities for implementing a deliberative policy, as Web 2.0 applications give opportunities to involve people to the debate and increase participation. The analyses show that in Estonia political web sites do not offer citizens many possibilities for participation. Even if candidates have blogs and are present on social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, they tend to use these applications only for marketing purposes and not for implementing deliberative politics. It could also be argued that the personal input from the side of the candidates to the Internet campaigning is low and most candidates do not offer that much interactivity via the websites