Does Exposure to the Websites and Blogs of Party Leaders Affect the Party Leader Trait Evaluations of Voters?

2 In parliamentary systems, election campaigns are increasingly party leader-centered. An emerging trend is that party leaders maintain personal websites and blogs in order to personalize the parties ’ campaigns. This article examines the impact of this new kind of party leader-centered campaigning on voters ’ party leader perceptions. Voters’ perceptions of party leader traits are examined after exposure to the websites and blogs of party leaders. Additionally, as blogs usually have a more personal touch than websites, the effects of website exposure and blog exposure are compared. The article presents two experiments that were conducted during the 2007 Finnish general elections using authentic websites (Experiment 1) and blogs (Experiment 2) of the leaders of three major parties as stimuli and young voters, an important target group for web campaigns, as participants. In both experiments—the first utilizing a pre-test-post-test control group design (n = 96), the second having a post-test only control group design (n = 130)—evaluations of party leader traits were measured by