Maahanmuutto/Immigration: what we talk about when talking about “immigration” (in Finland, 2023) by Aalto University

I created this project during a studio course for my minor study in Information Design, which also enriched my understanding of Finland and its politics.

From the parliamentary election in April to the new cabinet formation in mid-June, immigration policy has been one of the topical issues in the 2023 Finnish government negotiation. How do Finnish political parties and their candidates view immigration? What are the major divides between parties?

With access to the voting compass open data from Yle, the national public broadcasting company of Finland, this visualisation project attempts to unpack the complexity regarding immigration and further reflect on the potential cognitive biases in political discussions as well as the existing design of voting advice applications (VAAs).

The analysis consists of both quantitative and qualitative elements. The quantitative part is the distribution of anonymous candidates’ responses towards VAA statements on the Likert scale, while the qualitative section is derived from parties’ self-reported answers towards Yle’s VAA statements.

The dataset can be retrieved from https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2016/05/18/avoin-data-tarjolla-ylen-sisaltoja-ja-metatietoa#vaalikoneet. The original statements from parties are in Finnish. Due to my limited language proficiency, I used the DeepL translator during my design process with additional help from Finnish-speaking friends.