‘Of course we are on Facebook’: Use and non-use of social media among Swedish and Norwegian politicians

Abstract

While plenty of research has provided important insights into the uses of the Internet by politicians during elections, a relatively scarce amount of work has looked into these uses outside of such parliamentary events. This article seeks to remedy this lack of research by presenting a study on the ‘routine’ uses of two of the currently most popular social media services – Facebook and Twitter. Focusing on politicians elected to the national parliaments of Norway and Sweden, the article employs novel methodologies for data collection and statistical analyses in order to provide an overarching, structural view of the day-to-day social media practices of Scandinavian politicians. Findings indicate that use levels are rather low for both services – the median amount of tweets sent and messages posted on Facebook is close to one per day. Further analyses reveal that the most active politicians could be labelled as ‘underdogs’, as they are more likely to be younger, in opposition and out of the political limelight.

‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

“…Aside from Larsson and Kalsnes (2014), we continue to lack comparative research in this field. This not only prevents us from exploring the impact of context but also means that we cannot be sure if our findings are country specific or apply more generally.…”

Members of the Scottish Parliament on Twitter: good constituency men (and women)?

“…In some cases, these have simply quantified the politicians' Twitter activity, in terms of adoption rates, number of posts and followers, etc. ; for example, in Australia (Missingham, 2010), Brazil (Marques, de Aquino and Miola, 2014), Sweden and Norway (Larsson and Kalsnes, 2014). A small number have adopted a more qualitative approach, using interviews to explore politicians' motivations for using Twitter.…”

Political conversations on Facebook. Exploring the role of homophily in argumentation and communicative interaction

“…Several authors highlight the significance of Facebook and Twitter as channels of political communication practices and electoral campaign tools, given the extensive number of citizens using them regularly (Kreiss, 2012;Nielsen & Vaccari, 2013;Larsson & Kalsnes, 2014;Yung et al, 2014). In Spain, Facebook is clearly more popular than Twitter, according to different surveys conducted on both the general population (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2015) and Internet users (Asociación para la Investigación de Medios de Comunicación, 2016).…”

“…Cardenal (2013) argues that large parties tend to have more incentives to use a variety of online platforms (including social media) for political mobilization because they have reasonable expectations to win elections and they own more resources to invest in both online and offline activities, in comparison with smaller parties. For their part, Larsson & Kalsnes (2014) focus on the Facebook use by Norwegian and Swedish politicians, and they conclude that representatives with less vote percentage are more likely to use social media. Through their study on the routine uses of social media by Norwegian and Swedish politicians, they observe that it is the individual politicians' characteristics which most determines social media adoption and use, rather than any other contextual variables (such as party size or ideology).Thus, although using Facebook for electoral purposes requires both financial and human resources, it is not clear that Internet campaigning is dominated by bigger parties (Gibson et al, 2008).…”

“…Recent studies show that ideology does not influence the use of digital technologies by political parties (VesnicAlujevic, 2016). Some even refer to this phenomenon as an ongoing deideologization of political actors' online activities (Larsson & Kalsnes, 2014). In Spain, the emergence of party primaries or the involvement of citizens during election campaigns are a clear evidence of the increasing americanization of political campaigns since the nineties (Dader, 1999).…”