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General elections were held in the Kingdom of Sweden on the 9th of September 2018; parliamentary (riksdagsval), municipal (landstingsval), and local elections (kommunalval). Citizens and residents of Sweden elect 349 members of parliament, county representatives from 20 counties, and representatives of municipalities within those counties, depending on the population in each unit. Since these are general elections, the results do not vary much, and the results are similar at all levels of government. This paper presents the results decided at all levels, detailing the results for the parliamentary elections. The results of this election took European and international public by surprise. The Sweden Democrats have crystallized as a third political option in Sweden, repeating an outstanding result in two cycles in a row. The success of the Swedish Democrats has tarnished the image of liberal and tolerant Sweden and its image of neutrality in the world. It remains to be seen how Swedish politics will respond to future challenges.

Within computational political science, a sentiment expressed in social media has been subject to examination about electoral behaviour, more so because of the cases of the successful use of social media by candidates (Obama) or by companies who tried to manipulate public opinion (e.g., the involvement of the Russian Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica in 2016 Presidential Elections in the USA, or of Cambridge Analytica's to the UK's Referendum about Brexit). In this paper we examine a refinement of analysis, moving from sentiment (positive-negative) to emotions, combine opinion mining with social network analysis, and apply it to the tweets posted during the critical elections that took place in Greece in 2015 and 2019. We find support for the relation between some emotions and voting behaviour in other countries but also realize that the intensity of expressing such emotions is perhaps a better indicator of the need for change.

ObjectivePast research shows that electoral context prompts changes in political trust. In the United States, data limitations confine this literature to status‐quo affirming presidential elections. We extend previous research to unexamined contexts: elections with partisan presidential changes, midterm elections with shifts in congressional control, and nonelection periods.MethodOriginal panel data from 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2012 are used. Data were obtained from surveys administered to students enrolled at a large midwestern university. We compare context effects on trust and other political attitudes, and contrast trust levels among winners and losers in each context.ResultsWe find that trust is more malleable than most other attitudes in all periods; it is less stable in presidential elections than congressional elections; and there is no evidence of winner and loser effects.ConclusionOur findings reveal the importance of political context in explaining the stability of trust by showing that trust levels are more changeable in certain contexts than others, specifically more changeable in presidential than in congressional elections.

The paper offers a critical discursive and pragmatic analysis of a corpus of hateful Facebook and Twitters status updates of politicians, political activists and voters in the 2016 pre-and-post election period, in Macedonia. Aiming to determine how power is exerted on social media, the paper focuses on identifying the stance social media users take when posting messages with political content. The analysis first attempted to unveil what speech acts the hateful posts are predominantly composed of (e.g. assertive, directives, expressives), what roles the authors of the posts normally assume, who the hateful political discourse in the given socio-political context is directed to, as well as what are some of the predominant linguistic strategies underlying the analysed hateful comments. The results show that, by using mostly assertive and expressive speech acts, social media users assume mainly the roles of analysts and judges and only subsequently the one of activists, they mostly address politicians directly and they use a lot of negative lexis, rhetorical figures and boosters as interpersonal metadiscourse markers to express their negative stance and exert power and dominance. Key words hate speech, elections, speech acts, stance, positioning, power, propaganda