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While a series of case studies have provided useful insights into the political uses of Twitter, scholars have pointed to the necessity for longitudinal and cross-country findings in order to further our understanding of social media use in this regard. The study at hand presents a comparative analysis of Scandinavian political party communication on Twitter. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the study details the full histories of party Twitter accounts from Denmark, Norway and Sweden in order to provide overarching, structural insights into how the studied political parties have made use of Twitter – but also how their potential voters have chosen to engage with the tweets posted by the parties. While Twitter once was described as integral for political campaigning and indeed for the hybrid media systems in these countries, the results indicate an overall declining trend when it comes to use - albeit an increase of what could be considered as less demanding types of use for parties and citizens alike. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed.

This article presents a longitudinal, structural study where party and citizen activity on Facebook is studied over a 10-year period, outlining the growing importance of audio-visual content for online campaigning purposes – as well as the rise of populist parties on the same platform. The study shows that an overall increased focus on video as a means of communication emerges as especially pertinent for native Facebook functionalities. This could have repercussions for how online political communication messages are fashioned – and also for the dependencies on platforms that are supposedly strengthened as parties make choices regarding where to invest their campaign resources. In terms of citizen engagement, the results indicate the dominance of populist parties, who have strengthened their positions on the studied platform. The dominance of populist actors will likely have repercussions for the algorithmic spread of political messages – as well as for the ways in which political messages are shaped.

Detailing processes related to direct representation in a longitudinal fashion, the study at hand gauges the degree to which Swedish political parties have utilized their Facebook pages during a four-year period covering two elections. Moreover, the study provides insights into citizen interaction by measuring the types of engagement preferred by Facebook users in relation to the party pages. Results indicate that while the bulk of parties appear as largely organizing their online activity in relation to election campaigns, the small, non-parliamentary Pirate Party emerges as taking an approach more in line with the permanent campaign aspect of direct representation. Moreover, while results indicate that citizens are indeed engaging with parties on Facebook, they do so mostly through 'liking' rather than commenting – arguably a tendency suggesting limited interest in online discussion and deliberation.

Political elections see several actors rise to the fore in order to influence and inform voters. Increasingly, such processes take place on social media like Facebook, where media outlets and politicians alike utilize seek promote their respective agenda. Given the recent rise of so-called hyperpartisan media—often described as purveyors of "fake news"—and populist right-wing parties across a series of western contexts, this study details the degree to which these novel actors succeed in overtaking their more mainstream or indeed established competitors when it comes to audience engagement on the mentioned platform. Focusing on the one-month period leading up to the 2018 Swedish national elections, the study finds that right-wing actors across the media and the political sector are more successful in engaging their Facebook followers than their competitors. As audience engagement is a key factor for social media success, the study closes by providing a discussion on the repercussions for professionals within the media and the political sector.

This study details the influence of hyperpartisan media actors in comparison to regional and national news media competitors by gauging audience engagement in relation to news on Facebook in Norway. Adopting the perspective of news use as a way of understanding such engagement, the study finds that followers of hyperpartisan Facebook Pages are more active than those following mainstream media Pages. The study also looks closer into what kinds of news are engaged with to higher degrees than others, building on these results in suggesting opportunities for future research into news production and consumption on Facebook.

While plenty of research have provided useful insights into political parties' use of Twitter, comparably few efforts have focused on the arguably more popular Facebook service. This article presents a comparative approach, detailing similar functionalities on each platform and providing statistical analyses of the social media activities undertaken by Swedish political parties during the 2014 elections. Moreover, the types of attention and feedback received by these parties are analyzed, suggesting that while sizable parties are not necessarily the most ardent at using their social media presences, they receive the most attention. The study largely complements previous research, suggesting that larger actors receive the bulk of new media attention on both platforms – with some internal variation. However, the role of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats is clearly felt throughout, suggesting the apparent prowess of controversial parties in the online context.

Many claims have been made regarding the influence of social media like Facebook on activities undertaken by political actors. While the study of online political communication provides several different perspectives, few studies have attempted to uncover tendencies of so-called permanent campaigning in online environments. The term signifies campaign-like activities at the hands of politicians also during non-election periods and has spawned a number of conceptual discussions. This article presents an exploratory effort, studying traces of permanent campaigning in two similar countries—Norway and Sweden. As the former of these countries underwent a parliamentary election during the studied period, the study provides insights into "the election effect"—heightened levels of online activity among the Norwegian parties and politicians that can perhaps best be understood in relation to an ongoing election.

As research has indicated, what are sometimes described as traditional forms of political-parliamentary participation are dwindling in most Western democracies, and the Internet has often been pointed to as harboring the means to hinder these developments. While empirical studies on these matters have at best provided mixed results, social media services, like Twitter, have yet again fanned the flames of the most enthusiastic debaters. This paper moves beyond the often-studied context of parliamentary elections and instead offers a structural study of everyday political discussions on Twitter. Specifically, tweets from political contexts in Sweden and Norway are collected and analyzed with a specific focus on the top users and their activities. Results indicate that while thematic Twitter discussions can indeed serve as a potential channel for citizens, the influence of established as well as political extremist actors is also clearly discerned. ; As research has indicated, what are sometimes described as traditional forms of political-parliamentary participation are dwindling in most Western democracies, and the Internet has often been pointed to as harboring the means to hinder these developments. While empirical studies on these matters have at best provided mixed results, social media services, like Twitter, have yet again fanned the flames of the most enthusiastic debaters. This paper moves beyond the often-studied context of parliamentary elections and instead offers a structural study of everyday political discussions on Twitter. Specifically, tweets from political contexts in Sweden and Norway are collected and analyzed with a specific focus on the top users and their activities. Results indicate that while thematic Twitter discussions can indeed serve as a potential channel for citizens, the influence of established as well as political extremist actors is also clearly discerned.

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has often been pointed to as having the potential for reinvigorating democratic processes. While such overly optimistic claims have largely been disproven by empirical research, a similar rhetoric is now commonly heard in conjunction with the rise of so-called social media like Twitter or Facebook. This study assesses social media practices by politicians on the local level. Featuring a quantitative structural analysis of social media practices by all 290 Swedish municipalities, the study gauges the spread of these types of emerging online platforms in local governments and uses statistical analyses to explain the observed variations. Results indicate that the uptake of social media by municipality governments is slow and in some cases decreasing, perhaps due to the legal and operational risks involved. Overall, the study mainly supports the normalization hypothesis, concluding that offline patterns of municipality characteristics are largely translatable to the online also in the era of 'Web 2.0'.