And the next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is the great Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on political campaigning on Facebook in the Nordic countries. Social media are of course now used widely as a way of bypassing conventional media in campaign communication; this is particularly interesting for populist communicators.
European Parliament elections provide a useful case for comparative research, and the comparison of the Nordic EU countries Denmark, Finland, and Sweden is particularly interesting given their political similarities: parties rather than candidates tend to be the central political actors here; government parties are currently doing poorly; turnout is declining overall; populist far-right parties have emerged, but have also experienced some electoral setbacks recently.
How did this manifest in the EU elections, then? This study focussed on the parties’ Facebook pages as well as those of the leading candidates, and manually coded those. Overall patterns diverged quite substantially between countries; populist parties gained more reactions on some than others, and policy area emphases also varied somewhat, although many were shared across countries. Populist communication styles were of course employed by populist parties, but sometimes also by others; they were most prominent in Sweden, where the Social Democrats also employed such approaches widely.
National dynamics thus strongly shape strategic communication across social media platforms like Facebook, and cross-national differences are often driven by the distinct strategies of individual parties.
