Social Media in the 2012 Danish Election

The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.

Denmark is interesting because it shows high levels of voter turnout (at over 80% on average), while support for traditional parliamentary politics is declining. Facebook is strong in Denmark, with a penetration rate of over 50%; that rate is up to 92% in the young population (who are also least interested in traditional politics).

Denmark has a multi-party system, but there ultimately are two major candidates for the prime ministership, from the conservative and progressive sides of politics. New media use during Danish elections has a long history, going back at least to 1998; Facebook and MySpace as well as blogs were used in the 2007 elections, so use of the latest social media could be expected in 2011. YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter were widely used; Facebook largely overtook the use of dedicated blogs, but blog-style functionality was still widely used.

There is an interesting duplication of candidate presences here – in the form of both Facebook pages and profiles, with some candidates attempting to keep their personal profiles from being drawn into the electoral contest, while others used them for a combination of personal and political updates. Managing Facebook pages was also a problem – some politicians posted long rules of posting on their pages, and deleted negative comments from voters.

Some politicians attracted a substantial amount of new Facebook friends and likes, but this did not translate into a strong presence in the mainstream media; a disconnect between social and mainstream media remains. Nonetheless, social media may be a significant channel for communicating directly with voters.

Television remains the most important and most trusted channel during elections in Denmark, however. That's even though a greater number of citizens engaged in online activities around the 2011 election that ever before – but such participation remains unevenly distributed (skewed towards younger and female voters), and is focussed around interactions with friends, not with official politician or party pages.

Lack of political interest in Denmark is not a problem, then – but there is low rather than high online engagement, and users are more engaged with one another than with politicians. Politicians are moving from personal profiles to professional pages, and there is greater focus on (fandom for?) candidates than for parties; social media supplement rather than replace older media, which remain important. Bridging campaigns which connect both media forms seem particularly promising.