The Dynamics of Internet Use in Danish National Elections

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Jakob Linaa Jensen, who focusses on the Danish political environment. He and his colleagues conducted surveys amongst Internet users in four Danish election campaigns (2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019) to examine their experiences with the role of social media in national elections. Denmark has a multi-party system, and Facebook is clearly the leading social media platform here.

Over these campaigns, the use of news and party Websites has increased over time. Social media use peaked in 2015, with 61% of survey respondents using such platforms, yet only 46% in 2019. Such use largely tends to be in receiving rather than posting information, though sharing political stories from other media through social networks remains somewhat common; this reflects typical hierarchies of social media engagement actions. Again, such uses tended to peak in 2015 and have declined in the 2019 campaign.

Digital and social media uses may have come to replace TV debate viewing, and there is a chance that they have also started to replace offline discussions about the elections. However, there may also simply be an overall decline in campaign engagement in Denmark, so that there is not so much a shift from offline to online engagement but from engagement to non-engagement.

Some possible reasons for this include a loss of interest in politics, a lack of trust in social media platforms, a dislike of the tone on social media tone, or a distrust in information on social media. Overall, women still participate more online than men, and younger people participate more online than older people, but the effect of demographic factors seem to lose their importance in 2019. This could be a sign that Internet participation has normalised – or alternatively, that there are no normalisation effects.

Participants have felt increasingly strongly that their social media use has affected their choice of party, their opinions on important issues, and their level of political knowledge, however. They also felt that social media and Internet use are affecting the election itself increasingly strongly. This means that ironically, there are fewer people engaging online, yet that the effects of such engagement have increased.