Changing Political Campaigning Strategies in Sweden

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 panel is Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on the developments of online political communication in Sweden – this covers the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. His focus is especially on the rise of populism in Swedish politics, and the platformisation of messaging in election campaigns.

Populism can be seen as a style of political communication; this may include negative political content and policy and personal attacks (which could also backfire, of course), as well as the targetting of specific elite or minority groups. Platformisation refers to the emergence of hybrid campaigns and the crafting of campaigns that contextualise the campaign for different groups, as well as the utilisation of platform affordances to mobilise audiences, generate engagement, and encourage content virality.

Data for the study were collected using the Netvizz tool for gathering data from Facebook. In 2010, campaign posts were largely text-based, and only few received a substantial number of shares on Facebook; there were also some posts of campaign posters, and some encouragements for users to change their profile pictures to show support for a party (but note that this strategy fails to connect with the platform algorithms.)

In 2014, campaigning is getting a lot more visual, and there are considerably more encouragements to on-share content, as well as more campaign videos. In 2018, most of the prominent content is recorded or live video. Populism ‘works’ in this content, but it can backfire as it also attracts negative feedback in comments – yet even this still feeds the platform algorithms. It may also gradually affect the political Zeitgeist in Sweden, and slowly change overall political discourse. Platformisation is also in evidence here: campaigning strategies become more attuned to Facebook, its affordances, and its metrics. This also hands more power over to the external media consultants employed by the parties, rather than just to the political campaigners.