Case Study Review of Sweden's Parliament Parties

1. Politics 2.0: How political parties in Sweden are using social media in their political communication over the internet. Case study review of Sweden's parliament parties (April, 2009)

2. Politics seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together. (Sean O'Casey)

4. About This research was done as a part of my Masters degree at Mitt Universitetet (MIUN), in Sundsvall, Sweden. Sweden as a state that is devoted to the freedom of information, fitted the research since social media is based on openness and transparency.

5. Introduction Internet as a medium that its prime time is all the time is used ever since what is used to be called web 1.0 era. Political parties had been trying to use the internet as a mobilizing tool and to build a community around them that somewhat can replace real life communities that had been involving in the parties' activities.

6. Method In order to level the differences between the parties and a common base for comparison, two indexes were created, internal platform which are the party's official website and external platforms which are websites that defined as social media platforms.

7. Internal Platform While reviewing the websites I searched for features that can be considered as social media features and that were incorporated in parties' websites. Contrary to traditional content analysis where texts are the subject of a thorough analysis, here a content analysis was made, but on a more general level of website sections and less on their content. These features are categorized in the following indexes.

9. External Platform Platforms that are not owned by the parties and considered as social media platforms. On these platforms the party has an official profile/user that is uploading the content and has the permissions to monitor moderate the other users' activity.

10. External Platform Features - Social Networks - UGC platforms (blogs, Microblogs, video, photo)

11. Results The results had showed that the relatively popular parties, The Moderates and Social Democrats, had been using more social media features and platforms than the other parliament parties. Despite these findings there are no clear signs of an established use of social media as a political communication strategy.

12. No correlation between number of parliament members and website’s users. The major parties are the worst in translating voters into website’s users. More votes, more users?

13. Who is the real Social Democrat of Sweden?

14. Social Democrats (S)

15. The Moderates (M)

16. The Center Party (C)

17. Liberal people’s party (FP)

18. Christian Democrats (KD)

19. Left Party (V)

20. * New version of the website The Green Party (MP)

21. Future Research A follow up research after a certain period of time, but before the 2010 elections might be able to show which parties had developed a stabilized social media strategy instead of test & trial and on-the-fly tactics. Also, a further research can be a vertical analysis of social media platforms of one of the seven parties. By doing that the researcher would be able to indentify strengths and weaknesses in the party's political communication in social media.

22. Thank You.

23. Connection Info: Omer Rosenbaum, Sundsvall, Sweden Email: [email_address] Tel #: (+46) 076.566.1028 Download the complete version at: http://onethatknows/socialmediainsweden