Pandering, protesting, engaging. Norwegian party leaders on Facebook during the 2013 ‘Short campaign'

Abstract

While a comparably large amount of research has looked into the uses of Twitter at the hands of politicians, relatively little work has been done how Facebook is being used in this regard. The current paper expands our insights into the uses of social media by politicians by presenting a study of party leaders' uses of Facebook during the 2013 Norwegian election campaign. The paper focuses on two overarching areas: gauging the different themes brought up by the party leaders in their posts and the types of feedback (understood here as likes, comments and shares) that these activities appear to result in. Results indicate that the types of content least provided by the politicians – acknowledging the support of others or criticizing the actions by political peers or media actors – emerge as the most popular in this regard. Results further show that the most common type of feedback is likes – a finding that suggesting that a reassessment of the viral qualities of Facebook for purposes like these is necessary.

Keywords:

• politics
• social media
• web 2.0
• Facebook
• Norway
• e-Government

Notes on contributor

Anders Olof Larsson (PhD, Uppsala University, 2012) is a postdoctoral fellow working in the Social media and Agenda-Setting in election campaigns project at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. During his PhD work, which was funded by The Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology, Larsson took part in the 2011 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme. His PhD thesis – ‘Doing Things in Relation to Machines – Studies on Online Interactivity' (pdf) – was awarded the 2012 Börje Langefors award (for best Swedish thesis within the field of Informatics) and the 2012 FSMK Doctoral Dissertation award (for best Swedish thesis within the field of media and communication studies). Anders Olof Larsson's research interests include the use of online interactivity and social media by societal institutions and their audiences, and online political communication and methodology, especially quantitative methods. [email: [email protected]]