Continuing from my last post, dealing with Norwegian politicians and parties on Facebook, the current post presents data regarding the Swedish context. The graph posted here utilizes the same color scheme to make sense of the respective type of politicians visible – Black nodes equals parties, dark gray nodes show party leaders, light grey nodes denote ministers and “celebrity politicians” (e.g. van Zoonen 2005), and white nodes show activity undertaken by members of parliament without specific portfolios or indeed public profiles.

In the previous post, we could see that Norwegian non-parliamentary parties were comparably quite popular in terms of the median amount of Likes and Shares received per post. The figure presented above suggest similar tendencies, although not as stated, for the Swedish case. Consider the node representing the Pirate Party, whose placement in the graph indicates a median of shares per post on par with major, “catch-all” parties like the Social Democrats or the Conservatives. Similarly, the finding that two of the parties in the right-wing coalition currently governing Sweden (the Liberal Party and the Centre Party) are not present in the figure could be an indication of what could be labeled as an ‘ekection year effect’ – seeing as all Norwegian parties (who underwent an election earlier this year) were present as visible in the corresponding figure. With regards to the most popular Facebook Pages, we see another tendency repeated from the Norwegian context. Much like the Progress Party appear to have produced a series of posts yielding high amounts of both Likes and Shares, so do the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats seem to enjoy a similar status in the Swedish context. However, when one considers the change of scale on the vertical axis, representing the median of shares per post – 0-100 shares for Norway, 0-1000 shares for Sweden – the dominance of the Sweden Democrats in this regard is further affirmed. As such, far right parties appear to have succeeded in getting their message across through Facebook in both countries, while this tendency is arguably more affirmed in the Swedish context.

Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Norwegian Public Service Broadcaster NRK (you can see the piece here) regarding some work I have been doing on the how political actors (parties and politicians) make use of their Facebook Pages – and to what degree their activity spreads through the platform at hand. The figure below is referred to in the brief interview and I thought I’d post it here as well. Please click on the image to enlarge it if necessary.

Black nodes represents parties, dark gray nodes denote party leaders, light grey nodes identify ministers and “celebrity politicians” (e.g. van Zoonen 2005), whereas white nodes show activity undertaken by members of parliament without specific portfolios or indeed public profiles. Each actor is identified with name and party abbreviation. The vertical axis represent the median number of Shares per post by the identified actors, whereas the vertical axis shows the median number of Likes per post.

Starting with the Norwegian case, the figure above finds the node representing the official party account for the right-wing populist Progress Party – as well as the node corresponding to their party leader, Siv Jensen – to be among the political actors enjoying the highest medians of likes and shares per Facebook Page Posts. Beyond these and other top actors in this regard (such as PM Jens Stoltenberg), all political party accounts save for two (Socialist Left and Christian Democrats) are positioned above the horizontal dividing line, indicating the apparent popularity of official party accounts. As for the two parties below the aforementioned middle line, these are both small parties in terms of voter share. This suggested relationship between ballot recognition and Facebook Page post popularity is perhaps particularly interesting when considering the case of the Socialist Left Party. From another analysis – not published here – we could tell that while their official party account produced the highest yield of Page posts during the studied period, the figure above shows that their reach in terms of Likes and Shares was comparably limited. As a small Party, albeit with seats in government and a role as incumbents going into the 2013 elections, the Socialist Left Party appears to have had some difficulty in getting their messages across on Facebook.

This finding on the activities of an incumbent but small party on the left side of the Norwegian political spectrum can be contrasted with the spread that other accounts, operated by somewhat similar parties, appear to have enjoyed. Consider the nodes representing The Green and Red Parties in the figure above – both without representation in parliament. As visible here, these parties appear to have hosted comparably popular Facebook Pages, resulting in corresponding nodes placed in the middle of the figure. Taken together, this would seem to indicate that while party size appears to hold explanatory power regarding the online coverage enjoyed by parties, smaller, non-imcumbent parties are indeed able to get their message across on Facebook.

In a couple of days, I’ll post results regarding the popularity of Swedish politicians on Facebook. Stay tuned!

Here, then, is the follow up post to my previous post on the paper I am currently working on together with Bente Kalsnes, regarding social media adoption and uses by Swedish and Norwegian politicians. In the last post, I presented the adoption rates for Twitter and Facebook Pages for our sample of politicians. Below, a series of luxurious greyscale box-and-whiskers plots provides some insights into the actual uses of these services by those elected to serve in the Swedish and Norwegian Parliaments respectively. Specifically, the scales on the y axis represent the number of tweets (upper row, grey boxes) or Facebook posts (lower row, white boxes) that the politicians had sent per day since they created an account on each service.

To begin with, a note on interpretation. Box-and-whiskers plots provide a visual overview the distribution of specified numeric variables. First, the ‘whiskers’ inform us about the spread of the data – indicating the lowest and highest data points. Any case – here, politician – found outside the whiskers is considered an outlier – here, a politician who stands out in his or her comparably extreme high-frequent use of social media. Second, for the ‘boxes’, the lines visible within them indicates the median of the distribution. Given the nonparametric distribution of the data, the median was determined as a suitable statistic. The areas in-between the whiskers, the box edges and the median line altogether allow us to discern the quartiles of each distribution – which in turn is helpful when assessing the skew of the analyzed data.

With these guidelines for interpretation in place, a few results stand out. First, for Twitter (upper row of the figure, grey boxes), the median values for both countries indicate that politicians tend to send out under one tweet per day (NO = 0.60 tweets, 0.95 tweets in Sweden). Compared to the means of tweets per day, these are considerably higher in both countries (NO = 1.01, SE = 2.85), suggesting a skewed distribution where comparably few politicians account for a large amount of tweets being sent. The same tendency can also be discerned when noting the slight upward skew of the boxes for both countries. Particularly for Sweden, this upward skew, indicating the activity of high-end users, is complemented by a series of outlier values – politicians who, due to their frequent use of the service at hand, appear to be literally ‘off the charts’ when compared to their colleagues. In both countries, these politicians could be described as “mid-level” with regards to their respective roles in parliament – while there are exceptions, particularly in the Swedish case (such as Annie Lööf or Birgitta Ohlsson), these outliers can largely be identified as members of parliament without specified ministerial duties or other, similar tasks usually associated with important work portfolios ascribed to them.

Second, for Facebook data (lower row, white boxes), the difference in scale as detailed on the Y-axis is striking when compared to our results regarding Twitter activity – while the former scale ranges from 0-40 tweets per day, the Page activity of the politicians in our sample can fit comfortably within a scale of 0-4 posts per day. This very basic results provides us with some initial insights into everyday uses of this particular service at the hands of politicians – a mode of communicating that is arguably not characterized by abundance. According to our findings, Norwegian politicians tended to provide a median of 0.28 Facebook Page posts per day (Mean = 0.36), with that same statistic for Sweden amounting to 0.11 posts per day (Mean = 0.26). While the middle boxes are still skewed upwards, they appear more evenly distributed around the median line in comparison with the Twitter data, indicating a comparably limited spread around the reported median for both countries – a claim that seems especially valid for Norway. Furthermore, as the medians and means are relatively closer to each other for the Page activity variable than for its Twitter counterpart, we can conclude that while Twitter activity is more abundant and characterized by upward skews on the scale caused by highly active politicians, Facebook Page activity appears as rather limited – a result that is further corroborated by the fact that the number of outliers for the latter of these scales are rather limited in comparison with the former. In comparison with the “mid-level” politicians found in our results pertaining to Twitter, the outliers in terms of Page activity tend to be top-level politicians – Siv Jensen is the leader of the Progress Party in Norway, while Jonas Sjöstedt leads the Swedish Left Party.

Time for some insights into the research I’m currently working on – over two posts, I’ll be sharing some of the work-in-progress data interpretations undertaken by myself and co-author Bente Kalsnes, focusing on the degree to which government politicians in Sweden and Norway adopt and make continuous use of social media services Twitter and Facebook. Please note that the results presented here have not been subjected to peer review – the headline for this post certainly stands. With that caveat in place, we look first at adoption rates. The figure featured below is based on data from the beginning of may 2013. Furthermore, it is arguably somewhat simplistic, but it does it’s job…

The figure depicts adoption rates – whether an MP in Norway or Sweden had an account on Twitter or Facebook or not – during our time of data collection. The bars indicate the percentages as well as the “raw numbers” (in parenthesis) of MPs with accounts.

While the fact that the Swedish parliament boasts more members than its Norwegian counterpart has influence on the numbers presented in the figure, the difference of scale is adjusted for when discussing these issues in terms of percentages. While Norwegian politicians have apparently adopted Facebook Pages to a slightly higher degree compared to their Swedish colleagues (twenty-four percent of Norwegian politicians use Facebook pages, compared to nineteen percent in Sweden), the differential when looking at Twitter is minimal (fifty-seven percent for Norway, fifty-eight for Sweden).

The results presented here indicate that Twitter adoption rates were slightly higher than the Facebook counterparts. As Twitter use in the two case countries is often reported at rather low levels, the popularity of Facebook among the general populace becomes relatively sizeable. Our results here indicate that politicians are generally more present and more active on the former of these two, suggesting a potential online communicative mismatch between those electing and those elected. While the demographics of social media use can vary considerably in different contexts, use of Twitter in the Scandinavian countries  has mostly been associated with elite, urban, media-savvy groups. In sum, then, if politicians wish to engage more clearly with everyday voters, they might be well served to look beyond Twitter for their social media activities.

Of course, merely looking at whether a politician has an account on Twitter or Facebook or not does not take us very far in understanding the social media practices of elected officials – we also need to take their activity into account. This will be dealt in part II, coming up in a couple of days. Stay tuned!