Reaching the Voter

Exploring Swedish Political Parties’ Assessment of Different Communication Channels in Three National Election Campaigns, 2010–2018

Abstract

The mediatization of politics denotes a long-term process through which political actors have become increasingly dependent on news media, the key mechanism being the adaptation to news media and news media logic by political actors. One aspect of this is related to how political parties communicate during election campaigns, and how important they perceive different communication channels to be. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to explore the assessment of different communication channels in election campaigns by political parties over time. This study analyses the ways in which political parties value the importance of traditional news media, social media and traditional methods for communication with voters during election campaigns. The empirical material covers the 2010, 2014 and 2018 Swedish national elections, enabling us to make comparisons within the same national context as well as to explore their development over time. The results indicate that news media is still considered the most important communication channel, although social media is levelling the field.