The 2018 Swedish Election Campaign on Twitter

Abstract

How did Swedish parties and candidates use Twitter during the 2018 election? And what topics were discussed the most? Using an original dataset containing over 9.1 million tweets collected over the four weeks of the electoral campaign, this paper explores candidates’ campaigning strategies online. We show that candidate’s individual characteristics and political career have significant effects on the adoption of and use of Twitter, yet party and district-related factors also explain some patterns in online campaigning.