Social Media in Political Communication of Swedish Right-Wing Parties

Introduction. The institutionalization of social media as the main communicative area of modern life forces political parties to be involved in new formats of interaction with the audience. The spread of populism, made possible thanks to new technologies, can be considered today as a kind of aggressive Internet promotion of party slogans and ideologies. The development and improvement of such methods of influencing remains an important problem that requires scientific analysis. In this article, the peculiarities of social media use in political communications of right-wing parties in Sweden became the subject of the research. Methodology and sources. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the functional (K. Lawson) and ideological (K. von Beyme) approaches to the study of political parties. Empirical data collected in online communities were processed using content analysis and qualitative-quantitative analysis methods. A software product using Python was written to collect the information, interacting with online resources using requests and pandas libraries. The obtained data allowed us to calculate the engagement ratio (ER) and the attractiveness ratio of online communities (LR) to capture feedback on publications. Results and discussion. In the context of political events between 2021 and 2022, the Sweden Democrats and Christian Democrats parties focused on a populist agenda, addressing crime, the crisis of multiculturalism, the consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic and public dissatisfaction with migration policy, which eventually led to an increase in the popularity of right-conservative parties, as evidenced by the results of the parliamentary elections Conclusion. A comprehensive content analysis of Swedish right-wing parties' online communities allowed us to examine the digital footprints of social media publications and to identify and rank by frequency the lexemes used to influence the audience. Based on the findings, influence techniques were identified that contributed to the Swedish electorate's growing interest in right-conservative ideas.

Authors: Alexey Yu. Kolianov, Mikhail S. Matveev, Dmitry G. Cherkasov

Direction: Sociology

Keywords: political regionalism, political communication, Sweden, political parties, party systems, right-wing political parties, social media

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