Political blogs in the American Presidential Elections : Blogging Swedish Parliament members about the results of the 2008 American Presidential Elections

The 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections were in many ways special, where the USA got its first president of Afro-American origin, Barack Obama. The elections will also be historical since the great use of social medias - as the community Facebook, the video sharing site YouTube and web based diaries, blogs - broke through during the campaigns. This study's purpose was to examine how a few members of the Swedish parliament described the result of the Presidential Elections in their blogs. The main question - how the election results were described in the blogs - was divided into three themes, created on the basis of the blog's content. The themes were Barack Obama, John McCain and the future. To answer the questions a qualitative text analysis was made, in order to analyze the positive and negative values and opinions in the blog posts. The results showed that the majority of the chosen seven bloggers - one from each parliament party - had a positive view of Barack Obama's victory. Obama's winner speech got special attention. Regarding John McCain, he was described as a good loser, even though - as in the Obama theme - there were exceptions. The majority of the bloggers had an optimistic view of the future, but the most of them thought that Obama will face many difficult challenges, like the financial crisis and the anxiety in the Middle East. In the final discussion Obama's election campaign, with it's engagement in social medias, and hope for a better future, were the main causes to the overall optimistic view in the blogs. Finally, a discussion about what didactic consequences the blog's place in education in civics will have. More participation and better insight into the political life are two positive consequences. Dragging peoples name in the mud and the creating of false rumors are two negative consequences. Key words: blog, social media, presidential elections, Swedish parliament members.