Political Communication on Twitter : A look at the Swedish Parliamentary parties and their leaders during the Political Summit in Almedalen 2017

The aim of this paper is to analyze and compare Twitter feeds of the eight political parties in the Swedish parliament, together with their party leaders, during the political summit Almedalen week 2017. The communication theories gatekeeping and agenda setting are applied to the first two research questions: How do official Twitter accounts of political parties differ from party-leader accounts when it comes to (1a) frequency and dispersion of tweets, (1b) agenda setting? How does different parties’ communication diverge regarding (2a) frequency and dispersion, (2b) agenda setting? Finally, Political personalization theory is applied to the third research question: (3) To what extent are party leaders utilized in party communication on Twitter? There are 655 identified tweets during Almedalen 2017. These make up the empirical material of a content analysis following a coding scheme, attached in appendix 1. Interesting findings include: official party accounts use strategic dispersion methods such as established hashtags, party leaders do not. Party accounts have a stronger agenda-setting role, while party leaders tend to forward media content. Opposition parties are more active on Twitter than governing parties. Female opposition leaders are the only party leaders tweeting laid-back photos of themselves in their professional capacity