Conventional political campaigning strategies on social media have been extensively scrutinized by researchers; however, there is a shortage of studies focusing specifically on audiovisual communication by political parties on video-based platforms. Moreover, the adaptation of journalistic genres and formats in political communication has become increasingly prominent, challenging the relationship between media and politics as separate categories in contemporary media systems. This case study aims to address this gap through a detailed description of how mixed methods can be used to analyze political campaign efforts that utilize journalistic genres and formats on YouTube. It demonstrates a combination of manual content analysis with computer-assisted transcription and search techniques, and how these can be combined with qualitative contextual analysis. This resource emphasizes the integration of quantitative, qualitative, and digital approaches to political content in social media, contributing valuable insights to the field of social media analysis. The case study provides students with a theoretically and analytically grounded approach to political communication that aligns with ongoing shifts in hybrid media systems.

In recent decades, anti-immigrant, racist and nationalist attitudes have become increasingly mainstream, transforming public debates on immigration and immigrants in Europe and beyond. These attitudes and sentiments have been widely disseminated and amplified through digital communication, including commercial social media platforms. To better understand the relationship between racism and digital communication, it is necessary to move beyond media-centric explanations and simplified discussions of online hate speech and platform regulation. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-theoretical approach to digital racism, i.e., racist content produced and circulated online. The paper presents an understanding of digital racism in relation to four perspectives: networked affect, nationalism, masculinity and conspiracy thinking. It takes a relational approach to these theoretical perspectives and discusses how they could be utilized to understand and analytically approach digital racism at the macro, meso and micro levels.

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok’s platform features impact user engagement. Results reveal that party youth organizations had a prominent presence during the campaign, while traditional party actors were less established. TikTok tends to lean toward right-wing content, with right-wing praise being a significant predictor of user engagement. Semiotic resources such as stickers and emoticons but also added music, were widely used platform features, but these features had no or weak negative effects on user engagement. Added speech, particularly when praising right-wing politics, positively influenced user engagement, suggesting the importance of verbal communication on a platform characterized by multimodal experimentation.

The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.

In an increasingly fragmented digital media ecology, political actors constantly experiment with new formats, styles, and collaborations in order to reach specific segments of the citizenry. In this struggle, new and emerging platforms are explored as venues for political campaigning. This chapter explores how two political parties, the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats, utilised the short video format on TikTok during the 2022 election campaign. The chapter presents an analysis of the strategic relationship between influencers and political parties, exploring how TikTok’s short video format impinges on how political messages are designed and communicated. The results highlight the performative aspects of political communication and point to how influencer politics can build on very different logics of authenticity work, using influential users and their followers as a gateway for political campaigning.

This article explores how political parties and individual politicians in Sweden communicate strategically in an online environment where the close relationship between news and journalistic institutions no longer can be taken for granted. We define the adoption and adaption of journalistic conventions in political communication as a particular communication style, conceptualized as “parasitic news”. The article presents an analytical framework that explicates the role of parasitic news across five dimensions: ideological transparency/position, alternativeness, news genres, individual vs. collective media practices, and social media affordances. An analysis of three news projects, representing right-wing populist, liberal/conservative, and left-wing/green ideological positions, reveals that parasitic news is a flexible communication style that blurs the boundaries of politics and media in online spaces. Moreover, parasitic news challenges the relevance of established terms such as alternative, hyper-partisan, and fake news, pointing to the need of a renewed conceptual vocabulary in journalism, media and political communication research.

Political communication has taken new and complex forms within the contemporary hybrid media system. In this article, we examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. We assess the digital television news channel Riks, which during the 2022 national election was operated by the Sweden Democrats party and distributed via YouTube. Deploying a mixed-methods approach, we analysed all videos published by Riks four weeks prior to the election. Results show that Riks blends descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genres, and strategically frames the most important political issues of the election campaign in favour of the party’s policies. Hence, the study contributes to political communication scholarship by emphasising how news has become an integral part of strategic party communication, challenging established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news.

I samtidens hybrida mediesystem antar politisk kommunikation nya och allt mer komplexa uttryck. Den här artikeln undersöker hur politiskt kampanjarbete som bygger på nyhetsformer tidigare utvecklade inom TV-journalistiken, bidrar till en uppluckring av gränser mellan nyhetsjournalistik och politisk kommunikation i digitala informationsmiljöer. Artikeln undersöker den digitala tv-nyhetskanalen Riks, som under riksdagsvalet 2022 drevs av Sverigedemokraterna och publicerades på YouTube. Studien bygger på dataunderstödd metod med kvantitativa och kvalitativa ansatser och analyserar alla videor som publicerades av Riks fyra veckor före valet. Resultaten visar att Riks blandade deskriptiva och tolkande nyhetsgenrer i sin bevakning, men också att innehållet inspirerats av politiska och satiriska nyhetsprogram. Genom dessa genrer gestaltade Riks Sverigedemokraternas viktigaste sakfrågor i valrörelsen på ett sätt som var till förmån för partiets politiska kampanj. Studien bidrar till forskningen om politisk kommunikation genom att betona hur nyhetsproduktion har blivit en integrerad del av strategiskt kampanjarbete. Studien visar också att etablerade forskningsbegrepp som ”alternativa medier” och ”hyperpartiska medier” kan vara problematiska för att beskriva fenomen som Riks, eftersom de saknar en tydlig strategisk dimension.

Over the last decade, strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists have become an increasingly common feature of populist political communication. The purpose of this article is to identify various strategies that politicians use to criticise the news media and illuminate how the use and circulation of these strategies vary between party types. The article builds on a content analysis of the Twitter feeds of all members of parliament with an active account during the 2018 Swedish election campaign. Results show that political media criticism in Sweden is strongly associated with political personalisation, and it is almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, though not restricted specifically to populist parties. Public service media rather than newspapers or commercial broadcasters constitute the prime target for political media criticism in Sweden, illustrating the need to take media systemic aspects in to account when analysing media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication.

This extensive edited volume on politics and media in the Nordic region sets out to establish if there really is a Nordic model for political communication. The book brings more than 40 scholars together to shed light on media and politics in what is internationally known as the Nordic models. This refers to the similarities of the Nordic countries, characterized by, among several things, a combination of capitalist economies and historically large welfare systems and public sectors, specific labor market policies including high levels of union membership, a high level of engagement and trust among the citizenry including large voter turnouts, stable political systems, and large public-service media organizations.

The contributors to this volume were selected strategically by the editors, ensuing a mix of scholars with backgrounds in political communication research and media and journalism studies from all the five Nordic countries. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents the rationale for the volume as a whole, followed by five chapters outlining “media and politics” in the five Nordic countries separately. The second part is thematic and features twelve chapters covering a wide selection of topics that connect to the main theme of “media and politics” in the Nordic region, and a concluding chapter by the editors.