Pandering, protesting, engaging. Norwegian party leaders on Facebook during the 2013 ‘Short campaign'

Abstract

While a comparably large amount of research has looked into the uses of Twitter at the hands of politicians, relatively little work has been done how Facebook is being used in this regard. The current paper expands our insights into the uses of social media by politicians by presenting a study of party leaders' uses of Facebook during the 2013 Norwegian election campaign. The paper focuses on two overarching areas: gauging the different themes brought up by the party leaders in their posts and the types of feedback (understood here as likes, comments and shares) that these activities appear to result in. Results indicate that the types of content least provided by the politicians – acknowledging the support of others or criticizing the actions by political peers or media actors – emerge as the most popular in this regard. Results further show that the most common type of feedback is likes – a finding that suggesting that a reassessment of the viral qualities of Facebook for purposes like these is necessary.