ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study gauging developments in political Twitter use during two Swedish parliamentary elections— 2010 and 2014. Much as with the Internet during the 1990s, it is often suggested that social media services such as Twitter provide novel arenas for communication about political issues, in addition to contact between citizens and politicians. Indeed, a great deal of scholarship has examined the supposed parliamentary-political potentials of Twitter, and most research has been fashioned as single country or election case studies. The chapter suggests a framework for diachronic comparisons of uses of specific media services or online communication platforms. To operationalise the political change, it identifies five criteria: volume of tweets and users, dependence on mainstream media, relations between most and least active users, use of Twitter's dialogic modes of address and redistribution among the most prolific users, in addition to the ability for non-elite users to make an impact.
