Issue Salience on Twitter During the Swedish Pre-Electoral Party Leader Debates

The paper engages with current disputes about the transformation of the public and political debate in a social media context and how political discussions online take form. The objective for this study is to contribute with knowledge on the issue formation of the political agenda on Twitter by a case study analysis of the party leader debates in Sweden prior to the national election 2014. During the party leader debates six predefined topics were discussed and we measured the time of discussion for each topic and compared with the occurrence of the topic on Twitter- both in time and frequency. By applying a combination of methods and techniques (semi-automatic and manual) for analysing Twitter data it allowed us to study the tweets in greater detail and to handle larger quantities of data. The combination of quantitative mapping and qualitative scrutiny also gave opportunities for evaluating the performance of our model and ensure validity in our results. Our findings suggest that topics brought up during the party leader debates to a large extent are mirrored on Twitter and the debate also drives up the total amount of tweets during the time of the televised debates. However, a closer look reveals a gap between the time and size accorded to different issue dimensions on Twitter and the actual debates. Contrary to our expectations, issues on a left/right policy dimension are more salient in the online discussions rather than issues associated with liberal- authoritarian values.