Democratic Problem, Individual Responsibility? Strategies and Practices for Handling Online Political Harassment in the Swedish Parliament

It is well established that harassment targeting politicians today mostly takes place online, and that it has the most severe consequences for politicians belonging to marginalized groups, such as women and ethnic minorities. We know much less about how this serious democracy problem is handled in practice within Parliaments and party groups as organizations. In this study we focus on the strategies and practices for handling online political harassment within the Swedish Parliament and party groups, building on 50 interviews with politicians, communication managers and security staff as well as policy documents. We find that while online political harassment poses a serious challenge to (equal) political representation in democratic societies, there are very few elaborated strategies and little resources for handling this on a daily basis within the Swedish parliamentary parties and even less so in the Parliament as a whole. At the Parliamentary level, there are no specific resources or staff devoted to the handling of online harassment targeting MPs, hence this work is left much to the parties. While a few parties have decided to devote resources to systematically scrutinize online comments, this is mostly handled on an ad hoc basis and primarily a resource for party leaders and the party’s official accounts. As a result, most of the resource demanding and psychologically draining work to handle online political harassment in practice falls on individual MPs, with gendered and intersectional consequences both for their own well-being and for democratic political representation.