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The aim of this paper is to analyze and compare Twitter feeds of the eight political parties in the Swedish parliament, together with their party leaders, during the political summit Almedalen week 2017. The communication theories gatekeeping and agenda setting are applied to the first two research questions: How do official Twitter accounts of political parties differ from party-leader accounts when it comes to (1a) frequency and dispersion of tweets, (1b) agenda setting? How does different parties’ communication diverge regarding (2a) frequency and dispersion, (2b) agenda setting? Finally, Political personalization theory is applied to the third research question: (3) To what extent are party leaders utilized in party communication on Twitter? There are 655 identified tweets during Almedalen 2017. These make up the empirical material of a content analysis following a coding scheme, attached in appendix 1. Interesting findings include: official party accounts use strategic dispersion methods such as established hashtags, party leaders do not. Party accounts have a stronger agenda-setting role, while party leaders tend to forward media content. Opposition parties are more active on Twitter than governing parties. Female opposition leaders are the only party leaders tweeting laid-back photos of themselves in their professional capacity.

This study analyses the populist radical right discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD), examining how Jimmie Åkesson, the SD chairperson, conceptualized gendered social positions in the folkhem ([Swedish] people’s home) in his annual speeches in Almedalen, since the SD entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010 to date. Attention is being paid to whose voices are allowed to come forth and in which manner this is done, and to how inequalities intersecting gender and ethnicity are explained and reproduced, as means to normalize populist radical right discourse in Sweden. Theoretically, the study rests on the conceptualization of the populist radical right as a thin-centred ideology, which is contingently adapted to national politics, to which it ads “intersectionality from above” as a specific analytical perspective. The discourse-historical approach (DHA) provides the methodological tools for the analysis and facilitates its contextual positioning. The article contributes analytically to the field, shedding light on how, in the context of populist radical right discourse, welfare chauvinist appeals are employed formally to acknowledge the importance of gender equality in Sweden, and are used as a device to contour two antithetic entities: the supposedly gender-equal Swedish ethnic majority as the opposite of the allegedly deeply patriarchal migrant Other. The article also contributes empirically to the study of the populist radical right in Sweden. It provides a more nuanced picture of the party’s ideological transformations in what is envisaged to be their ideological normalization—from fringe nationalism (antidemocratic national socialism) and outright racism to welfare chauvinism and cultural racism (Islamophobic exclusionary nationalism) in conservative clothing., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published