Using the potential of the blog - A comparison of techniques in Swedish political

Abstract: As the use of Internet and social media increases, the Swedish politicians not only use the traditional media but also blogs as a way to reach out with their political message. The research objective of this thesis is to answer in what extent the media and blogging techniques are used in Swedish political blogs, and how the use differs demographically and politically. In this study, a literature study elucidated the requirements to perform the quantitative approach to data gathering. The result of this led to 16 techniques that are beneficial for the political blog, and a listing of 139 political blogs to compare them against to chart the results as statistics and then draw conclusions from them. The results showed that the different parties had some disparity in the uses of the techniques, but these results could not be guaranteed due to the low basic data springing from the low numbers of blogs from some parties. However, more statistically guaranteed results showed that there were no major differences in the use of the examined techniques between the genders. The large difference was between the age groups, where the younger the age group – the more frequent user of the techniques.