Bringing it all back home? Social media practices by Swedish municipalities

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has often been pointed to as having the potential for reinvigorating democratic processes. While such overly optimistic claims have largely been disproven by empirical research, a similar rhetoric is now commonly heard in conjunction with the rise of so-called social media like Twitter or Facebook. This study assesses social media practices by politicians on the local level. Featuring a quantitative structural analysis of social media practices by all 290 Swedish municipalities, the study gauges the spread of these types of emerging online platforms in local governments and uses statistical analyses to explain the observed variations. Results indicate that the uptake of social media by municipality governments is slow and in some cases decreasing, perhaps due to the legal and operational risks involved. Overall, the study mainly supports the normalization hypothesis, concluding that offline patterns of municipality characteristics are largely translatable to the online also in the era of ‘Web 2.0’.