Mid Sweden University

Survey studies show that popular support for democracy is strong in democratic and non-democratic countries. Naturally, the question is if democracy actually means the same thing in different linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. Mass media is often mentioned as decisive in forming citizens' understandings of democracy, but the media discourse is rarely in focus in comparative studies on popular conceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the debate by analysing data collected from online media in 93 countries. By utilizing tools from natural language processing, we provide new insights based on methods that are both extensive, flexible and cost-efficient. Our analysis shows that the media discourse revolves around democracy as governance, as outcomes and as values, but that these abstract understandings have additional dimensions. Our main contributions are three: (i) we show that the media discourse is related to popular understandings of democracy; (ii) our results indicate that there are common denominators of how the D-word is discussed in media across the globe, but when analysing the dimensions in more detail, common denominators are few and (iii) by relating democracy to everyday politics, media seems to legitimize any regime as democratic rather than being a beacon for liberal democracy. 

A consistent empirical finding is that Scandinavian countries by international standards score steadily high in terms of subjectively reported levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Intrigued by previous findings in Denmark (Lolle and Goul Anderson in Metode Og Forskningsdesign 1:95-119, 2013, in Journal of Happiness Studies 6:1-14)), this paper confirms that this is partly due to language effects. In this paper, Sweden serves as a case study that, similar to the Danish study, seeks to determine whether it is possible to establish semantic equivalence between translated survey items. By using randomized experiments on a representative sample of Swedish citizens with fluent skills in English, we test the effects of different designs in question wordings and response scale labels implemented by international surveys. The results reveal significant differences in answers on happiness. While the mean differences are very small, the distribution of answers is substantial enough to confirm a strong semantic threshold between the English term happy the Swedish term lycklig. Hence, it requires something more to be "very happy" in Swedish than in English. Notably, language appears to have a lesser impact on the distribution of responses across language groups when using a numbered response scale with endpoint labels, indicating that a particular question design either mitigates or intensifies translational effects. Happiness, it is concluded, is not easily translated and survey practitioners should bear this caveat in mind when operationalizing the concept across countries and cultures.

Despite the influence of stigmatization on vote choices, little attention has been given to the impact of social stigma on voters’ selection of voting procedures. To bridge this gap, our study focuses on Sweden, where the open-display ballot system at polling stations potentially compromises vote secrecy. Using survey data from the Swedish National Election Studies in 2014 and 2018, we examine the relationship between citizens’ voting procedure choices and their support for a highly stigmatized radical right party, the Sweden Democrats. Our findings reveal that voters of the Sweden Democrats are more inclined to vote in advance, particularly in districts with low general party support, indicating a high level of stigma. We argue that advance voting can be seen as a strategy to safeguard vote secrecy when voting for stigmatized parties within an institutional context featuring public displays of ballots. In addition, our research sheds light on the importance of electoral integrity in maintaining the confidentiality of voters’ choices. 

Linguistic Explorations of Societies (LES) is an interdisciplinary research project with scholars from the fields of political science, computer science, and computational linguistics. The overarching ambition of LES has been to contribute to the survey-based comparative scholarship by compiling and analyzing online text data within and between languages and countries. To this end, the project has developed an online semantic lexicon, which allows researchers to explore meanings and usages of words in online media across a substantial number of geo-coded languages. The lexicon covers data from approximately 140 language-country combinations and is, to our knowledge, the most extensive free research resource of its kind. Such a resource makes it possible to critically examine survey translations and identify discrepancies in order to modify and improve existing survey methodology, and its unique features further enable Internet researchers to study public debate online from a comparative perspective. In this article, we discuss the social scientific rationale for using online text data as a complement to survey data, and present the natural language processing-based methodology behind the lexicon including its underpinning theory and practical modeling. Finally, we engage in a critical reflection about the challenges of using online text data to gauge public opinion and political behavior across the world.

In this study the authors aim to add to the understanding of whether, and if so how, a change of electoral system affects factors such as voter turnout and the party system, and the authors' focus has been on changes that result in mixed electoral systems. They used three country cases (Japan, Italy, and New Zealand) to explore patterns in a before-and-after design. The findings suggest that a country cannot expect a significant effect on voter turnout if it decides to change its electoral system to a mixed system. Regarding party system fragmentation, the results show that the change of the electoral system in New Zealand from a plurality system to a mixed member proportional system had a clear and immediately positive effect on the party system. However, the results do not indicate that the changes of electoral systems in Japan and Italy have had any significant effect on the party system. 

Using a large data set of online media content in eight European countries, this paper broadens the empirical investigation of the online hostility hypothesis, which posits that interactions on social sites such as blogs and forums contain more hostile expressions toward minority groups than social interactions offline or in editorial news media. Overall, our results are consistent with the online hostility hypothesis when comparing news media content with social sites, but we find that negatively charged representations are common in both media types. It is instead the amount of attention to Muslims and Islam on social sites that most clearly differs and is the main driver of online hostility in the online media environment more broadly conceived.

Despite the continued electoral progress of the radical right, there are reasons to believe that its full electoral potential has yet to be revealed. Previous research suggests that it suffers from a stigmatisation effect and that many voters will find its proposals less compelling compared to if they were presented by a mainstream party even for policy issues they agree upon. This study employs a unique survey design, with two experiments conducted seven years apart, on a panel of Swedish voters. The aim is to evaluate whether proposals are assessed differently dependent on who the sender is and whether the effect diminishes as the cordon sanitaire of the party weakens. The results show that proposals are less liked if the sender is the radical right. This effect persists even after a weakening of the ostracisation of the radical right as well as for different types of political issues.

The Sámi electorate in elections to the Swedish Riksdag: participation and party choiceThe Sámi electorate in Sweden votes to the same extent as the general population in elections to the Riksdag, something that differs considerably from other parts of the world where turnout in elections to national parliaments usually is significantly lower among people who identify themselves as belonging to an Indigenous People in com-parison with the majority population. How the Sámi in Sweden vote in parliamentary elections is, however, an unexplored field of research so far. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, to analyse how the Sámi electorate votes in elections to the Riksdag, and second, to explain the voters’ choice of party on an individual level. The study shows that the Social Democrats and the Left Party would have had a parliamentary majority in all elections since the 2010 parliamentary elections, if the Sámi electorate had the decision-making power. In comparison with the election results for the entire Swedish population in the elections 2018, the Social Democrats and the Left Party were about ten percent larger within the Sámi electorate, while the Conservative Party and the Sweden Democrats were around ten percent smaller. The analysis also indicates that the voters’ opinions on specific political issues are decisive for how the Sámi electorate votes in the Riksdag elections: the Sámi electorate votes to a large extent on the Left Party and the Green Party, two small parties in the Riksdag clearly stating that they work for a strength-ening of Sámi rights, simultaneously as the two parties that most clearly has opposed Sámi rights, the Conservative Party and the Sweden Democrats, have a considerably weaker support among the Sámi in comparison to the majority population in general.

Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.