Abstract
How much of a party's Facebook engagement comes through its leader? I use 33,958 posts from the pages of Sweden's eight parliamentary parties and seven of their leaders, from January 2015 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. The answer differed sharply between parties and over time. Jimmie Åkesson's page drew 41% of the engagement on the two Sweden Democrat pages in 2015, but only 13% to 16% from 2018 to 2020, as the party page grew into the largest political page in the data. Annie Lööf went the other way: her share of the Centre Party's engagement rose from under half to 57% to 68% from 2018. Stefan Löfven drew about half of the Social Democrats' engagement until 2017 and between 25% and 42% afterwards. Åkesson's page still drew more interactions than the prime minister's in every year. At the 2018 general election and the 2019 European election, the Sweden Democrats' party and leader pages together drew 46% and 52% of interactions on the party and leader pages, against 18% and 16% of the vote among the same parties, while the Social Democrats drew 0.64 and 0.41 times their vote share. Counting leader pages changes some comparisons a great deal: the Centre Party's ratio is 0.13 to 0.16 on its party page alone and 0.52 to 0.77 on Lööf's page alone. Parties differed in whether their engagement ran through the leader or the party page.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). The Party, Not the Leader: Sweden's Party Leaders on Facebook, 2015 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396563