Political Campaign through Social media: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Oslo Arbeiderpartiet Facebook Page

Abstract

Facebook and other social media sites offer suitable forums for political parties to express political views and ideas through their social media accounts and pages. This thesis determined to understand how the political parties utilize Facebook for their political activities and what are the ideas and concepts posted on their pages. This research analysed the Facebook posts of the Arbeiderpartiet Oslo section (Oslo Labor party/ Oslo Arbeiderpartiet) to elaborate on the research question. This study aims to perform a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Facebook page of Oslo Arbeiderpartiet party to analyze the type of posts they use, the strategy of the ‘post content’, and what political or non-political topics are presented on their official Facebook account. The type of posts describes as the ‘subject of the respective posts’ whereas the strategy of the posts is explained in the ‘thematic analysis of the gathered data’. Data analysis was conducted by using NVivo software. The data from Facebook posts were collected and organized individually to identify the theme or subject discussed in the posts. The codes were assigned and then grouped together according to their similarity. The results showed that the Oslo abor party’s leading posts were relevant to health (45.6 %) and corona management concerns (28.5%). The reason for that is because the selected timeframe falls in the corona pandemic. The political agenda and electoral campaigns, voter engagement and jobs counted for 13.8% and 7.5%, 10.44% and 18.38% references respectively.