Kalsnes, B., & Larsson, A. O. (2026). ‘More than a feeling’ – Facebook reactions and the sharing of political posts during Scandinavian elections. Information, Communication & Society, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2025.2595670
Summary
This paper offers a comparative analysis of how political parties and leaders in Norway (2021), Sweden (2022), and Denmark (2022) used Facebook during national elections, with a focus on the emotional “Love” and “Angry” Reactions and how these relate to sharing behaviour. Framed within political communication’s “emotional turn” and debates on affective publics, platform affordances, and populist communication style, the study conceptualises posting as supply, reactions as demand, and shares as mobilization. Its central finding is an asymmetry in emotional virality: anger drives sharing while love suppresses it, and populist parties are especially adept at harnessing this dynamic — even in the comparatively low-polarization, multiparty Scandinavian context.
Key Contributions
- One of the first explicitly comparative analyses of Facebook Reactions across all three Scandinavian countries during national elections.
- Extends work on emotional virality by linking discrete Reaction types (“Love” vs. “Angry”) to sharing, showing asymmetric mobilization effects.
- Empirically supports that populist communication styles benefit disproportionately from social media’s affective affordances, even outside highly polarized systems.
- Provides a methodological template pairing scatterplot-based outlier identification with negative binomial regression for viral content.
- Proposes coding categories (gratitude/celebration vs. criticism/confrontation/call-to-action) for future content analysis of emotional political posts.
Methods
Quantitative comparative analysis of CrowdTangle data (archived April 2023) covering the six weeks before and one day after each election: 1,609 Danish, 1,676 Norwegian, and 2,629 Swedish posts from parliamentary parties and leaders, with metadata on reactions, shares, comments, and likes. Parties were classified as populist or non-populist using Inglehart & Norris (2016), the 2017 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and the PopuList. The authors used scatterplots (mapping Love, Angry, and Shares) to surface outlier posts for qualitative thematic inspection, then ran three country-level negative binomial regressions predicting shares from reactions, populist status, and actor type (party vs. leader).
Findings
- Swedish actors posted roughly twice as much as Norwegian or Danish actors; the Sweden Democrats averaged 7.3 posts/day.
- Gratitude and celebratory posts attracted the most “Love” reactions and came mainly from mainstream/non-populist parties.
- Populist parties (Sweden Democrats, Denmark’s Hard Line, Norway’s Progress Party) drew the most “Angry” reactions, especially on immigration and energy posts.
- “Angry” reactions positively predict shares in all three countries (strongest in Norway); “Love” reactions negatively predict shares in Norway (~7% less) and Denmark (~12% less), non-significant in Sweden.
- Posts from leaders (vs. parties) were shared less (3–6% fewer); populist status carried an unexpected negative coefficient in Norway.
- Denmark showed the largest “Love” scale; Sweden the most balanced Love/Angry distribution; Norway produced the single most-shared post.
Connections
This work sits alongside other studies of engagement and virality dynamics on Facebook, particularly research building on CrowdTangle data and platform sharing behaviour such as Bakshy2015-rn and Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq. Its focus on emotion-driven, especially anger-driven, mobilization connects to broader research on affective and negative-content amplification like Brady2026-ln, while its comparative Scandinavian election framing relates to other electoral digital-media analyses such as Larsson2026-ro and Karlsson2026-hd.
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