Not a Forecast: The Radical Right on Facebook in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 2014 to 2020
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Radical-right parties often draw more engagement on Facebook than their share of the vote would suggest. Does that advantage tell us anything about where their support is heading? I compare three established radical-right parties in Scandinavia: the Sweden Democrats (SD), the Progress Party (FrP) in Norway and the Danish People's Party (DF). The data are 61,081 posts recorded by CrowdTangle between 2014 and October 2020: the national party pages of the eight main parties in Sweden and Norway, and, for Denmark, where the export has no party pages, the pages of eight politicians who led or spoke for the main parties for most of the period. I compare each party's share of the interactions on these pages with its share in 1,733 national polls and at five elections. In Sweden and Norway the radical right drew more engagement than its poll share in every month, typically two to three times as much. The Sweden Democrats' page drew 34% of party-page interactions in 2015 and 68% in 2020, while their share in the polls stayed at about 19% to 21%. In an accounting sense, almost all of that growth came from posting more: their share of all posts rose from 12% to 37%, while engagement per post stayed at three to four times the other parties' average. The Progress Party's page drew 34% to 49% of interactions while its poll share was 12% to 16%. In Denmark the result depends on the pages compared: the DF leader's page drew less than DF's poll share, but with the page of its parliamentary group leader added, DF drew more. Its Facebook share gave no clear warning of its collapse at the 2019 election. Across all 24 parties, a rise in Facebook share was followed by a small rise in the polls: a typical three-month change in Facebook share was followed by a change of about a tenth of a point, against typical poll movements of one and a half points. For the Sweden Democrats and the Progress Party there was no association. In Sweden and Norway the radical right's advantage on Facebook was a stable feature of how these parties used and drew engagement on the platform, not a forecast of their support. Files: the preprint (PDF); monthly Facebook interaction shares, poll shares and interactions by party for the eight main parties in each country; the monthly poll medians used (computed from the poll compilations on Wikipedia); Facebook and vote shares at five elections; and yearly summaries for the three radical-right parties. No post-level data are included. Provenance and AI use. The data were exported from CrowdTangle in October 2020 for my doctoral research. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. I designed the study and am responsible for the analysis and conclusions. I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged. Version 4 (October 2026) corrects the range for the Sweden Democrats' median post relative to the other parties' median from 3.5 to 5.5 times to 3.7 to 5.5 times, to match the analysis output. No other figure changes. Data note (added October 2026). These data can no longer be collected. CrowdTangle, Meta's tool for public Facebook content, closed on 14 August 2024, and its successor, the Meta Content Library, is open only to approved researchers and does not offer the same ready-made page-level histories. The posts analysed here were exported in October 2020, so they are a record that cannot now be rebuilt. This note was added to the record; the PDF is unchanged.
Author: Hotham, Tristan
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221464369