Nina on the Net: A study of a politician campaigning on social networking sites

In this paper I will attend to contemporary individualization and digitalization of politics from an in-depth study of a Swedish politician, Nina Larsson, campaigning on social networking sites for re-election to the Swedish Parliament in the 2010 general election. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on social networking sites and their potential for representative democracy and broaden the analysis beyond perspectives of strategic political communication and deliberative democracy. The research question I will attend to is how Nina uses social networking sites in her elec- tion campaign. The method for empirical data gathering is (n)ethnographic. The results suggest that Nina uses social networking sites mostly for negotiating her political persona.