Open AccessThe climate change movement and political parties: Mechanisms of social media and interaction during the 2019 electoral period in Finland
Author(s) -
Sonja Savolainen,
Tuomas YläAnttila
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
nordic journal of media studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2003-184X
DOI - 10.2478/njms-2021-0003
Subject(s) - period (music) , politics , political science , political economy , alliance , movement (music) , distancing , social media , social movement , government (linguistics) , social distance , dynamics (music) , sociology , covid-19 , law , medicine , pedagogy , philosophy , linguistics , physics , disease , pathology , acoustics , infectious disease (medical specialty) , aesthetics
Building on the framework of electoral contention, we investigate the interaction dynamics between social movements and political parties during elections. We argue that social media today is an important venue for these interactions, and consequently, analysing social media data is useful for understanding the shifts in the conflict and alliance structures between movements and parties. We find that Twitter discussions on the climate change movement during the 2019 electoral period in Finland reveal a process of pre-election approaching and post-election distancing between the movement and parties. The Greens and the Left formed mutually beneficial coalitions with the movement preceding the elections and took distance from one another after these parties entered the government. These findings suggest that research on movement-party interaction should pay more attention to social media and undertake comparative studies to assess whether the approaching-distancing process and its constituent mechanisms characterise movements beyond the climate strikes in Finland.