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How did Swedish parties and candidates use Twitter during the 2018 election? And what topics were discussed the most? Using an original dataset containing over 9.1 million tweets collected over the four weeks of the electoral campaign, this paper explores candidates' campaigning strategies online. We show that candidate's individual characteristics and political career have significant effects on the adoption of and use of Twitter, yet party and district-related factors also explain some patterns in online campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethiopia presents an intriguing case of dichotomies with regard to new communications technologies. It has among the lowest rates of Internet penetration in the world, while also showcasing an opposition and diaspora that has leveraged social media and the Internet to significant political effect. One of the poorest countries in the world, its government has nonetheless built up one of the more sophisticated Internet surveillance states, with demonstrated capabilities far beyond those of similarly resource-constrained states. With the opening to democratic politics in the last three years, and the critical elections in 2021 representing a potential turning point for this state, understanding the role of social media in Ethiopian politics is critical. This article describes the current state of new communications technologies in Ethiopia, examines technical capacity both from the perspective of population and government, and discusses the role that social media will play in the aftermath of the divisive 2021 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of the Internet has had a profound impact on the social sciences, but understanding of how the engineering realities of the Internet's construction shape its political effects still lags. This article presents a framework and rich examples from multiple countries in order to describe how national differences in the implementation of the Internet cause different strategic calculations by political actors. This paper's goal is to provide a starting point for social scientists to treat the Internet as a strategic construction of regime and people, rather than a technical black box. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]