Swedish media have in earlier studies been shown to portray national politics as a game and the focus have not been on the actual politics. This have shown to have a negative effect on citizens trust for politicians and a growing cynicism against Swedish politicians have started. News portrayed as a game also lacks information valuable to citizens of a democratic country, especially during an election campaign for government. With these facts this thesis aims to study how Swedish party leader debates are portrayed in national newspaper media during the elections 2010, 2014 and 2018. That is the question for this thesis. The thesis will study how the debates is portrayed in the media and in what way. The method chosen to answer this aim is with a quantitative content analysis studying newspaper headlines during the election campaigns 2010, 2014 and 2018. Three of the biggest national newspapers were chosen to be studied; Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and Expressen. The results show that news portrayed as a game is the majority share of the material. The election years 2010 and 2014 is dominated by news portrayed as game while the year 2018 differs with news portrayed as politics. The election campaign of 2018 may be a start of a new trend with less news portrayed as game or just a campaign more focused on politics than other years. The coming election years will show if it just were a break or a new trend focused on politics rather than game.

The empirical material of this study consisted of tweets by four leading politicians in Sweden: Carl Bildt of Nya Moderaterna, Annie Lööf of Centerpartiet, Åsa Romson of Miljöpartiet and Jonas Sjöstedt of Vänsterpartiet. The aim of the study was to examine how they use Twitter as a political tool and what that says of the mediatization of politics. What content did they publish, how did the content differentiate between them and what political messages and other subjects occurred in their tweets? Does the political debate become fragmented because they’re only allowed to use 140 characters on Twitter? The theoretical framework and method applied for the research was based upon critical discourse analysis (CDA), with special interest in ideology and mediatized discourse. The result of the study showed that the content they published consisted mostly of criticism towards political opponents, rather than of independent political opinions. It also showed that the focus among the politicians was mostly on factual issues rather than on ideology. Furthermore, it showed that they use Twitter as a way of spreading information more than anything else. I argue that the political discourse that was present on Twitter among the politicians can be seen as somewhat populistic, due to the fact that they focused more on criticism towards political opponents than on independent political opinions and ideology. I argue that there are certain risks with their way of using Twitter as a political tool when political issues are brought out of their ideological context.