Governmental decision making is essential to maintain democracy. The decision making formats and processes are institutionalized and follow strict formats for participation, debate and decisions. The constraints and lock-downs due to the covid-19 pandemic led to an extensive increase in the use of digital meeting tools to maintain democratic decision making through virtual meetings. Our main approach in this paper is to inductively explore the changes that occur when democratic meetings take place on-line through a quantitative text analysis and interviews. We delimit our focus to speech duration in recorded meetings. We find that the virtual meeting format changed meeting characteristics compared to on-site meetings. There were some changes in speech duration among councilors which has to be further investigated in a larger sample. The main contribution of this paper is the method to measure actual speech duration and compare how virtual meetings may influence the organization of democratic meetings.

Sweden became an outlier among the Nordic countries in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. While the Nordic countries have historically shared a social democratic welfare state regime, with strong cooperation and harmonization of social policies, their responses to the pandemic showcased fundamental differences to that of Sweden. In particular, Sweden’s prioritization of individual civil liberties over social rights diverged from the more coercive approaches of Finland and Norway, which placed greater emphasis on public health and social welfare. This study examines the media framing surrounding the contrasting Swedish approach and highlights the dichotomy between statist individualism/autonomy and welfare paternalism/interdependence that has been an inherent part of the Swedish welfare state framing. Employing interpretive policy analysis, the study explores the media narratives used by policy actors to frame their pandemic response in terms of individual autonomy and governmental paternalism. We identified two contrasting perspectives on governance regarding the COVID-19 policy strategy. One framing perspective backed the strategy, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding individual autonomy and minimizing central control. The other viewpoint demanded a lockdown and criticized the Swedish response as too lenient. This deviated from usual Swedish political alignments and created a polarized and lively debate around the core values of individual autonomy, agency, and central governmental paternalism. 

The activity of open parliamentary debate is a crucial part of democratic government. Previous studies have shown that women face barriers that make them use less speaking time compared to men. In addition, women are, according to previous research, more biased towards engaging in soft topics, such as culture and care in comparison to hard topics such as economy and infrastructure. During the COVID-19 pandemic over half of the world’s national parliaments shifted to a virtual format that lasted throughout the pandemic. Emerging research on the transformation from face-to-face/onsite meetings to virtual/online meetings in society highlights radical changes to the meeting environment and meeting dynamics. This paper explores how women’s speaking time changed in online council meetings in Sweden after the temporary shift from their previous onsite format. Using video analysis of recorded meetings and a novel method of measuring speaking time, this paper compares onsite council meetings with their online counterpart in three different councils. The findings suggest that the gender distribution of speaking time between soft and hard topics became more even in the virtual meetings compared to onsite parliamentary meetings. In addition, there was a more even distribution of speaking time between men and women in the online meetings compared to their onsite counterpart. The findings contribute to the understanding of how the transformation from onsite to virtual meetings impact the distribution of speaking time between men and women. However, more research is needed on underlying mechanisms of how speaking time is impacted when transitioning from onsite to online meetings.

Democratic decision-making upholds local government legitimacy, institutionalising participation, debate, and decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated online meeting formats to maintain these democratic processes. This shift allowed for a natural experiment to study the effects of online local meetings on councillors’ floor time. This paper develops a method to analyse the transition from onsite to online meetings and its effect on floor time distribution, and we here analyse the effects on floor time among different age groups. Using video analysis of onsite and online meetings in two Swedish municipal councils, our results showed that age may not significantly predict floor time, contrary to digital divide theories. We suggest that Sweden’s high digital literacy and robust municipal IT support mitigated age-related differences in floor time. Future research should explore varying council sizes to broaden the context.