Lokal demokrati på distans : vem tar ordet när fullmäktige blir digitala?

Sammanfattning: This licentiate thesis studies the differences between analogue and digital council meetings in how they are organized and how speaking times are distributed between men and women, and hard and soft issues. The study is based on Swedish municipal council meetings, which share similar features with national parliamentary meetings and seek legitimacy through meetings and debate. Perspectives on meeting sites and components are combined with a time perspective on parliamentary activity, where women's representation and formal meeting procedures are set in focus. By studying video recordings of six council meetings in three municipalities, time is used to measure components of three analogue and three digital meetings. Measures of relative speaking time or speech duration are constructed and applied to meeting structure and how women and men spend their speaking time. Findings indicate that the roles of meeting secretaries and chairmen changed when faced with new digital challenges. The meeting formality decreased in the digital meetings, which is in line with previous research. Women generally accounted for a smaller proportion of speaking time in relation to their numerical representation. They spent more of their speaking time debating soft issues, such as social care, while men spent more of their speaking time debating hard issues, such as economy and infrastructure. The findings are in line with previous research on the policy areas with which women and men most engage. In the digital meetings, differences between men and women where still observed, but less noticeable. This could be interpreted as the digital format having potential benefits for women's representation in certain circumstances. The findings have implications for the understanding on how digital parliamentary meetings strive to create legitimacy. However, more research is needed to be able to generalize beyond the specific context of this study and to understand the mechanisms that can explain differences between men's and women's speaking time. The contribution of the thesis lies primarily in the development of a new method for measuring speaking time which, in relation to previous research, presents greater robustness from a reliability and validity perspective.