Swedish political party programs and election manifestos

These texts make it possible to trace the development of the parties in terms of language use, politics and ideology. They also provide a good overview of the issues that have been important to Sweden's development. The project was awarded financial support from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant for support to research infrastructures.

All party programmes and election manifestos in the database are available in PDF and TXT formats. The PDF files reproduce the original formatting of the documents, while the TXT files contain text only, in UTF-8 format, without page numbers, tables of contents and other layout-related elements. The text in the TXT files has been adapted for continuous reading, with the original paragraph structure retained as far as possible.

The documents are also available as a corpus through Språkbanken, providing additional opportunities for research on the material. The selection of election manifestos initially included only parties represented in the Swedish Riksdag, as it was based on Sven-Olov Håkansson's study "Svenska valprogram 1902–1952" ("Swedish election programmes 1902–1952") and the research project "Partiernas opinionspåverkan" (POP) by Peter Esaiasson and Nicklas Håkansson.

The material has subsequently been supplemented and the selection broadened to include, for example, documents for European Parliament elections as well as documents from parties outside the Riksdag that have been represented in the European Parliament. An unknown number of documents that could potentially be included in the collection are still missing. This project was made possible thanks to John-Erik Ågotnes at NSD (Norsk Samfunnsvitenskapelig Datatjenste, now SIKT – Kunnskapssektorens tjenesteleverandør), the Norwegian counterpart to SSD/SND, which published a CD with Norwegian party programmes in 1997. Ågotnes gave SSD free access to the software he had developed for his project.

The dataset consists of: - The zip file "Svenska partiprogram och valmanifest" that consists of the folder "Partidokument" which contains all political party documents in .pdf and .txt format sorted in separate folders for each party - Documentation files: "Partidokument" (.xlsx and .csv) listing all party documents, their type, source and titles and a "readme" .txt file