The Swedish parliamentary election of 2022 is approaching, and what could be a better time to have a look at the electoral data at SND? Apart from election studies since 1956 and SVT exit poll surveys since 1991, SND also has a unique collection of Swedish election manifestos and party programs. This collection has received a thorough update.
’Many of our staff have been involved in the work to improve access to the election manifestos and party programs. Many documents have been difficult to convert from pdf to text format, so it has taken a great deal of manual work to make sure everything is correct and updated’, says Dimitar Popovski, one of the Research Data Advisors at SND who have worked on updating this collection.
One dataset for all programs and manifestos
The material covers political parties that are or have been represented in the Swedish Parliament, plus Piratpartiet (the Swedish Pirate Party), and Feministiskt initiativ (Feminist initiative), which have had elected representatives in the European Parliament. Several improvements have been made to the material to make it more accessible:
- The entire collection can now be downloaded as an entire dataset from the SND catalogue.
- The dedicated search page for the documents has been made more user-friendly. As an example, all documents are now accessible in pdf format and as plain text.
- The collection has been complemented with additional election manifestos and party programs. As soon as the political parties publish their election manifestos for this year’s parliamentary election, they will also be added to the collection.
Grateful to accept additional material
The staff who work with the collection would be happy to learn if there’s a party program or election manifesto that isn’t in the collection.
’There have been students who have used documents from our collection for their theses and who have later discovered more material that we’ve been able to add to the collection, which we really appreciate’, says Dimitar Popovski.
If you want to gain access to more electoral data from previous parliamentary elections, send a request through the SND research data catalogue: