About the Swedish party programs and election manifestos collection

Swedish party programs and election manifestos builds on the "Vi vill …! Hundra år av partipolitiska viljeyttringar" ("We want…! A hundred years of political party declarations") project, which the predecessor of SND, SSD, conducted in 2000–2002. The purpose of this project was to collect the programs and manifestos that the political parties had produced during the 20th century. In these texts, you can trace the development of the political parties in terms of their language, politics, and ideology. The material also provides an overview of which questions have been essential for the development of Sweden.

The selection of election manifestos builds on work done by Sven-Olov Håkansson in "Svenska valprogram 1902–1952" (”Swedish election programs 1902–1952”), and materials collected and used in the research project "Partiernas opinionspåverkan" (“Political party influence on public opinions”), POP, by Peter Esaiasson and Nicklas Håkansson. This means that only political parties in the Swedish Riksdag are represented in the material. Later additions have given a broader selection of parties.

In the case of party programs, we have searched in research libraries and people’s movement libraries, as well as in the archives of the political parties. As there is varying degrees of knowledge about which programs have been produced, we are aware that we have probably been unable to find an unknown number of documents that could otherwise have been included in the collection.

You can read more in this SND article from 2012 about the collection: A gold mine for anyone who wants to study Swedish parties.

This project was made possible thanks to John-Erik Ågotnes at NSD (Norsk Samfunnsvitenskapelig Datatjenste, now Norsk Senter for Forskningsdata), the Norwegian counterpart to SSD, which in 1997 published a CD with Norwegian party programs. Ågotnes allowed SSD free use of the software he had developed for his project.

The "Vi vill …" project was awarded financial support from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant for support to research infrastructures.