Previous research claims that there has been a narrowing of distance between the
Swedish political parties. Typically, such research into political distance has primarily
focused on studying voters rather than the political parties themselves. In this article, the
author conducts a longitudinal analysis of Comparative Manifesto Project data to
determine if, and to what extent, the political parties have converged ideologically on a
Left-Right continuum in the period 1991-2010. After first unraveling the concept of
political distance, the author moves on to explain why the ideological dispersion of
political parties is an important and consequential characteristic within party systems.
Furthermore, the author argues that the Left-Right ideological scale continues to be a
highly useful model with which to conceptualize and study this characteristic. The
author then discusses the methodological approach and explains why quantitative
manifesto data, often overlooked in favor of voter interview data, is deemed a valid and
reliable material for measuring the ideological positions of political parties. The
findings are that there indeed have been over all tendencies of ideological convergence
between the blocs and that, in terms of how political parties are dispersed on a Left-
Right ideological continuum, by 2010, the Swedish party system (the Sweden
Democrats excluded) had become much less polarized than it had been in 1991.
2016.
left, right, Left-Right, ideological distance, Swedish party system, polarization, convergence, divergence, ideological continuum, ideological scale, political distance