In the Swedish general elections of 2010, the party the Sweden Democrats for the first time entered the parliament. In an election otherwise characterised by competition between two explicit political blocs, the Sweden Democrats profiled itself as a party free from ideological blinders, ready to represent the will of the people. Commonly referred to as a populist party, there is considerable disagreement about where in the Swedish political space the party actually belongs. At the same time, there exist within political science a multitude of methodological approaches aimed at answering such questions. By combining election manifesto content analysis and survey-based approaches, the study of this paper presents cross-validated estimates of where in Swedish political space the Sweden Democrats belong. The study also evaluates strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to the estimation of policy positions in the specific context of the Sweden Democrats. The party is found to be economically centrist but highly authoritarian, making it an outlier along both a "traditional" and a Swedish left-right continuum. Some methodological difficulties that may be particularly important to consider when analyzing parties such as the Sweden Democrats, e.g. bias, dimensional salience and linguistic volatility, are suggested.

Over the years, a variety of methods have been used in order toestimate policy positions for political parties in national parliaments. This papersets out to apply a novel computational method called Wordfish and apply it to aheavily under-researched form of political text, parliamentary speeches.Quantitative studies of this sort are even more rare the case in Sweden in whichquantitative studies on parliamentary speeches is close to non-existent. In anattempt to contribute to fill the gap in literature this study uses scaling techniqueusing word frequencies and to estimate positions of 4 Swedish political partiesalong two dimensions in political space. By observing the estimated movement bythese 4 parties over a 20-year time period one can draw conclusions of theSwedish political space and how it has shifted over time. One can also evaluatethe chosen method on this specific research material, a combination that has notbeen seen before. The results suggest that there is fine tuning that needs to bedone when using Wordfish considering the output was not in line with conventionalwisdom and previous research. The studied did show interesting movementtowards the authoritarian extreme by the two largest parties in Swedish nationalpolitics.