Följande undersökning ställer sig frågan hur män i Sverige, jämfört med kvinnor i Sverige, ändrar sina politiska preferenser i samband med en förändring i civilstånd. Med förändring i civilstånd menas att en individ går från en situation där denne delar boende och/eller ekonomi med någon annan till att leva ensam, eller en förändring åt det motsatta hållet. Frågeställningen undersöks via enkätdata om var respondenten ställer sig på en politisk vänster/höger-skala samt information om civilstånd, kön och andra bakgrundsvariabler. Metoden som används för att genomföra undersökningen är fixed effects-regression. Ingen av de olika estimeringarna som har utförts tyder på att politiska preferenser ändras i samband med förändring i civilstånd.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate to which extent two Swedish political parties, founded in the early 1900s, represents changes in public opinion. The question of issue to be answered is to which extent the Social Democrats and the Moderates represents their former voters´ opinions. The question of issue will be investigated throughout a comparison of party politics and public opinion in 2014 and 2018, the years Sweden had parliamentary elections. The analysis was performed by applying the GAL-TAN and left-right division on these data. The results shows how there has been a change in politics between these years among both the parties and voters. The change in public opinion is reflected in party politics in areas such as immigration and law and order but there are parts of politics that is considered irrelevant for how the voters choose to vote. The Social Democrats and Moderates are capable of representing changes in public opinion to some extent.

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.