En grumlig ideologi?

An increasingly share of the literature recognizes a rise in salience for culturally rooted issues, and analyzes the political space with a cultural dimension complementing an economic left-right dimension. But a unidimensional left-right distinction prevails to be the primal core of individuals’ political schemas and heuristics, and a main part of political communication. With this thesis I question in what way the left-right concept for Swedish citizens corresponds to the rising of the cultural dimension. With a computer-assisted quantitative approach, I analyzes the content of the definition of left-right gained from open-ended questions in “The Citizen Panel” consisted of Swedish citizens, in connection with the elections of 2006, 2010 and 2014. The result is that the definition overwhelmingly consists of substance connected to economic issues. Using longitudinal data from “The SOM Institute” I investigate through ordinal regression analysis how attitudes towards immigration affect left-right self-placement during 1990-2014. The result shows a clear over time increase in how much attitudes towards immigration determine left-right position. In a conclusion I argue that this kind of discrepancy between definition and position, and the following conceptual confusion on subjective and collective level, makes a major challenge for democracies like Sweden