Den djupa väljaropinionen : En studie av väljarnas preferensordningar och förhållandet till väljarnas minskade partiidentifikation

Sammanfattning: One of the main goals for political parties is to attract as many voters as possible. The competition for voters among the parties is especially relevant in a multiparty system. A voter in such a system may choose between several parties and can order them in any way he or she pleases. Thus, the voter has an order of party preferences. In this thesis, I argue that differences in a voters’ first and second preference order can be used as a resource to discover unique patterns in the voters’ party identification. To address this conjecture, I have used the Super-Riks-SOM dataset to study such patterns between the years 2005, 2011 and 2013. The results show that along the points of measure, the Swedish voter has become less willing to vote for the middle parties. Hence, the pattern indicates that the party identification in the second preferences is more balanced in 2013 than in 2005.