Väljarbarometern

We provide a continuous picture of which party the Swedish public would vote for if there were parliamentary elections today.

For more than three decades, we have monthly interviewed the public about which party they would vote for at the moment. The intention is to capture the current opinion winds and to assess how political developments, so-called deals or other significant events affect public opinion.

Values are the most important starting point for how to vote. At the same time, it can be said that voters have become increasingly flexible over time. There is a tendency for material and personal issues to gain greater importance in relation to the value base. The parties’ exposure during the last phase of the election campaign therefore becomes increasingly important. It limits the possibilities of making reliable forecasts long before the actual election. The intention is therefore not to predict the election results, but to measure what the support for the parties looks like right now.

Aftonbladet/Demoskop’s voter barometer is based at each survey on at least 2,000 interviews with the voting public aged 18 and over who can also be reached via e-mail. The interviews are conducted online. The selection is based on performance stratification from the Inizio panel based on age and gender, which corresponds to the population in the country according to Statistics Sweden’s census.

Demoskop has a daily ongoing data collection. Every day we send out about 500 new invitations. Each day also contains a first and a second reminder of previous invitations. The form changes over time and contains various questions about current political topics. The form always contains questions about which party you would vote for if there were an election today (which forms the basis for the voter barometer). When we then decide on a survey period, we will thus “include” respondents who directly answered the form and respondents who needed one or two reminders to answer the same.

The data collection usually takes place over the course of a week to ensure interviews are carried out both on weekdays and at weekends.

When a panel member has been selected for a specific survey, he is marked in our database so that he will not receive a new invitation within a certain predetermined time. Demoskop thus applies quarantine rules for participation. The reason is that chance should not cause you to receive too many invitations to participate in surveys in a short period of time.

The completed interviews are weighted by gender, age, region, and party in the previous parliamentary election (at the time of writing 2018) as well as a coefficient that further calibrates against the previous parliamentary election’s results. The coefficient is based on the deviation Demoskop had in its last voter barometer in relation to the election result.

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