The Ideology of the Swedish Conservative (Moderate)

Abstract

The Ideology of the Swedish Conservative (Moderate) Party: An Interpretation of the Political Science Debate of the Early iggos. The conclusions drawn by Aronson (199G), Hylen (1991) and Ljunggren (1992) concerning the ideology and the process of ideological development of the Swedish Conservative (Moderate) Party during the twentieth century are highly diverging. Two of the authors concluded that the party always has been and still is a predominantly conservative party. The third author, Jan Hylen, came to the completely opposite conclusion. According to Hylen, the party has developed in a direction from a collectivist and pessimistic conservative ideology to a predominantly liberal, individualist and optimistic ideology. This has been a process of ideological transformation over the whole century, according to Hylen. This study considers the particular metaphysical traits of conservatism as opposed to the modem concept of more or less secularised ideologies. The results support the idea that the conclusions of these authors diverge so much because their theoretical frameworks and their methodological instruments are very different.