Josefine Magnusson

The Swedish historical municipal council database Local political assemblies often perform essential political and governing functions. We introduce the Swedish Municipal Council Database (SMCD), whic…

See our Open-Access paper in Electoral Studies for more information: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please help share with colleagues or students who might find this resource useful! 😄

The database is now available on Dataverse doi.org/10.7910/DVN/...

We follow the official method of the Swedish government to code party families. The database includes the raw data from the statistical reports so that users can study more fine-grained local variation.

A geographic ID code tracks territories over time. Two large mergers reduced the number of municipalities from over 2,500 to 290. This code also allows matching our political data with other historical Swedish datasets on economy, demography, and social movements.

The data lets researchers explore long-term trends in political representation, including how women gained ground in local politics well before gender quotas. Here's a figure showing striking local variation in women’s representation

This is the first database of its kind in Sweden with consistent party-family classifications, gender breakdowns, and full historical continuity from the early days of democracy to the present. So what can you use it for?

Swedish local councils historically submitted detailed election statistics to the national government. By hand-coding these archival forms, we recovered gender-by-party family data for each elected council across 29 election waves.

We’re excited to introduce the Swedish Municipal Council Database! This open-access resource contains our hand-coded data for all local politicians in Sweden's democratic local elections between 1919 and 2018.

With 🤩 @johannarickne.bsky.social, @abrarbawati.bsky.social and Moa Frödin Gruneau