| Summary: | The Swedish People’s Party have for over one hundred years functioned as a political tool for the liberals and center-right of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. As a party the SPP stands out in comparison to most other European minority parties as not working for regional self-governance or independence, but instead wanting to uphold constitutional language and service rights. The SPP was a part of every coalition government in Finland from 1979 to 2015 and has held multiple ministerial posts despite only having approximately 5% of the votes. The aim of this essay has been to examine the variance in the value based political issues in the SPP to see if there is a divergence on a liberal/conservative divide within the party. With a theoretical framework based on the GAL-TAN political scale, a socially based dimension of measuring party positions, I have operationalized a liberal and conservative stance to Weberian ideal types, and by first e-mail interviewing party representatives to build a frame of issues to investigate, I have then performed an idea based content analysis by examining motions from 2009 to 2017. The results show that, even though there are a divergence between some of the proposals themselves, and in some cases, between the official party line as described in the party program, the differences are too insignificant to draw conclusions from. The conflict between the motions speaking for and against nuclear power stands out as being very even, while the motions concerning Finland joining NATO stands out as being fully for.
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