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Understanding Political Addresses of the Social Democratic and Moderate Party: Keywords and Political Discourses Used in the Almedal Week

  • Journal of the Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Abbr : JSSK
  • 2022, (29), pp.21-44
  • Publisher : The Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Research Area : Social Science > Area Studies > North Europe(Scandinavian)
  • Received : June 4, 2022
  • Accepted : June 29, 2022
  • Published : June 30, 2022

Yonhyok Choe 1

1Linnaeus University

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The annual event of ‘Almedalsveckan’ – ‘The Almedal Week’ held at the first week of July on Gotland in Sweden where every political party has attended has been existing since 1968. The political event for a variety of seminars, meetings, and garden talks has become a symbol for Swedish deliberative ‘Agora’ democracy. In spite of its history with accumulated data of speeches, debates and addresses, no single research analyzing addresses of party leaders has existed so far except for descriptive statistical studies of the event and participants. This article aims at filling this gap. Evening addresses given by two main party leaders representing Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party were compared in this article. Two analytical tools, i.e. keyword analysis, on the one hand, and political discourse analysis on the other were adapted to explore the contents, symbols, ideas and arguments. This research based on semiotic exploration of core keywords detects that clear ideological differences between addresses of the two largest political parties have emerged in terms of perceptions of social issues, ideological stances, value orientation, policy goals and arguing claims on the prospective role and image of welfare state. More in-depth and broader interest in empirical studies of political address is argued to be of greater importance for better understanding of persuasive skills, consequences of the addresses and influence on political changes.

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