This is a guest post by our API user Fores, a green and liberal research institute.
Saplo is a nonpartisan company and invites other organizations to use our API.

Think-Tank FORES together with Axess-TV and makthavare.se (makthavare.se) evaluated the statements from party leaders during the political week in Visby, Almedalsveckan, Sweden. In “Ideologisk After Speech”, broadcasted daily by Axess-TV, the statement were scrutinised from every aspect under the stewardship of FORES director Martin Ådahl.
The statement underwent an ideological evaluation (liberal or conservative, left or right) by a political philosopher, a fact check was made by makthavare.se, and economist Andreas Bergh made a calculation of the cost from the Speech. In addition to this, we used the Saplo API to analyse the speeches.
Politicians are often accused of being unclear, and being hard to separate from each other. They all sound the same, don´t they?
We were interested in finding out to which degree the party leaders sounded the same, but even more interested we were in finding out who they resemble. Is it true that Fredrik Reinfeldt (Prime Minister) sometimes sound more like a social democrat? In Almedalen, he apparently did, since his speech according to our analysis resembled Mona Sahlin‘s (party leader, social democrat) previous speeches more than his own. By the way it seems like Mona Sahlin is the one party leader who can be said being difficult to differ from the others. She finished top three in every analysis, meaning that every statement was pretty similar to the statements Sahlin usually deliver.
On the other hand it seems like Lars Ohly (party leader, left-wing party) is the odd man out, since every speech other than his own were furthest away from being similar to the left party leader’s.
In order to do the analysis, we collected a large amount of speeches from every party leader and created a context (using Saplo Context) for every leader. We than compared the Almedalen speech to each context.
Being aware that it is no exact science, it still added an extra spice to the After Speech and now we know – Fredrik Reinfeldt is more Mona Sahlin than Fredrik Reinfeldt. And Lars Ohly’s statements are the black sheep of Swedish political statements.

http://fores.se/almedalen/ideologisk-after-speech-almedalen-2010/ (Swedish)