Sweden 1979 general election

Final results from ParlGov, read 5 October 2026: Swedish Social Democratic Party won 154 of 349 seats with 43.2% of the vote; 90.7% of registered voters cast a ballot, down 1.0 points on 1976.

Sweden
Held Sunday 16 September 1979

Result

175 for a majority

Seats and votes by party

Party	Seats	± seats	%	± points	Votes
Swedish Social Democratic Party	154	+2	43.2	+0.5	2,356,234
Moderate Party	73	+18	20.3	+4.7	1,108,406
Centre Party	64	−22	18.1	−6.0	984,589
Liberals	38	−1	10.6	−0.5	577,063
Left Party	20	+3	5.6	+0.9	305,420
Christian Democrats	0	0	1.4	0.0	75,993

± is the change against the Sweden 1976 general election, party by party.

Votes by party

Swedish Social Democratic Party 2,356,234
Moderate Party 1,108,406
Centre Party 984,589
Liberals 577,063
Left Party 305,420
Christian Democrats 75,993

ParlGov lists parties with at least 1 percent of the vote or 2 seats, so the rows do not add up to the valid votes. How we read it.

Share of the vote

Turnout

90.7% of the 6,040,461 registered voters cast a ballot (5,480,126 ballots), down 1.0 points on 1976. 5,448,638 of them were valid votes. The lowest turnout since 1970 in our data. How turnout is counted.

Votes and seats

Swedish Social Democratic Party43.2% of votes44.1% of seats
Moderate Party20.3% of votes20.9% of seats
Centre Party18.1% of votes18.3% of seats
Liberals10.6% of votes10.9% of seats
Left Party5.6% of votes5.7% of seats

Each party's share of the vote (outlined) and of the seats (filled)

The Gallagher index of disproportionality is 1.3 (0 when seats follow votes exactly); the effective number of parties is 3.6 by votes and 3.5 by seats; Swedish Social Democratic Party led Moderate Party by 22.9 points of the vote. How these are computed.

Sources and licence

ParlGov 2024 Release (Döring and Manow), Harvard Dataverse (source). Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal
Wikidata, party colours (P465) (source). Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal

Our text and compilation: CC BY 4.0. How to reuse and cite this page.