Partisan tastes or ideological divides? Everyday interests and political identities in a multi-party system

Everyday interests expressed in leisure, media consumption, or cultural practices, increasingly intersect with political orientations, making them strong signals of individuals’ political identities. While most research on this phenomenon has focused on bipartisan systems, this study examines interest-politics alignment within Sweden’s multi-party context. We extend prior work by systematically analyzing both the size (strength of associations) and shape (structural patterns) of this alignment, and by distinguishing whether lifestyle polarization follows partisan identities or broader ideological orientations—a question that cannot be addressed in two-party contexts where these dimensions are confounded. Analyzing Swedish Twitter data (2010-2020), we examine how politically engaged users’ interests captured through the accounts they follow correspond to their political preferences, measured both as party associations and left-right ideological positions. Our findings show that multi-party systems do not shield against interest-politics consolidation. Patterns of everyday interests among politically engaged Swedish social media users reveal two dominant clusters that correspond closely to Sweden’s coalition landscape. Importantly, fragmentation in everyday interests aligns more strongly with ideological orientations than with party identities. We find that left-leaning individuals follow accounts associated with human rights, environmentalism, and cultural consumption, whereas right-leaning users favor finance, sports, and security content. Despite this polarization, certain interests cut across political divides, offering opportunities for dialogue across ideological lines. By disentangling partisan and ideological dimensions in a multi-party setting, the study contributes to research on affective polarization and cultural cleavages in European democracies.