In this empirical paper I am examining the perceptions about the ideal party leadership in two Swedish political parties, the Social Democrats and the Liberal party and show how their perceptions can be related to different ideas about democracy. In particular, my aim is to better understand how members of the party elite recognize an ideal party leader and explain why this says something about these two parties internal democracy. By conducting deep interviews with the party elites of the last 30 year within each party, I distil two distinct leadership ideals: the friendly father figure (the Social Democrats) and the intellectual depth (the Liberals). Different parties thus demand different kinds of leaders and leadership types and therefore different democratic ideals. The most striking characterization of these ideals are their ambiguousness; the perceptions thus are full of oppositions. The paper shows which ambiguities each party fights with and also how the party elites have different kind of solutions to the conflicts of the ideal. Among other things, the paper also shows that the differing leadership ideals are a consequence of each party’s individual historical and parliamentary experience.
