Crafting citizen(ship) for people with dementia: How policy narratives at national level in Sweden informed politics of time from 1975 to 2013

•We explore how policy narratives inform associated politics on people with dementia.•We explore how policy narratives construct reality and craft citizenship.•The study shows that people with dementia have been narrowly and negatively framed.•The study shows that the medical model has dominated policy narratives.•Power and participation are necessary to shape the space for exercising citizenship.

This article explores how policy narratives in national policy documents in Sweden inform associated politics on people with dementia. This is disentangled in terms of how people with dementia have been defined, what the problems and their imminent solutions have been, and if and how these have differed over time. Based on a textual analysis of policy documents at national level in Sweden, covering nearly 40 years the study shows how divergent policy narratives shape the construction of citizens with dementia as policy target groups. This study shows the temporal character of people with dementia as a political problem, the implications of policy narratives on people with dementia as a citizen group, and policy narratives as something being crafted rather than shaped by fixed pre-existing “facts”. Dementia, and further citizens living with dementia, does not have a once and for all stabilised meaning. Instead, the meanings behind the categories continue to evolve and to be crafted, which affects the construction of citizens living with dementia, the space in which to exercise their citizenship and further belonging to the society.