This study investigates the relationship between the current migration crisis in Europe and the escalation of far-right voting which has been witnessed since it's beginning. In order to do so this study utilized correlation experiments and detailed case studies to explore the relationship between legislative vote shares and asylum applications for the years 2009-2017 in the EU member states of Hungary, Germany, France, Greece and the UK. Control variables of GDP, unemployment and terrorist attacks have also been utilized to measure alternative causes of far-right voting. Results of these experiments vary quite a bit from state to state - finding differing potential causal factors in each case study. Germany, France and the UK show results which indicate that an increase in asylum applications potentially influence far-right voting habits. Greece does not show this type of result, but does show correlation with control variables. Hungarian experiments however do not produce correlation with any variables tested, but has the strongest presence of far-right activity which may indicate that Hungarian far-right success is attributed to their long history of far-right activity.

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In 2010, the populist radical right party the Sweden Democrats were voted into the Swedish parliament, which rattled the mainstream parties. The Sweden Democrats’ stance on migration policy was clear from the start, with their MPs promoting a radical decrease, if not a complete stop, to all immigration. This thesis aims to expand the existing research about populism in Sweden and contribute to the field of political science by analysing the general policy debates on migration policy held after the entry of the Sweden Democrats into parliament. The study examines the debates to get answers to several questions: What do politicians think is the main problem with migration policy over the years and how are the problems represented? Is it possible to find indications of populism during the debates and are there signs of the Sweden Democrats' discourse being normalized? Are there any discursive shifts made by the mainstream parties and is there a hegemonic discourse visible throughout the debates? The results show four dominating problem representations on the topic of migration over the years, with the problem representation of the Sweden Democrats gaining support from the Liberals and the Christian Democrats in the debate of 2018. Tendencies of normalization of the Sweden Democrats’ discourse are also detectable in the 2018 debate, as well as some discursive shifts by mainstream parties. A hegemonic discourse is visible during the 2010 and 2014 debates, but it has lost its hegemonic position during the 2018 debate.

This dissertation argues that the just transition policy framework may not vivify labor internationalism or erode support for right-wing populists if just transitions are not part of left-wing populist projects. Labor internationalism, which involves labor unions cooperating across borders to pursue common goals, is increasingly important as unions strive to work with their foreign counterparts to influence the international community's urgent efforts to address climate change. Right-wing populism is a growing threat to organized labor and climate protection efforts. Some labor activists hope that advocacy for the just transition policy framework, a set of guidelines for compensating workers in polluting industries who are laid-off as a result of environmental protections, will unite labor organizations from around the world and improve their approaches to international solidarity. Progressives hope that just transition policies will discourage voters from supporting right-wing populist candidates, who are often climate skeptics, out of fear of the job losses that accompany environmentalist reforms. However, I question the assumption that just transition policies, in and of themselves, can serve as solutions to the challenges posed by right-wing populism or overcome divisions within the global labor movement. It is possible for economic nationalism at the expense of global solidarity to continue and for right-wing populists to maintain support in decarbonizing areas where policy makers have indemnified laid-off fossil fuel workers. Integrating just transition policies into left-wing populist politics could potentially make just transitions more useful for countering the far-right and promoting labor internationalism. This dissertation looks to the political theorist Antonio Gramsci's thoughts regarding the "national popular," which Gramsci's readers often associate with left-wing populism. The national popular entails intellectuals from different fields (such as the academy, journalism, and manufacturing) coming together to modernize patriotism and strip it of chauvinistic nationalism. I point out that the original proposals for just transitions prioritized providing free higher education for the workers laid-off from polluting industries. The just transition framework's stress on higher education has populistic implications. Educators, particularly members of teachers' unions, may practice populism throughout the implementation of a just transition for laid-off coal workers by encouraging the displaced workers to cooperate with knowledge workers to rethink nationalism. If workers displaced from polluting industries rethink nationalism in university settings while maintaining their connections to the labor movement, then these workers may in turn reject far-right politicians and discourage organized labor from supporting trade nationalism. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation argues that the just transition policy framework may not vivify labor internationalism or erode support for right-wing populists if just transitions are not part of left-wing populist projects. Labor internationalism, which involves labor unions cooperating across borders to pursue common goals, is increasingly important as unions strive to work with their foreign counterparts to influence the international community's urgent efforts to address climate change. Right-wing populism is a growing threat to organized labor and climate protection efforts. Some labor activists hope that advocacy for the just transition policy framework, a set of guidelines for compensating workers in polluting industries who are laid-off as a result of environmental protections, will unite labor organizations from around the world and improve their approaches to international solidarity. Progressives hope that just transition policies will discourage voters from supporting right-wing populist candidates, who are often climate skeptics, out of fear of the job losses that accompany environmentalist reforms. However, I question the assumption that just transition policies, in and of themselves, can serve as solutions to the challenges posed by right-wing populism or overcome divisions within the global labor movement. It is possible for economic nationalism at the expense of global solidarity to continue and for right-wing populists to maintain support in decarbonizing areas where policy makers have indemnified laid-off fossil fuel workers. Integrating just transition policies into left-wing populist politics could potentially make just transitions more useful for countering the far-right and promoting labor internationalism. This dissertation looks to the political theorist Antonio Gramsci's thoughts regarding the "national popular," which Gramsci's readers often associate with left-wing populism. The national popular entails intellectuals from different fields (such as the academy, journalism, and manufacturing) coming together to modernize patriotism and strip it of chauvinistic nationalism. I point out that the original proposals for just transitions prioritized providing free higher education for the workers laid-off from polluting industries. The just transition framework's stress on higher education has populistic implications. Educators, particularly members of teachers' unions, may practice populism throughout the implementation of a just transition for laid-off coal workers by encouraging the displaced workers to cooperate with knowledge workers to rethink nationalism. If workers displaced from polluting industries rethink nationalism in university settings while maintaining their connections to the labor movement, then these workers may in turn reject far-right politicians and discourage organized labor from supporting trade nationalism.

The aim of this paper is to examine the way political parties use populist discourse on social media following a terrorist attack. I analyze what type of populist language is used, and which parties use it, with a theoretical framework of Jagers and Walgrave (2007) and Magin et al. (2024). This is done by studying the 2017 terrorist attack in Sweden as a selected case. All statements regarding the terrorist attack made by a Swedish Member of Parliament on Facebook in the week following the attack are coded into a dataset and the mean value for each party are compared. The main findings are that it is not the beforehand populist-coded party (the Sweden Democrats) that uses the most amount of populist language. It is, however, this party that uses the most anti-elite and exclusion as populist communications. I also argue that terrorism should be seen as a populist issue, meaning statements on this topic contain, on average, more populist characteristics than non-populist issues do. This study is made with a small sample size and I encourage others to recreate this study in i) a bigger scale and ii) other political contexts.

The inclusion-moderation thesis argues that, as radical parties become included in coalition governments, their positions and rhetoric will moderate as a consequence of compromising with, and adapting to the parties they are governing with. With lacking empirical evidence, however, the effects of inclusion on radical parties are still not clear. The Sweden Democrats (SD), a Swedish radical right-wing populist party, became the country’s second largest party after the election of 2022 and received considerable influence through the “Tidö-agreement” with the new coalition government. They are thus a recent example of a radical right populist party gaining influence in Europe. This paper examines the rhetoric of the SD’s party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, before and after the election of 2022 through qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that no moderation has taken place in their radical right populist rhetoric after inclusion. Furthermore, the nativist aspect of their rhetoric seems to have become far more pronounced, and increasingly influences other aspects of their rhetoric as well.

Herrschen erfolgt nicht ausschließlich durch Terror und Gewalt, sondern auch durch die Verführung der Masse anhand der Inszenierung von Macht, denn Legitimität erwächst nicht allein aus Zwang, sondern verlangt ihrerseits die Akzeptanz der Masse, die eine gewisse Stabilität für die auf Dauer angelegte Diktatur garantiert. Aus diesem Grund setzten Diktatoren außerhalb der Gewaltsphäre weltweit auf wohlkalkulierte spektakuläre Masseninszenierungen, die die Sinne und die Emotionen in starkem Maß mittelbar und unmittelbar ansprachen. Nichtsdestotrotz ist die Neigung zum Spektakel keine Besonderheit der Diktaturen; vielmehr verschmähen auch demokratische Politiker den Reiz des Populismus nicht und nutzen dessen Strategien der Inszenierung, um Emotionen zu evozieren und sich als Helfer in der Not zu verkaufen. Sowohl Beispiele aus der Geschichte als auch solche aus der aktuellen Politik zeigen jeweils, wie der Populismus sich des Spektakels bedient, um Menschen zu verführen. Sich stützend auf Emotionalisierung definieren Populisten Freunde und Feinde, variieren dabei alte Stereotypen und Verschwörungstheorien, um ihre Rollen zu legitimieren. Und genau diese Strategie wird von der AfD verfolgt, um sich als Alternative zum bestehenden System und dessen Vertretern zu inszenieren. Deswegen gilt dieses Buch als Appell, aus der Geschichte zu lernen und dem Populismus entgegenzustehen. Dies betrifft nicht nur Deutschland, sondern auch Tunesien, in dem der Populismus blüht bzw. herrscht, denn der Aufstieg des Populismus führt zur Errichtung einer Diktatur und gefährdet die junge Demokratie erneut, von der das tunesische Volk seit dem ›Arabischen Frühling‹ träumt.

The purpose of this study was to explore what exactly bound post-Second World War American conservatives together. Since modern conservatism's recent birth in the United States in the last half century or more, many historians have claimed that both anti-communism and capitalism kept conservatives working in cooperation. My contention was that the intellectual founder of postwar conservatism, Russell Kirk, made imagination, and not anti-communism or capitalism, the thrust behind that movement in his seminal work The Conservative Mind. In The Conservative Mind, published in 1953, Russell Kirk created a conservative genealogy that began with English parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Using Burke and his dislike for the modern revolutionary spirit, Kirk uncovered a supposedly conservative seed that began in late eighteenth-century England, and traced it through various interlocutors into the United States that culminated in the writings of American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot. What Kirk really did was to create a counter-narrative to the American liberal tradition that usually began with the French Revolution and revolutionary figures such as English-American revolutionary Thomas Paine. One of my goals was to demystify the fusionist thesis, which states that conservatism is a monolithic entity of shared qualities. I demonstrated that major differences existed from conservatism's postwar origins in 1953. I do this by using the concept of textual communities. A textual community is a group of people led by a privileged interpreter—someone such as Russell Kirk—who translates a text, for example Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, for followers. What happens in a textual community is that the privileged interpreter explains to followers how to read a text and then forms boundaries around a particular rendering of a book. I argue that conservatism was full of these textual communities and privileged interpreters. Therefore, in consecutive chapters, I look at the careers of Russell Kirk, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Gottfried to demonstrate how this concept fleshed out from 1953 and well into the first decade of the new millennium. / Ph. D.

This thesis examines democratic innovations in Hungary, a country governed by Fidesz, an illiberal and populist party since 2010. Democratic innovations aim to engage citizens in the political decision-making process. The thesis analyses and compares two democratic innovations: the National Consultation, first organised by Fidesz in 2005, and the Citizens’ Assembly, first organised by the liberal opposition in Budapest in 2020. The aim of this thesis is to examine how the quality of democratic innovations is influenced by their organizers and the increasingly authoritarian political context of Hungary. Previous research has analysed both innovations in depth but has not systematically compared the two processes.  This thesis primarily uses official reports on both innovations, supplemented by secondary data from semi-structured elite interviews conducted with Hungarian politicians in 2020. The study's results indicate that the quality of the democratic innovations analysed is influenced by the ideology and broader political goals of the organisers, institutionalisation, and the dynamics of the illiberal state apparatus. It is noteworthy that the National Consultation lost its democratic and deliberative character after Fidesz came to power in 2010. Although the quality of the Citizens' Assembly organized by the opposition parties was affected to a lower extent by the seemingly unfavourable political context, the National Consultation and the politics of Fidesz have also negatively affected other practices of the opposition.