In 1982, when the Social Democrats returned to power, they had two goals. One was to increase the growth in the economy, another to decrease the public debt. This led to a new economic policy for the Social Democrats. The new economic policy was influenced by the neoliberal ideology that started to spread throughout the world from the late 1970s. The purpose of this study is to examine if the Social Democrats favoured economic growth over welfare, fair distribution and state ownership. The results of the study was analyzed with the use of Hiroto Tsukadas Welfare State Theory. The theory claims that politicians favour investments over welfare because welfare consumption decreases economic growth. The empirical analysis is based on parliament debates, party and union congresses, policy programs and memoirs. The results show that the arguments from leading social democrats were pro-growth and for investments over welfare spending and fair distribution policy.

This bachelor’s essay discusses the Swedish political party The Sweden Democrats’ presence on the social media Facebook and Twitter during the month of January 2017. The essay’s purpose is to discuss and analyse the party’s posts with picture- and text analysis, in relation to nationalism, populism and from a historical perspective. The party’s connections to nationalism and populism are visible in their social media posts and an ongoing theme of their social media presence is the connection between fugitives and crime, where rape and gang crimes are blamed on fugitives from the Middle East. The party’s self-announced political standpoint as Sweden’s only oppositional party is also discussed in relation to their social media posts. The conclusion of the essay is that the political party has internalized a postcolonial view of Europe and the rest of the world as binary opposites, where Sweden and the West has come further in their social and cultural development than the world outside of Europe. This causes The Sweden Democrats to post and retweet/share posts on social media that represents and reproduces the image of immigrants as a threat to the Swedish nation.

Over the past two decades there has been a significant increase in the support for radical-right populist parties in Europe. Simultaneously the income inequality has been rising. The aim of this thesis is to examine how income inequality affects the support for populist radical-right parties. To achieve this, we study the support for the Sweden Democrats, a radical-right populist party, and income inequality measured as the Gini coefficient. Using Swedish municipality level panel data of the election years from 2002 to 2014, a fixed effects-method is employed to examine the relationship between the Gini coefficient and support for the Sweden Democrats. Interestingly, the results show a robust statistically significant negative relationship between income inequality and support for the Sweden Democrats. Thus, our findings indicate that increased inequality decreases the support for the Sweden Democrats.

The purpose of the following study is to investigate if, and in what way, other parliamentary parties show similarities with the Swedish Democrats rhetoric in the speech on immigration and integration and, based on Bourdieu's concepts field, capital and doxa, offer a possible explanation for the other parliamentary parties' position through the speech on immigration and integration. In order to achieve the purpose, a framing analysis is made in which speech presented on Almedalen by the Social Democrats, the Left Party, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats during the period 2009-2019 constitute the empirical material. The position of the investigated parliamentary parties in the political field through the speech on immigration and integration is explained on the basis of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and doxa. The study shows that the pattern of change among the parliamentary parties examined differs in the way of speaking but also in the existence of similarities with the rhetoric of the Swedish Democrats as well as the tendency to raise issues concerning immigration and integration. One conclusion that can be drawn is that an approach to the Swedish Democrats seems to entail changed rhetoric as well as an increased tendency to discuss immigration and integration issues. Another conclusion is that the existence of the Swedish Democrats means that the investigated parliamentary parties must somehow relate to them since neutral handling of them does not seem possible. A third conclusion is that nothing happens as an isolated event, but several factors cooperate in the change of the parliamentary parties' investigated speech on immigration and integration.

In the past decade, scholars have discovered how European populist radical right parties have increasingly resorted to instrumentalizing issues of gender equality within broader anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. This phenomenon has been coined as femonationalism by sociologist Sara R. Farris; building on her theorization, this thesis aims to investigate thisfurther in a Nordic context by examining whether and how femonationalism can be traced within the politics of the Finns Party (FP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). This has been achieved by conducting an ideational analysis of the parties’ official election material and policy documents provided on their respective party websites. The analytical framework applied is political scientist Mats Lindberg’s VDP-triad, in which the central task is to capture the proposed value, descriptive, and prescriptive statements in a text. The thesis’ main findings indicate that for the FP, femonationalism could most closely be linked to their policy implications. Here, the FP advocates for extensive anti-immigration and anti-Islam policies, while also promoting policies that uphold a traditional gender order amongst Finns. For the SD, femonationalism was mostly found in their expressed value statements concerning the supremacy of western values in relation to gender equality, which migrants are supposed to internalize and respect. Implications for future research are to examine the phenomenon of femonationalism further in different country settings in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it presents itself.

This essay studies if the Sweden Democrats is a centrist party or not. The party’s ideological affiliation has been debated for a long time in Sweden. The party has been described as fascists and racists by opponents from both right- and left-wing. Most of the research on the Swedish Democrats has focused on the party’s connections to right-wing populism and nationalism. But the research has paid little attention to study the Sweden Democrats as a centrist party, despite the party defining itself as it. This makes it interesting to further investigate what ideological association the party has since they define themselves as centrist combined with elements from both right-and left-wing ideologies. It’s a study on the party’s updated party-platform, the study focuses on how the party describes the state, the economy and their view of humanity. The purpose of this study is to examine if the party is a centrist party based on the ideologies of liberalism, conservatism and social democracy through the use of the ideal-type analysis. The ideologies work as theories in this study. These ideologies were formed into ideal-types and were then applied to the chosen policy areas to be examined, to study whether the party had any connection to these as they claimed.

The purpose of this essay is to get an understanding of how the Swedish Democrats have such a prosperity in the countryside. The aim is also to see if, and in that case how, the Swedish Democrats uses religion as a tool to increase their voter support. This will be especially focused, and compared with, what the respondents have to say about the countryside. To achieve this a qualitative interview study will be used to establish the information needed. The use of a qualitative interview study is essential due to the need of profound and complex information from the respondents. The respondents sit on a big knowledge because of their close relationship with the village and the Swedish Democrats. Further on the study will be set in a small town where the Swedish Democrats have a strong support. In this small village three out of the four Sweden Democrats who sit in the municipal council lives. The study will be in close proximity with words as xenophobia and islamophobia and it aims to supplement the research previously focused on the Swedish Democrats as ideology, with its actual representatives in the countryside.

In November 2020, The European Commission came out with a fact sheet regarding their LGBTI- equality strategy for 2020-2025. This strategy mentions the goal to fight discrimination against LGBTI-people, build a society that includes LGBTI-people, and more. Even if countries are members of the European Union, it is not a guarantee that they embrace every opinion that the European Union have. The same goes for political party groups. There are many aspects in LGBT politics that can vary among the party groups. Everything from which letters should be used, to what the European Union should meddle in and not. The purpose of this thesis is to study the ideological elements that can be found in the European People's Party (EPP), Socialists & Democrats (S&D) and The European Commission concerning their political views on LGBT, then compare the differences and similarities found in the analysis. This is carried out by using different ideologies characteristics and keywords to analyse the material from the different party groups and the equality strategy. The conclusion is that The European Commission's equality strategy has elements from several ideologies, but liberalism and social democracy are the ideologies that are mainly present in the material. In the material representing The European People’s Party, there are only ideological elements present from conservatism/christian democracy, while in the Socialist and Democrats one can find ideological elements from social democracy and socialism. The party groups and the equality strategy had similar opinions about discrimination but had different opinions about how much The European Union should meddle in other member countries laws and if they should be punished.

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to analyze how populist parties argue for state authority in a way that resembles Thomas Hobbes’s arguments in Leviathan. Moreover, the essay analyzes the characteristics of human nature studied by Thomas Hobbes connecting it to the importance of the National State. The parties analyzed are Sweden Democrats from Sweden, VOX from Spain and Jobbik from Hungary. The research questions are: 1)How do populist parties argue for state authority?  2) How do their arguments resemble Thomas Hobbes’s arguments for state authority in Leviathan? The theories used are related to the study of Thomas Hobbes described in Chapter 13 and 29 in Leviathan related to human nature and state of authority. Moreover, Cas Mudde and Hellström’s theories are used related to populist parties on the right. The method used is a qualitative method which includes an argumentative analysis which aims to explain the essay’s purposes. In conclusion, the analyzed populist parties share the ideas of Thomas Hobbes related to the state of authority and the decrease of corporations in the National State. In other words, the populist parties argue that the national state must be unity and solid in order to defend its own interest and citizens’ interests.

This social scientific thesis is dedicated to the widespread social phenomena of racism. More specifically, I am conducting a critical discourse analysis according to Fairclough’s methodology. The analysis is aimed at analyzing the politics of the Sweden Democrats wherein there is a use of three primary sources. As proposed by previous research on the topic of racism, a multifaceted approach is used, and the analysis is initiated with a variety of theories. As for the background, CERD’s 22/23rd concluding observation on Sweden clarifies for Sweden’s current reoccurrence of racial discrimination/racism. In addition, with ECOSOC’s General Comment no. 20. laying out a definition to the concept of discrimination, and thereon using AHRC’s definition on racism.  The main purpose of the thesis was to lay out: -       How the Sweden Democrats approach migration politics and how this furtherly could be seen as problematic due to issues of racism/racial discrimination/racial differentiation.  As the final conclusion came to; the Sweden Democrats pursue an ethnocentric rhetoric which will de facto lead to both direct and indirect discrimination.