This study critically studies two different manifestos, New democracy manifesto from 1991 and Sweden Democrats manifesto from 2010. The purpose with this is to discover in what way populist rhetoric is used and what parlance the parties have used in these two manifestos. Using Lennart Hellspong’s model for propaganda analysis, textual compilations will be discovered and analyzed through a set of questions. Previous research show that these two parties has a lot in common and even though both have different political ideology and framework, they both have populist rhetoric as one of the key elements in their rhetoric. With Sweden democrats currently being the third biggest party in Sweden there is an interest to see what they have in common with the first populist party in Sweden during the modern era, New Democracy. Do the populist characteristics in Sweden Democrats manifesto have similar attributes as the in New Democracy manifesto? The result of the study shows that the populist rhetoric is used in different ways, with different ideological purposes but is built from the same springboard.

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This thesis aims to contribute to the current academic debate on contemporary polarization in the U.S. Congress. The paper provides a brief overview of the relevenat existing literature and schools of thought on the issue. As part of the thought direction which steers away from definining roots and causes of polarization among the general public but rather sees them as issues of the political elite, this thesis highlights the need to focus on individual Congressional Member Organizations (CMOs) in the House of Representatives and their connection to polarization. By applying an existing dataset accepted among political science scholars as the key tool for measuring polarization, the thesis seeks to affirm the presumed ideological differences among the individual CMOs (or caucuses). The main part of this thesis which adds value to further discussion is the case study of all roll call votes of the 114th House of Representatives examining voting cohesion of the studied caucuses. The aim of this study is to show to what extent the CMOs are in fact consistent voting blocs and how influential they can potentially be within the political elites in the House of Representatives and to what level they may be contributing to the contemporary polarization.