The relationship between a party leadership and party activists is often illustrated by the use of John May’s "Law of curvilinear opinion structures in political parties", i.e. the idea that mid-level party activists are assumed to be more radical than both party sympathisers and the party elite. This tension between party leadership and party activists can be assumed to lead to a restriction on the party leadership’s freedom of action. However, in recent years we have seen a number of examples where political parties have made major realignments of their own policies without any substantial internal conflicts. Given the role assigned to conditions for involvement in the formulation of May's Law it appears reasonable to look in that direction when trying to understand these changes. This study covers the Moderate Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party in Sweden. The offer made by the parties to their members can be understood in terms of collective goods, such as ideological and political community, and selective goods, such as elected offices. This thesis shows how the political involvement for the interviewed party activists is intimately linked to selective goods. This finding can help us to understand ideological and political changes in present-day parties. If, as a party activist, one is attracted by the opportunities to become an elected representative or the opportunities to exercise political power, it is reasonable to imagine that one will be more inclined to support actions that increase the opportunity to enjoy these goods. Since both the party leadership and the party activists are attracted by the selective goods offered by the party organisation, the conflict between these groups decreases, as both groups are focused on winning elections and exercising political power. The result of this study therefore provides grounds for questioning the ideas of a tension between party activists and party leaderships.

No description available.

The dissertation explores the causes of party relabeling by focusing on four party systems: South Korea, France, Taiwan and the United States. The existing literature on political parties considers one of their primary functions to be providing a brand name. As a result, party name change has been viewed as an anomaly caused by internal and external shocks that disturb the status quo equilibrium or a phenomenon symptomatic of unstable, weakly institutionalized party systems. However, party name changes are not as rare as assumed in the existing literature. Therefore, my dissertation addresses the following questions: When and why do parties change names? What are the characteristics of a party system that hamper the development of brand-name party labels? I theorize that the combination of the following three factors increases the likelihood of party relabeling: (1) prominence of personalistic party cues, (2) strong levels of political attention in the electorate, and (3) high degree of governmental centralization. These three factors encourage vote-, office-seeking motivations in the party so greatly that the party is willing to do whatever it takes to win including such a radical strategy as relabeling. In order to test the proposed theory, I closely examine South Korea and France, where parties commonly replace their labels, in comparison to Taiwan and the United States whose parties do not change labels, respectively. These four cases are chosen because they allows cross-case and within-case analysis that is crucial for a comparative case study to gain internal and external validity. I utilize various types of data – both qualitative and quantitative in investigating these cases. My dissertation will contribute to a broad range of literatures in party politics as well as in East Asian politics. By providing a new theoretical model on this understudied phenomenon, I contribute to a better understanding of the role of party labels and initiate more active discussion over party strategy and party branding. Furthermore, by examining Korean and Taiwanese parties in depth, my dissertation provides a systematic analysis on the studies of East Asian politics.

In recent years, negativity has become a dominant theme in the political campaign. However, there are no comprehensive studies to measure the amount of negativity and to examine how parties and candidates adopt these negative strategies, particularly in the Canadian context. Although some studies have focused on a particular aspect of negative campaigning in a Canadian election, the question remains of how and to what extent parties adopt negative strategies in an election. In this thesis, I have collected and analyzed parties’ press releases in the 2015 federal election to examine and explain negativity in parties’ political campaigns. I have tested my results according to five primary theories of negative campaigning, including competitive positioning, ideological proximity, party organization, coalition or minority effect, and negative personalization, to see if these theories apply in the Canadian context. My results indicate that the 2015 federal campaign was a highly negative one, and most of the negative attacks have been directed towards the leader of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper, while the Conservative Party published the least amount of negative attacks during the campaign. I also found that the Liberal Party has published the most negative statements during the campaign. My results also show that one of the influential factors in shaping parties’ negative campaign strategies is the other parties’ status in public opinion polls, particularly the federal voting intention factor. Although the results show that most of the attacks in the 2015 campaign targeted leaders of parties, I did not find enough support in my models to verify the negative personalization theory. The overall findings of this thesis show that Canadian elections are moving toward a presidential-style campaign, similar to the United States, by becoming more negative and more personalized, which can have significant implications for Canadian democracy.

This thesis aims to contribute to the study of how established political parties deal with an increasingly popular radical right parties, focusing on the case of Sweden and the Sweden Democrats (SD). Swedish parties have had a different approach compared to established parties in other European countries, when being challenged by the radical right. The trend has been that the major parties have formed government with support of the radical right and also adapting some of their political positions, in order to regain lost voters. Although, in the case of Sweden, the initial strategy of the major parties was to distance themselves from SD:s policies, while also making efforts to isolate them from positions of power and minimizing their influence in all levels of government.  Anders Backlund (2020) has studied the case of Sweden and argues, with the use of the modified spatial theory (Meguid 2008), that the initially rejective strategy of the major parties towards SD, might have forced them to adapt their policies to a large extent further down the line. The thesis explores Sweden as a least-likely case for a theory-testing purpose. Through the means of a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis the election manifestos from all parliamentary parties in Sweden, from the last five elections are being analyzed. The thesis tries to explain to what extent, and in what manner, the parliamentary parties have adapted their policies to those of SD – and furthermore, to what degree these adaptations can be explained in terms of the strategic pursuit of votes.  The Sweden Democrats are placed far out on the TAN-scale, on the socio-cultural political conflict dimension GAL-TAN – where TAN stands for Tradition, Authoritarianism and Nationalism. Therefore, the extent to which the remaining parties have included policies related to TAN in their election manifestos is examined. The result shows that most parties in Sweden increasingly have included policies related to TAN in their election manifestos for the more recent elections – hence showing an adaptation to both SD:s policy suggestions and their way to formulate issues. Especially the parties that have been shown to lose particularly many voters to SD, but also the parties that are not competing for their votes to any bigger extent, exhibit a political conformity in the direction of SD.  The thesis strengthens the modified spatial theory by highlighting how Swedish parties swiftly have modified their strategy of handling SD – from initial rejection, to adaptation of rhetoric and policy. The thesis further contributes a few theoretical adjustments, to more fully explain how all major Swedish parties have managed their strategies when facing the increasing popularity of SD.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to examine how the Swedish parliamentary left viewed Brexit and its expected consequences. The standpoints concerning Brexit that were presented by the Social Democrats (S; SAP), the Left Party (V) and the Greens (MP) during the foreign policy debates of 2016 and 2017, and during eight of the consultations with the Committee on EU Affairs, from December 2015 to September 2016, are analysed. The actions of the three parties are explained with the help of the concepts politicization, programme realization, vote maximization and maximization of parliamentary influence. The standpoints are categorized using a qualitative text analysis. The conclusion is that the Social Democrats and the Greens had a negative attitude towards the United Kingdom leaving the EU, and they argued that the result of the referendum was a matter of regret. According to the Social Democrats and the Greens, Brexit meant that the EU had to start fulfilling the wishes of the citizens; otherwise the legitimacy of the union would be damaged even further. The Left Party neither approved nor disapproved of Brexit, but it did consider the event a historic opportunity to reform the EU. The analysis of the standpoints showed that Brexit couldn’t be classified as a politicized (contentious) question for the Swedish left. The actions of the Social Democrats are seen as an attempt to achieve all the strategic goals: programme realization, vote maximization and maximization of parliamentary influence. The Left Party prioritized vote maximization over the other goals, while the Greens prioritized maximization of parliamentary influence at the expense of programme realization.

In this qualitative text analysis paper the author examined how the Swedish Green party, the Moderate party, the Christian Democrats and the Swedish Social Democratic party described female representation during the years 2001-2013 at their party congresses. With party strategic categories constructed by Lena Wägnerud and one self-constructed category with the help of works by Ann Phillips a total of 5 categories was used to separate the different statements regarding female representation. The categories were attack, win voters, comparisons, bragging and other. The results of the study show that the focus of female representation has shifted from a focus on female political representation to female representation in the business world, mostly representation in the board rooms. The results also show that all parties express themselves about female representation but in different ways. The Swedish Social Democratic party is the only party that focuses mainly on female representation as a question of justice and democracy, statements that fall under the category other. The other parties in this paper all had their focus on strategic statements that fall under Lena Wägneruds categories.

Populism has been an integral part of the Finnish political system since the late 1950's. At that time the Agrarian Populist Party, better known as The Rural Party, emerged and thrived for decades until the party financially broke down in the 1990's. Reemerging on the political scene as the True Finns, the party is more radical and more influential than ever, gaining enough support to be the third largest party of the 2011 parliamentary election. Sweden, Finland’s neighbor, in contrast has a history with very little populist presence or radical right populist parties (RRP-parties). However, during the 2010 parliamentary election the Sweden Democrats attained seats in the parliament for the first time in history. In this thesis, these cases, with their different historical backgrounds, are analyzed to explain the rise and growth of RRP-parties. Many political scientists have tried to answer this question before, focusing on system-oriented and contextual factors, but often neglecting factors that incorporate the political actors themselves. What this thesis adds to the previous research is a perspective on the rise and growth of RRP-parties based on the dynamism between system-oriented factors and actor-oriented factors. The theoretical discussion indicates that some system-oriented and contextual factors are significant when explaining the rise and growth of RRP-parties. At the same time, actor oriented factors such as the legacy of the RRP-party and the mainstream party strategies prove to be influential on the electoral strength of the RRP-party. These theoretical approaches are then used and combined in a comparative analysis, which imply two important things. First, the legitimacy of the RRP-party itself is an aspect that does explain the rise and growth of RRP-parties. Second, in the case of Sweden, the system-oriented and contextual factors alone were not able to explain the rise and growth of the Sweden Democrats. Together these findings stress that the dynamic perspective between system-oriented and actor-oriented factors truly is meaningful when trying to explain rise and growth of RRP-parties.