The aim of the current study was to examine the radical right-wing sympathizers in Sweden. To fulfill this aim, a quantitative case study on Sweden Democrats sympathizers was conducted. More specifically, this study has examined socio-economic backgrounds and political attitudes of the Sweden Democrat sympathizers. The results show that sympathizers of Sweden Democrats are higher among younger people and men. The results also show a higher support for Sweden Democrats among people with lower education and low income that also live in small towns and in the countryside. These individuals also have lower trust in political institutions at the national and European level and are less satisfied with democracy at both levels and believe that Sweden should reduce immigration. The theory explains that these results are also consistent in other parts of Europe. The underlying explanation for these results seems to be that the world has become amore globalized, and these individuals who sympathize with radical right-wing populist parties are the ones who are negatively affected by a globalized world.

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.

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In the last decade, we have witnessed a new stage in the mainstreaming and normalization pro­cess of populist radical right policies and ideas in the Western world. This has resulted in in­creasing politicization of issues related to immigration. In Sweden, this politicization took off when the radical right-wing populist (RRP) party the Sweden Democrats (SD) was voted into the parliament in 2010. Even though the party was isolated by the mainstream parties, its presence in the parliament still contributed to the politi­cization for a long time. Additionally, increased “gang”-related shootings have pushed the po­liticization even further since the shootings in the public and political discourse have often been connected to immigration. Apart from this, certain mainstream right-wing parties, especially the Moderates (M) and the Christian Democrats (KD), have questioned the isolation of SD lately, which led to the presentation of a collaboration between the three parties in the fall of 2021. With this collaboration as a background, the aim of this study is to show the particular roles M and KD play in the process of mainstreaming and normalization of the RRP discourse, espe­cially related to immigration and its alleged connection to criminality. The study draws on crit­ical discourse analysis of political and public discourse in the context of RRP to analyze how M, KD, and SD construct themes and arguments around immigration, immigrants, and crimi­nality on their official Facebook pages. The study argues that there is an ongoing process of normalization of RRP policy and ideas in Swedish public and political discourse. Largely, SD is the strategical enacting actor in this pro­cess. How­ever, both M and KD take part in the process by contributing to gradually changing the existing discourse on immigration towards new forms and new norms. This is conducted by employing strategies, concepts, and rhetoric well-known from RRP discourse.

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.