This essay examines the indirect effects of the local strength of the Swedish Democrats on refugee acceptance in the Swedish municipalities. With statistical methods this essay has aimed to investigate if such effects exist and by using statistical data from three periods of time - 2002, 2006 and 2010 – the investigation has been able to measure effects over time. Based on former research and reasonable expectations the hypothesis for the essay claims that the Swedish Democrats has got an indirect effect upon the refugee acceptance. With the statistical analyses made, the essay is able to conclude that the strength of the Swedish Democrats in municipality elections as well as the change of this strength between the elections does have a negative effect upon refugee acceptance in the Swedish municipalities. With this conclusion, the idea of the Swedish Democrats as an isolated and insignificant party is questioned.

There has been an on-going discussion in the Swedish society about the media’s news reporting regarding the political party the Sweden democrats (Sverigedemokraterna.) Some claim that the party has been disfavored by systematically negative reports, others claim either that this is not the case or argue that the party is an extreme right wing party with racist tendencies, hence should not be treated like any other party. The report investigates news articles from four well known Swedish newspapers (Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet and Ex- pressen) during two separate years - 2009 and 2017 (the years before an election year). In the period between these years the support for the Sweden Democrats increased fast, they entered the Swedish Parlia- ment and became one of the biggest partys. A content analysis has been used to answer the main question of the thesis: "Has the news reports by swedish newspapers regarding the Sweden Democrats changed be- tween 2009 and 2017?" The results show a possible slight increase of negative articles in 2017 as well as an increase of articles that presents the party as turbulent and violent, while the articles that presents the party as xenophobic or rasist decrease in comparison.

The aim of the thesis is to shed light upon how the Sweden Democrats, in their official party documents and in the party- funded newspaper Samtiden, crosses the line of hate speech. This thesis uses Parekh's model in identifying hate speech as a theory. The thesis is a comparative case study as it compares and analysis the Sweden Democrats official documents with the Samtidens articles. The method used to analyse the material is interpretive content analysis. The thesis reaches the conclusion that the documents from Sweden Democrat use an implicit and subtle form of hate speech, while the articles from Samtiden use a very explicit and aggressive form of hate speech.

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The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, a systematic theology of the Sweden Democrats is reconstructed from the party’s party program (Valplattform 2021) and Swedish Church election pamphlet (En kyrka för Sverige). This theological reconstruction is limited to the categories of ecclesiology (the Church), theological anthropology (the Human Creature), and soteriology (Salvation), which together serve to detail the party’s theological vision for the Swedish Church, its members, and in turn, Swedish society. The aforementioned theological concepts are selected and consequently examined on account of the thematic attention and allocation they receive by the party. A qualitative method is further employed in an effort to explore to what extent the Sweden Democrats not only define their theological foundations but also utilize this basis in their political discourse. Secondly, the salience of religion, along with other works on populism in Europe, provides this paper with a theoretical framework to explore the populist underpinnings that support and inform the Sweden Democrats’ theological beliefs. This research concludes by demonstrating how the reconstructed theology in the election material provides utility for the party’s populist ambitions and empowers the Sweden Democrats to develop a Christian justification for their own vision of a homogenous social order.

This study aims to examine the existence of populism in campaign speeches held by the Swedish party the Social Democrats in the election years 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 in Almedalen. By attempting to answer if there is any populism in the party´s speeches, and if the populism has increased over the years, the essay will analyze the speeches using a qualitative text analysis and a descriptive idea analysis. Based on the study of the theory, ideal types have been created to be applied to the speeches. The study´s definition of populism is created by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017).They mean that populism is a communication style used in politics. This study’s results show that there is populism in the Social Democrats speeches held in Almedalen. The results also show that various amounts of populism have existed in the speeches over the years.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what the crucial factors in shaping the political trend toward the right and right wing populism in Sweden are. In recent years, populism and certainly right wing populism has evolved into being a large part of Swedish politics as well as in the rest of the western world, where parties and political actors that are called populist are more and more successful and mainstream. The 2022 general elections in Sweden followed this trend, where Sverigedemokraterna (The Sweden Democrats) who are described and seen in Sweden and abroad as right wing populist, became the second largest party with over 20 percent of the total vote. As a consequence of that, they became a collaborating party to the new coalition government. This thesis has, through an analysis of data on the elections and exit polls from past elections analyzed with the help of the relevant theoretical framework through a method of a qualitative theory based analysis examined which factors have been instrumental in shaping the Swedish political landscape in the 21st century. The study came to identify that there certainly has been a shift and the right wing parties in particular Sverigedemokraterna have benefitted from this change. They have successfully used populism, nationalism and other concepts like euroscepticism to gain voter support, and force other political parties to move further in their direction but that there is no exact proof of how or why exactly they managed to do so other than educated and informed discussions on the possible causes.

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att förklara vilka sociala och värderingsmässiga faktorer som ökar svenska väljares benägenhet att rösta på Sverigedemokraterna samt undersöka om den mediala och allmänt vedertagna föreställningen om SD-väljaren stämmer. Detta undersöktes med bivariata analyser och ett antal binära logistiska regressionsanalyser. Materialet som användes var ett dataset från European Social Survey från år 2012/13. De oberoende variablerna bestämdes utifrån vad teorin påvisade som möjliga förklaringsfaktorer för att rösta på ett högerextremt parti. De teoretiska utgångspunkterna var; teorin om massamhället, moderniseringens förlorare, xenofobi samt politiskt missnöje. Studiens resultat visar att attityder gällande invandring och låg utbildning är mycket viktiga faktorer för att förstå varför svenska väljare röstar på SD. Resultatet visar också att den mediala och allmänt vedertagna föreställningen om SD-väljaren som en ung, relativt lågutbildad man som känner sig utanför, är politiskt missnöjd och har extrema åsikter i vissa avseenden är delvis missvisande. Detta då resultatet visar att den typiska SD-väljaren är lågutbildad, politiskt missnöjd och har extrema åsikter i vissa avseenden. / The purpose of this essay was to explain which social and attitudinal factors that affect the Swedish voters tendency to vote for the Sweden Democrats and to study if the medial and generally accepted notion of the typical voter of the Sweden Democrats is true. To examine this a number of bivariate analyses and binary logistic regressions was made. The analyses were based on the European Social Survey 2012/13. The independent variables were determined by what our theories established as possible explanatory factors. The theoretical framework consisted of; the mass society theory, the theory of modernization losers, xenophobia and political dissatisfaction. Our results show that low education as well as attitudes towards immigration is important factors for understanding why Swedish voters vote for the Sweden Democrats. Furthermore the results suggests that the medial and generally accepted notion of the typical Sweden Democratic voter as a young, relatively low educated man that feels left out, is politically dissatisfied and has extreme views in some regards are partly misleading. This because the results show that the typical Sweden Democratic voter is low educated, politically dissatisfied and has extreme views in some regards.