This thesis explores discourse of the Sweden Democrats around the issue of immigration and provides an overview of changes that occurred in Sweden Democrats’ rhetoric and argumentation from National election in 2010 until the election in 2014. The study offers an analytical contribution to the field of media and communication and provides readers with the insight of right wing online activism. Qualitative in its core, and based on the theory of framing, the study analyzed video material uploaded by the Sweden Democrats on their official Youtube channel. Results are organized thematically in the way in which party framed the issue of immigration (threat to a national identity, the cause of criminal actions, unemployment and welfare abuse). The Sweden Democrats use their YouTube page as a tool for alternative political communication. The findings indicate a major shift in their rhetoric about the issue of immigration from sharp criticism of mass immigration on religious and cultural grounds toward criticism based on economical and financial grounds. On their journey towards more democratic norms, the Sweden Democrats sought to give an impression of new, changed party, distant from racial roots by employing ‘softened’ rhetoric and blowing a ‘dog whistle’.

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.

A controversial party’s entry into parliament - a review of Expressen’s depiction of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) The purpose of this essay was to study how Expressen presents the Sweden Democrats, as well as reasoning about the effects this depiction could have on the citizens’ opinion. Using a quantitative method I studied 122 articles, and through a qualitative method four of these could be further analyzed to reach a deeper result. The theoretical perspective that was applied in this study was primary agenda-setting and framing theory, to illuminate the power of media. The result showed that a prominent theme was to present Sweden Democrats as racists. Other recurring themes were to include the party misfortunate-, successful, crime-related scandals and as victims. It also showed that the Sweden Democrats rarely gets to speak in the articles and that the headlines and events are angled in an unfavorable way for the party.

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 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.

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.

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.

I denna uppsats kommer värdegrunden i Sverigedemokraternas parti att granskas utifrån de partipolitiska program som finns tillgängliga sedan 1989. Sverigedemokraterna kom in i Sveriges riksdag år 2010 och gör nu stora politiska framsteg som tredje största partiet i svensk riksdag. De är hyllade av många och kanske precis lika fruktade för sin historiska bakgrund. Syftet är att undersöka om de värderingar som utgör skolans värdegrund uttrycks i SD:s partiprogram. Metoden som har använts är en innehållsanalys med intresse för partiets formulerade värdegrund och hur Sverigedemokraterna förhåller sig till värdegrunden. Resultatet som presenteras är att Sverigedemokraterna har en historisk bakgrund som de inte kommer ifrån. De har utvecklats från år 1989 och de har blivit mer rumsrena. Idag företräder Sverigedemokraterna ett konservativt samhälle som har kristna värderingar. / In this essay the core values of the Sweden Democrats Party will be reviewed on the basis of political party programs available since 1989. The Sweden Democrats entered the Swedish parliament in 2010 and are now making major political progress as the third largest party in the Swedish parliament. They are acclaimed by many and perhaps equally feared for their historical background. The purpose is to investigate if the values that make up the school´s values are expressed in SD´s party program. The method used is content analysis with the interest of the party’s formulated values and how the Sweden Democrats relate to the core values. The results that will be presented are that Sweden Democrats have a historical background that they never can escape from. They have made progress from the year 1989 and have become more accepted. Today Sweden Democrats represent a conservative society with Christian values.

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.

Right-wing populistic parties are gaining power in many parliaments around Europe. Two parties, the Swedish democrats (SD) and the Swiss people´s party (SVP) are being classified as such. The history of those two are not at all similar, although the parties after many years of intern development and evolution are meeting each other on the political scale. This awakes a lot of questions and therefore the purpose of this paper is to examine why they went in different directions but towards each other, in the way of studying their political program and to what extent they distance themselves from the right of the political spectra. In the conclusion, it will be confirmed that they indeed are right-wing populistic parties and that the biggest traction towards any side on the political scale, is the demand of a certain policy that the electors are asking for.