The following study is a qualitative text analysis and an idea- and ideologyanalysis with the aim of examining the Sweden Democrats view on women over time and if the party’s organizational and ideological development is reflected in the party’s ideas regarding women’s role in society. The material of research consists of the Sweden Democrats party programs which has been analysed through conservatism and populism, which is the theoretical framework of this study. The results of the analysis have been divided into three different time periods and the first period between 1989-1999 indicated a strong connection between the Sweden Democrats view on women and a conservative view on women. During the second and third time period, between the years 1999-2018, the operational indicators for a conservative view on women could not be discovered, however several operational indicators which indicated a populistic view on women could be established. Previous academic research has categorized the Sweden Democrats view on women as conservative, but the results of this study´s analysis argues that the party´s view on women rather should be described as populism.

The rising support for right-wing populist parties and the subsequent anti-immigrant sentiment has become a focus of interest across academia, media, and public debates. In a similar vein, this thesis explores the portrayal of immigrants and citizens by the Swedish right-wing party Sweden Democrats leader and by the members of the Swedish online forum Flashback. The theoretical framework draws on the approaches- discourse theory and discursive psychology from discourse analysis that facilitated in examining the speeches and debates by the SD leader as well as the comments of the forum members. Whereas the results highlight the Sweden Democrats leader’s discourses constructing immigrants as a burden, the forum members are noted as constructing the immigrants as inherently flawed. Further, while the leader views the citizens as victims, who are denied their rights to resources and welfare, the forum members also describe themselves/citizens as victims, however, due to being denied a sense of belonging, autonomy, and prestige. The study also focused on identifying the strategies that both deploy to be persuasive. The results showed both using blame and victimization as strategies to be persuasive. The SD leader, by blaming the ruling party and victimizing the citizens is noted as aiming to create a grand discourse of- Country in Crisis, and thereby, comes across as seeking to instill fear, threat, and vulnerability among citizens. In contrast, the forum members are marked as blaming the immigrants, ruling elites as well as Swedish women, and victimizing themselves, and seem more focused on creating the discourse of People in Crisis. By doing so, they are noted as justifying their anger, disempowerment, and woundedness. Together, the leader and the forum-members discourses are viewed as creating a broader discourse that could benefit from further examination of the notions such as pessimistic persuasion, the powerlessness of us/we, and othering the insider.

In this essay the goal has been to examine what kind of beliefs about the "people´s home" the Sweden Democrats expresses during the period 1990-2014, and how these beliefs are used in the political debate. This has involved an examination of the party's total number of intention decorations documents, and the party´s magazine The SD Courier (SD-Kuriren). The theoretical concepts that have been used to analyse the material are the different forms of "historical use", and particularly the types of "historical use" that are used by political actors.These concepts are "existential", "moral", "political-pedagogical" and "ideological" use of history. These concepts have been combined with a hermeneutic method, in which Intertextual reading has had a crucial role, and the focus have been to find change and continuity. The party has used their interpretation and beliefs about the "people's home" idea, to show their political intent and to criticise opponents, but also to some extent paint a picture of a Sweden in chaos. The party´s idea of the "people´s home" include the nation's peculiarity, homogeneity as the foundation of stability, the importance of the traditional family for raising good citizens. They use this idea of the "people´s home" to describe their vision as a political organization, and partly to criticise opposition parties, arguing these do not live up to the idea of the good "People's home". But also, to some extent paint up a picture of a country in chaos if the "people´s home" idea do not take its rightful place in society, and political discourse. / Inom ramen för denna uppsats har undersökts vad för typ av föreställningar om folkhemmet som det svenska riksdagspartiet Sverigedemokraterna ger uttryck för mellan åren 1990-2014, och hur deras användningen av folkhemstanken i den politiska debatten ter sig. Detta har inneburit undersökning av deras samtliga partiprogram samt deras partitidning SD-Kuriren. De teoretiska begrepp som har använts är de olika formerna av historiebruk, som används av politiska aktörer.Dessa är Existentiellt, moraliskt, politiskt-pedagogiskt och ideologiskt historiebruk. Dessa begrepp har kombinerats med en hermeneutisk metod, där intertextuell läsning, samt förändring och kontinuitet varit framträdande inslag. Partiet har använt, som de anser korrekta, föreställningar om folkhemmet, vilka innefattar nationens särart, homogeniteten som grunden till stabilitet, och den traditionella familjens betydelse, för att fostra goda medborgare. De använder denna folkhemstanke, dels till att beskriva sin målbild som politisk organisation, och dels för att kritisera motståndarpartier, genom att hävda att de inte lever upp till tanken på det goda folkhemmet. Men också i viss utsträckning måla upp en bild av ett land i kaos om folkhemstanken inte får inta sin rättmätiga plats i samhället.

This bachelor’s essay discusses the Swedish political party The Sweden Democrats’ presence on the social media Facebook and Twitter during the month of January 2017. The essay’s purpose is to discuss and analyse the party’s posts with picture- and text analysis, in relation to nationalism, populism and from a historical perspective. The party’s connections to nationalism and populism are visible in their social media posts and an ongoing theme of their social media presence is the connection between fugitives and crime, where rape and gang crimes are blamed on fugitives from the Middle East. The party’s self-announced political standpoint as Sweden’s only oppositional party is also discussed in relation to their social media posts. The conclusion of the essay is that the political party has internalized a postcolonial view of Europe and the rest of the world as binary opposites, where Sweden and the West has come further in their social and cultural development than the world outside of Europe. This causes The Sweden Democrats to post and retweet/share posts on social media that represents and reproduces the image of immigrants as a threat to the Swedish nation.

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.

The purpose of the following study is to investigate if, and in what way, other parliamentary parties show similarities with the Swedish Democrats rhetoric in the speech on immigration and integration and, based on Bourdieu's concepts field, capital and doxa, offer a possible explanation for the other parliamentary parties' position through the speech on immigration and integration. In order to achieve the purpose, a framing analysis is made in which speech presented on Almedalen by the Social Democrats, the Left Party, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats during the period 2009-2019 constitute the empirical material. The position of the investigated parliamentary parties in the political field through the speech on immigration and integration is explained on the basis of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and doxa. The study shows that the pattern of change among the parliamentary parties examined differs in the way of speaking but also in the existence of similarities with the rhetoric of the Swedish Democrats as well as the tendency to raise issues concerning immigration and integration. One conclusion that can be drawn is that an approach to the Swedish Democrats seems to entail changed rhetoric as well as an increased tendency to discuss immigration and integration issues. Another conclusion is that the existence of the Swedish Democrats means that the investigated parliamentary parties must somehow relate to them since neutral handling of them does not seem possible. A third conclusion is that nothing happens as an isolated event, but several factors cooperate in the change of the parliamentary parties' investigated speech on immigration and integration.

In the past decade, scholars have discovered how European populist radical right parties have increasingly resorted to instrumentalizing issues of gender equality within broader anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. This phenomenon has been coined as femonationalism by sociologist Sara R. Farris; building on her theorization, this thesis aims to investigate thisfurther in a Nordic context by examining whether and how femonationalism can be traced within the politics of the Finns Party (FP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). This has been achieved by conducting an ideational analysis of the parties’ official election material and policy documents provided on their respective party websites. The analytical framework applied is political scientist Mats Lindberg’s VDP-triad, in which the central task is to capture the proposed value, descriptive, and prescriptive statements in a text. The thesis’ main findings indicate that for the FP, femonationalism could most closely be linked to their policy implications. Here, the FP advocates for extensive anti-immigration and anti-Islam policies, while also promoting policies that uphold a traditional gender order amongst Finns. For the SD, femonationalism was mostly found in their expressed value statements concerning the supremacy of western values in relation to gender equality, which migrants are supposed to internalize and respect. Implications for future research are to examine the phenomenon of femonationalism further in different country settings in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it presents itself.

This essay studies if the Sweden Democrats is a centrist party or not. The party’s ideological affiliation has been debated for a long time in Sweden. The party has been described as fascists and racists by opponents from both right- and left-wing. Most of the research on the Swedish Democrats has focused on the party’s connections to right-wing populism and nationalism. But the research has paid little attention to study the Sweden Democrats as a centrist party, despite the party defining itself as it. This makes it interesting to further investigate what ideological association the party has since they define themselves as centrist combined with elements from both right-and left-wing ideologies. It’s a study on the party’s updated party-platform, the study focuses on how the party describes the state, the economy and their view of humanity. The purpose of this study is to examine if the party is a centrist party based on the ideologies of liberalism, conservatism and social democracy through the use of the ideal-type analysis. The ideologies work as theories in this study. These ideologies were formed into ideal-types and were then applied to the chosen policy areas to be examined, to study whether the party had any connection to these as they claimed.

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to analyze how populist parties argue for state authority in a way that resembles Thomas Hobbes’s arguments in Leviathan. Moreover, the essay analyzes the characteristics of human nature studied by Thomas Hobbes connecting it to the importance of the National State. The parties analyzed are Sweden Democrats from Sweden, VOX from Spain and Jobbik from Hungary. The research questions are: 1)How do populist parties argue for state authority?  2) How do their arguments resemble Thomas Hobbes’s arguments for state authority in Leviathan? The theories used are related to the study of Thomas Hobbes described in Chapter 13 and 29 in Leviathan related to human nature and state of authority. Moreover, Cas Mudde and Hellström’s theories are used related to populist parties on the right. The method used is a qualitative method which includes an argumentative analysis which aims to explain the essay’s purposes. In conclusion, the analyzed populist parties share the ideas of Thomas Hobbes related to the state of authority and the decrease of corporations in the National State. In other words, the populist parties argue that the national state must be unity and solid in order to defend its own interest and citizens’ interests.

This social scientific thesis is dedicated to the widespread social phenomena of racism. More specifically, I am conducting a critical discourse analysis according to Fairclough’s methodology. The analysis is aimed at analyzing the politics of the Sweden Democrats wherein there is a use of three primary sources. As proposed by previous research on the topic of racism, a multifaceted approach is used, and the analysis is initiated with a variety of theories. As for the background, CERD’s 22/23rd concluding observation on Sweden clarifies for Sweden’s current reoccurrence of racial discrimination/racism. In addition, with ECOSOC’s General Comment no. 20. laying out a definition to the concept of discrimination, and thereon using AHRC’s definition on racism.  The main purpose of the thesis was to lay out: -       How the Sweden Democrats approach migration politics and how this furtherly could be seen as problematic due to issues of racism/racial discrimination/racial differentiation.  As the final conclusion came to; the Sweden Democrats pursue an ethnocentric rhetoric which will de facto lead to both direct and indirect discrimination.