The role of ‘fair’ institutions in developing democratic legitimacy has received increased attention. Citizens who perceive – on basis of past experiences – that they are being treated fairly by authorities have been held to have greater trust in political institutions. However, previous studies on the relationship between procedural fairness and political trust have not paid sufficient attention to individuals with limited first-hand experiences of authorities. We examine the relationship on an authority that virtually all individuals meet early in life: the school. Using structural equation modeling on unique panel data covering 1500 Swedish adolescents (ages ranging from 13 to 17), we find a reciprocal relationship: personal encounters with school authorities shape young people’s political trust; however, the images that adolescents get of the political system (through family, peers, media and so on) have also consequences on their perceptions about the authorities they encounter in their daily lives. The analysis increases our understanding of how individuals form their political allegiances by showing that the relationship between fairness and trust is more dynamic than has previously been suggested: neither an accumulated set of experiences of authorities nor formal ties with political institutions (as voters and so on) are required for a relationship to emerge.

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted A/RES/70/1, 2015, a resolution that entails 17 integrative and indivisible UN Sustainable Development Goals, by the name of 2030 Agenda, a plan of action that calls for the transformation of the world to ecologically, economically and socially sustainable planet where peace and prosperity endure. With its indivisibility and universality characteristics, the Agenda puzzled the world states, demanding a new form of governance style for its realization.

With the use of qualitative research methodology, this thesis, therefore, examines how the Agenda's policies are coordinated by the Swedish Government Agencies and what activities and mechanisms they use to integrate the Agenda' policies into their daily operational activities.

Through collaborative governance and sociological institutionalism theoretical lens, results show that Government agencies use several mechanisms such as collaboration, dissemination of knowledge, leadership and communications to enhance the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in Sweden. Nevertheless, some challenges hinder the agencies from working with the Agenda on a full scale, that if addressed properly, it could have improved the current conditions.

This dissertation attempts to answer the research question on whether there is a common pattern of democratic backsliding. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s theoretical model of democratic backsliding is utilized as the guiding theory. The theory suggests that Democratic Backsliding has three stages where different goals are attempted to be achieved. The goals are first to take over state institutions, thereafter to use these institutions to target political opponents and protect the government from criticism. The third stage concerns entrenching the political dominance.

The research question is answered by a systematic comparison of Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela. The results are that each case does follow the suggested path of democratic backsliding, with certain differences. More emphasis is put on the media, election monitoring, and how the institutions are controlled. The institutions are often taken control over by hijacking the nomination process, a fact overlooked by the theoretical model. These aspects are not expanded on in the theoretical model, and this dissertation suggest adding these to the model.

This study focuses on humanitarian intervention in Iraq with a special focus on Iraqi Kurdistan. The purpose of the study is to analyze humanitarian intervention from different perspectives, especially in political matters. Despite this, a reasonable selection process is needed as not all international political aspects are particularly relevant. There are aspects which, although closely linked to humanitarian intervention, do not need a detailed analysis due to the already extensive literature and the established nature of the relevant regulation which does not analyze much new information.

The study aims to apply theories and concepts in an analysis of humantarian intervention by applying a theoretical model based on humanitarian intervention and the UN's policy process. The analysis will focus on three dimensions: content, organization and legitimacy. By exploring these dimensions, the study will examine and evaluate different aspects of the intervention, including the political arguments, the structure and functioning of the UN policy process, and the legitimacy and support for the intervention from different actors and the world community.

The method used in the study is qualitative research to define humanitarian intervention which is heavily dependent on the theoretical model. The most important results of the analysis are that there are no standards for when the UN system for crisis management should be activated and that the political unity in the Security Council is not as strong as the principles express. Other results are that thispolitical field, especially the political decisions about international armed conflicts, has countless very interesting aspects. However, a detailed presentation of these aspects requires a more specific study dealing with this topic, rather than an essay on humanitarian intervention.

In this article we discuss discourses of white mobility in reality television, a genre whose problematic post-racial and neoliberal discourses have long been exposed. Moving beyond the widely researched Anglophone media landscapes, we interrogate the discursive construction of white mobilities in the Swedish romance reality show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden Runt (TV4, 2019-2020) [Farmer Seeks Wife – Around the World] where Swedish North-to-South migrants working as farmers abroad seek a partner from Sweden through the assistance of reality TV. By focusing on the discursive and visual strategies through which the show perpetuates racial hierarchies, we discuss the colonial imaginaries, the absence of border policies (such as residency, employment, or integration), and the significance of individual migratory preferences in the mobility discourses. We identify three forms of white mobility – the tourist, the adventurer, and the philanthropist – and show that migration is depicted as something reversible, an adventure, and a possibility for self-development, rather than a life-long decision with high stakes.

Under de senaste decennierna har högre utbildningsinstitutioner reformerats över hela världen så att de kan ha ett större inflytande i produktionen av kunskap inom kunskapsbaserade ekonomier (KBE). Denna omvandling förklaras ofta i termer av hur avancerade kapitalistiska ekonomier behöver säkra en välmående framtid inom post-fordistisk kapitalism. I denna vision är finska och estniska universitet tänkta som utrymmen inom vilka kunskap, teknik och entreprenörskap kreativt kombineras för att bidra till förverkligandet av en fortsatt ekonomisk tillväxt. Studien kontextualiserar denna efterfrågan på kunskapsbaserad tillväxt till en större global politiskt-ekonomisk kontext och förstår den som något som styr reformer som utvecklas i samband med en generell process för marknadsutvidgning. Denna process förstås som en totaliserande rörelse som överlappar med befintliga maktförhållanden och sociala hierarkier. I studien används ett gramscianskt ramverk för att kritiskt undersöka framväxten, konsolideringen och reproduktionen inom två tvärvetenskapliga universitetsavdelningar i Helsingfors och Tallinn av en motsägelsefull ordning. Ordningen utgörs av förhållandet mellan legitimerandet av berättelser, å ena sidan, och ett vertikalt genomförande av politik å andra sidan. Metodologiskt antar studien en narrativanalys av ett antal programmatiska dokument vid sidan av berättelser från dessa arbetsplatser. Trots spänningar som uppstått ur reformerna visar analyserna på att det finns ett bräckligt samtycke baserat på konsolideringen av en vag horisont av hopp och frihet, såväl i de programmatiska dokumenten som i den akademiska arbetskraften.

Denna vaga välståndshorisont styr och legitimerar marknadsutvidgning genom cirkulationen av en optimistisk teknik-centrerad berättelse, uttryckt i begreppet lösningsorientering (solutionism). Begreppet tjänar till att motverka de spänningar som finns i territorialiseringen av marknadskrafterna genom att lova en framtid där vetenskap, teknik och entreprenörskap samspelar till förmån för samhället. Studien visar även hur implementeringen av reformer legitimeras genom att åberopa den exceptionella status som den meritokratiska ordningen har i akademin. För att förstå hur marknadslogiken smälter samman med det som utmärker akademin analyseras denna alltmer "marknadsförda" - eller tygellöst meritokratiska (debauched meritocratic) - ordning genom att omdefiniera några av Bourdieus begrepp. Lösningsorientering (solutionism) och "tygellös meritokrati" (debauched meritocracy) tillhandahåller en uppsättning av mellanbegrepp som kopplas till det större gramscianska ramverket i syfte att komplettera den kritiska utredningen av universitetsordningen och dess centrala plats inom kunskapsbaserade ekonomier och post-fordistisk kapitalism.

The motivation of the bachelor thesis is to provide an understanding of democracy in Iraq from 2003 until present. After the fall of Saddam’s regime, there have been general elections but there is still an unstable democracy in Iraq. What are the reasons behind the failure of democracy in Iraq? Of course, there are many reasons behind this but my choice is to focus on three specific ones. How do these three variables that I have chosen, affect the possibility of democracy in Iraq? These two questions will be answered in this bachelor thesis, using Path Dependence Theory and Dahl’s Polyarchy Model and its Criteria that help to analyze and answer the research questions. Iraq has many major problems but the three I have focused on are ethnic and religious divides between Shia and Sunni, the violent environment and the presence of terrorist groups.

Elisabeth Abiri claimed that the political question regarding immigration to Sweden had been securitized during the 1990s and that national security, therefore, had been prioritized on the expense of human security and human rights. This thesis will examine whether or not her perspective is valid as an explanatory tool in the context of Swedish migration politics during the “migrant crisis” 2015-2016. Her perspective will be examined by cross-referencing it to the theory of political securitization by examining the propositions, proposed laws and measures, speeches and claims by members of the Swedish Government regarding this topic. I will also define national security so that this term may be applied as a tool for analysing the validity of Abiri’s claim in the aforementioned context. The perspectives of human security and human rights and human rights and migration will also be applied in order to test Abiri’s perspective’s validity. The results show that migration politics in Sweden has indeed been securitized and that this, in turn, has been the factor which allowed the Swedish government to, not only propose, but also adopt new laws and extraordinary measures that have turned the priority from migrant rights and security to national security.

Keyword: Securitization, Migration, Migration Politics, Human Rights, Sweden Antal ord: 10623 

The French term ‘cohabitation’ is commonly used to describe situations in semi-presidential systems where the prime minister and the president represent different political parties. The present contribution sets out to test to what extent cohabitation affects the powers of the president. Theoretically, the link between the phenomena in question is complex; there are arguments both for an assumption that cohabitation enhances the powers of the president and for a presumption that cohabitation is linked to decreasing powers of the head of state. It is far from self-evident how cohabitation should be operationalized, however. For instance, a president and a prime minister can represent different parties, but the parties can have a long tradition of working together in government coalitions. In some cases, the president and prime minister represent different parties, but the president’s party is included in the coalition government. Another variant is that either the president or the prime minister (or even both) are unaffiliated with political parties. In the framework of the present study, we make use of several operationalizations of cohabitation to assess to what extent the relationship between cohabitation and presidential powers is affected by whether cohabitation is broadly or narrowly defined. Empirically, the study is extensive in time and space. The research population consists of all democratic republics with a separate president and prime minister during the time period 1850-2021. In the literature, cohabitation is a term generally associated with semi-presidential forms of governments in which the president is popularly elected. The present paper takes a broader view and accordingly sets out to test if cohabitation is linked to presidential powers both in dual executives with popularly elected presidents and in systems with indirectly elected presidents. Since constitutional powers tend to remain unaltered irrespective of whether periods of cohabitation occur or not, the present study measures presidential powers with reference to actual, or ‘real’ powers. The powers of the president are measured with reference to seven questions in the V-dem dataset. Three of the questions refer explicitly to powers in the executive sphere, two to legislative powers, and two to powers that do not fall explicitly in either of the categories.

That the Lisbon Treaty lays the foundation for a supranational asylum and immigration policyis surprising, even more so for Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI), whose founder AndrewMoravcsik predicts that no such development will take place. While the article uses LI as its pointof departure, it shows that it runs into problems with regards to the policy area of asylum andimmigration. The article therefore turns to the (neo-)functionalist concept of spillover. Whileworking with the concept, it was deemed necessary to create a more coherent typology ofdifferent spillovers. The article suggests that the concept of spillover may be both descriptiveand explanatory. With regards to descriptive spillover, it seems valuable to differentiate betweenwidening and deepening spillovers, but concerning explanatory spillovers, more options becamevisible: there are unintended or intended functional spillovers, as well as unintended political,cultivated and social spillovers. The argument is illustrated through a detailed study of Sweden – a‘reluctant European’ that within the area of asylum and immigration made a fundamental U-turnwith regards to a supranationalism, a change that can be described as a social spillover.

This chapter has two aims. First, we describe the Swedish authorities’ management of the pandemic in 2020. Their approach deviated markedly from policies pursued in neighbouring countries, with respect to the authorities’ understanding of the virus; the measures adopted to counter the spread of the virus; the reliance on recommendations to citizens rather than legally binding instructions; and, most notably, the extensive delegation of policy-making by the government to a technocratic authority, the Public Health Agency. Second, we try to explain this policy deviation. We show that Swedish constitutional arrangements, with relatively autonomous, policy-delivering agencies, are a necessary but insufficient condition for explaining the outcome. Three additional conditions are needed: assertive leadership within the Public Health Agency; a weak and passive government; and citizens’ trust in public institutions, reflected in rallying around the flag and in supportive media coverage, all which cemented initial policy choices.

The aims of this article are, first, to describe the Swedish authorities’ strategy for dealing with the sudden onset of novel coronavirus in early 2020 and, second, to explain why that strategy differed markedly from those in nearly all other European countries. From an early stage, the Swedish government delegated decision making to the Public Health Agency, and its goal was to mitigate the effects of the virus rather than to suppress its spread. Society was never closed down in the same way as elsewhere. Using data from media reports and other publications, we argue that the agency was insulated from pressure to change course, even as the number of deaths associated with covid-19 rose far above those in Sweden’s Nordic neighbours, by four conditions: (1) the structure of national public administration; (2) an outburst of nationalism in parts of the media; (3) the uneven impact of the virus; and (4) a political leadership that was willing to delegate responsibility for policy almost entirely. We conclude by briefly comparing the coronavirus strategy to previous episodes of Swedish policy exceptionalism. This emerging pattern, we suggest, raises normative questions about the functioning of Swedish democracy.

Sweden’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, beginning in early 2020, hasbeen much discussed because it deviated from other countries’ equivalents. Set inthe context of scholarly debate about the balance between politicians and experts inpolitical decision-making, we argue that a necessary condition for this case of Swedishexceptionalism was the manner of policy-making adopted by the Swedish authorities. Inthis article, we describe this policy-making procedure, which involved a radical form ofdelegation by elected politicians to appointed experts, and seek to explain how it cameabout. We focus on the 1st year of the pandemic, and use media reports and other publicdocuments, including parts of a public inquiry, as our empirical material.

This article addresses political-party organization in Estonia, especially candidate selection. Its first objective is to describe the ways in which the main parties chose their candidates before the 2011 parliamentary election. A second objective is to evaluate those procedures in light of expectations generated by established theory. The focus is on two conditions: the institutional framework, particularly the electoral system, and the relative youth of Estonian democracy. The evidence confirms these expectations only partially, which suggests that an individual party’s ideological, organizational and strategic circumstances, in addition to structural and institutional conditions, are critical to understanding why it performs this basic function as it does.

Beslutet att lämna EU har inte bara förändrat Storbritanniens plats i världen utan också skakat om den brittiska inrikespolitiken och förstärkt polariseringen mellan brexitanhängare och EU-vänner. På sikt kan brexit hota sammanhållningen i landet.

Political parties are essential for parliamentary democracy, the form of government that prevails in most European states. But how have parties adapted to modern society – not least a new layer of political decision-making in the EU? Should we talk of a crisis of party democracy?

This book reports the findings of a comparative survey of parties in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden, all EU member states; and Norway, which remains outside the Union. Using original data, it explores how power is exercised within party organisations and their respective parliamentary groups.

Within an analytical framework that envisages a party as a series of delegation relationships, the book illuminates how leaders are chosen, how election candidates are selected, how manifestos are written – and how a party's various elements are co-ordinated. For all the challenges posed by multi-level governance, parties retain much of their capacity for making democracy work.

Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the ‘official story’–that is, what the parties’ statutes say that they do when selecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on the final stage of the selection procedure, in which the decision about who will lead the party is made by the ‘selectorate’. Yet this, the ‘official story’, is only a part of the process, and quite often not even the most important part. In this article, we seek to make the classification of selection processes more manageable and meaningful. We propose a typology of the ‘mode’ of selection, in which the emphasis is on the management of competition for the leader's position before the decision reaches the selectorate. We identify five modes of competition: open, enclosed, filtered, enclosed and filtered, and managed.

The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In this article, we sketch the background to the election; describe how the campaign unfolded; and interpret the results and outcome.

In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party system was transformed.

Political parties shape politics, and the most important person in a party is usually the leader. Party leaders make the political weather. Take a recent example from Britain. In 2015 the Labour Party, somewhat unexpectedly, lost a national election. Its leader resigned and a new one was needed. “Jeremy Corbyn is not going to win the Labour leadership election”, insisted one of the country’s shrewdest political commentators (Rentoul 2015). But Corbyn did win, and by a comfortable margin. Labour thus took a big stride to the left.

In this article, the aim is to enhance our understanding of who has power over leader selection in political parties. To this end, we apply an analytical framework in which the selection process is divided into three phases: gatekeeping, preparation and decision. The focus is on determining the extent to which each of these phases is influential for the outcome and thereby locating the distribution of intra-party power. Underpinning the analysis is the conviction that the comparison of leader selection is too limited if it relies solely on information about formal procedures, including the composition of the selectorate. We should also take the preselection phase of leader selection into account. Empirically, we examine a sample of recent selection processes in European parliamentary democracies. In contrast to previous research on intra-party politics, which has suggested an ascendancy of the party in public office, our results suggest an enduring strength of the party on the ground and the party in the central office.

The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selection and relate it to various ideal-typical constellations of intra-party power. The framework encompasses, first, what we call precursory delegation, with focus especially on an agent that, formally or informally, manages the selection process before it reaches the selectorate. Second, the framework takes account of the degree to which the process is managed rather than left open to free competition between leader candidates. We illustrate the framework primarily with instances of leader selection in two Swedish parties.

In this book, we examine the varying ways in which political parties manage intra-party conflict, or potential conflict, when they make what might be their most important decisions – on the selection of their leaders. We take special account of actors that, formally and informally, filter the field of aspirants even before the decision reaches the selectorate. Our analytical framework is developed both deductively, with a foundation in delegation models, and inductively, through reference to case studies from nine European countries. We present a typology of selection processes, which illuminates intra-party power structures.

The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party’s main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable consequences for the party and for Swedish politics. Moreover, the selection involved the breakdown of a long-established procedure for leader selection in the party. We seek to explain this deviant case. We emphasise an unexpected cascade of decisions by regional party branches to hold membership ballots on the leadership candidates. This event, we argue, was critical for the outcome. We also suggest a causal mechanism, a shifting perception of procedural legitimacy, that facilitated the outcome—a mechanism that could be useful in understanding leader selection and moments of party change more generally. 

The international trend towards more inclusive leader selection (Cross and Blais in Party Politics 18: 127–150, 2012) seems to have gone largely unnoticed by Swedish parties. At least on the surface, the process works as it has done for decades. Almost exclusively to Sweden, it centres on a valberedning, a selection committee. This committee is typically chosen by the formal selectorate of the party, the party congress. The job of the valberedning is to consider candidates and then to propose one of them as the new leader.

The parliamentary election of 14 September 2014 induced decidedly mixed feelings in the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna). It led to the ejection of the centre-right government and the installation, for the first time, of Green cabinet ministers. However, the party also experienced a small but unexpected loss of votes compared to its score in the previous election. Moreover, partly because a far-right party built impressively on its breakthrough into the national parliament in 2010, the new government rests on a precariously narrow parliamentary base.

This article tests the claim that government cooperation between mainstream parties and radical right parties can be explained by coalition theory. It does so by analysing three Swedish cases of coalition formation where the radical right Sweden Democrats (SD) have remained excluded despite holding a pivotal position in the parliament. It argues that, with the right analytical tools, this exclusion can be explained by coalition theory: cooperation with the SD has been unattractive in terms of policy, and unnecessary because the mainstream parties have been able to form viable minority governments. This argument requires three things: first, that we consider the two-dimensional nature of Swedish politics; second, that we shift the focus from majority government to viable government; and third, that we acknowledge strategic time horizons that extend well into the future. The findings contribute to our understanding of coalition formation and of how mainstream parties respond strategically to the radical right.

Den här avhandlingen behandlar frågan om hur etablerade politiska partier agerar när de utmanas av nya partier från den högerradikala partifamiljen. Studien fokuserar på Sverige och hur de svenska etablerade partierna har bemött det högerradikala partiet Sverigedemokraterna. Sverige har varit ett avvikande fall i jämförelse med många andra länder i Europa, där etablerade partier har tenderat både att bilda regeringar med stöd av högerradikala partier, och att ta över deras politiska positioner – framförallt i invandringsfrågan – för att försöka vinna tillbaka väljare. I Sverige valde de etablerade partierna istället (inledningsvis) att förflytta sina positioner bort från Sverigedemokraternas politik. Vidare har partiet trots sin starka position i riksdagen uteslutits från regeringssamarbete.

I syfte att förklara det svenska fallet kombinerar denna avhandling teorier om regeringsbildning med teorier om hur etablerade partier bemöter högerradikala partier. Studien kombinerar kvalitativ och kvantitativ metod för att analysera partibeteende på både lokal och nationell nivå, samt på väljararenan och den parlamentariska arenan. Genom att analysera ett avvikande fall vidareutvecklar avhandlingen etablerade teorier och koncept. Analysen visar att det svenska fallet, trots att det delvis skiljer sig från andra länder, kan förklaras i termer av hur partierna försöker uppnå tre strategiska mål: att vinna röster, att få genomslag för sin politik, och att sitta i regeringsställning. 

Den strategiska förklaringen består av tre delar. För det första måste vi beakta att olika partistrategier – t.ex. valet av sakpolitiska positioner och valet att misskreditera ett annat parti – kan påverka varandra. För det andra måste vi ta hänsyn till att partier inte alltid är fria i sina val. De kan förhindras från att tillämpa en viss strategi, antingen på grund av meningsskiljaktigheter inom partiet eller på grund av att det kan vara väljarmässigt riskabelt att alltför snabbt byta strategi. För det tredje behöver vi ompröva vissa av de koncept som vanligen används inom koalitionsforskningen – t.ex. vad som gör en koalition ”vinnande”, vilka politiska konfliktdimensioner som är de viktigaste, och hur vi bäst mäter förekomsten av ”anti-pakter” mellan partier.

Det strategiska perspektiv som presenteras i avhandlingen visar att isoleringen av högerradikala partier kan förklaras utan att hänvisa till att vissa partier är väsensskilda ”paria”- eller ”anti-system”-partier. Resultaten visar också att ett skifte från isolering till samarbete kan ske snabbt, givet att de strategiska förutsättningarna förändras. Avhandlingen är ett bidrag till koalitionsforskning, till forskning om partibeteende på väljararenan, samt till forskning om hur etablerade partier bemöter högerradikala partier.

As populist radical right parties have become electorally successful throughout Europe, mainstream parties have been adopting more restrictive immigration policies in order to win back voters, in what has been labelled a "contagion of the right". Sweden, however, has been a deviant case both in a comparative European context and in relation to influential theories of party competition. Despite the electoral threat from a growing radical right party (the Sweden Democrats) during the last decade, no other party engaged in any significant policy co-optation prior to the 2014 elections. In this paper I consider multiple explanations for this deviance derived from empirical and theoretical literature and mapped onto an analytical framework distinguishing between the party goals policy, office, and votes. The empirical material consists of survey data, statements from party representatives, and parliamentary voting patterns. I find the goal-oriented explanations to be only partially satisfactory, and go on to explore the possibility that the deviance can be explained by the institutionalisation of the Swedish cordon sanitaire – the commitment by all other parties to politically isolate the Sweden Democrats. The path dependency of the cordon sanitaire, I argue, became a behavioural constraint that effectively hindered parties from legitimately engaging in the co-optation of SD policies, until it was removed by the external shock of the 2015 "refugee crisis".

Within political science, there are numerous methodological approaches to estimating the policy positions of political actors. Such methods are often used to examine party systems as a whole, but little research has been done on testing them in the context of parties that deviate from the political mainstream, such as populist radical right (PRR) parties. This study evaluates four common approaches, (1) expert surveys, (2) manual content analysis, (3) dictionary-based content analysis, and (4) Wordfish, by applying them to the PRR party the Sweden Democrats. Election manifestos, being considered the most authoritative statements of official party policy, are used as the empirical basis of the content analyses. Results show an overall high degree of convergent validity along economic and socio-cultural policy dimensions, but also suggest an advantage for the more qualitative methods 1 and 2, as the frequency-based methods (3 and 4) face problems with the context-dependence of words, linguistic volatility and data scarcity on issues of low salience, difficulties that are related to the characteristics of the Sweden Democrats. Manual content analysis and expert surveys do not face these issues, but instead need to deal with reliability and bias. If the former compensates by averaging multiple codings and the latter focuses on clearly defined policy-specific dimensions, these two methods – ideally in combination – are more appropriate than frequency-based approaches in the analysis of parties similar to the Sweden Democrats.

When faced with organised racism, liberal democracies attempt to strike a balance between combating extremism and protecting core values such as freedom of association. Earlier research has argued that states that have experienced nondemocratic regime control in the twentieth century—either through a domestic takeover or a foreign occupation—are more likely to take a repressive approach to racist associations. In this study, I show that the previously overlooked Nordic region speaks against this explanation. Finland, which managed to avert a domestic authoritarian threat, is more repressive of racist associations than are the Scandinavian countries. The latter, two of which faced Nazi occupation, take a more liberal approach, which targets illegal actions rather than associations. These findings lead me to argue that the explanatory power of historical legacies cannot be reduced to a binary indicator such as nondemocratic regime control. I conclude by proposing a direction for future research on state repression of organised racism.

Why does the radical right care so much about animals? In this study, we argue that the salience of animal advocacy within the radical right can be explained by its compatibility with these parties’ broader ideological framework. By analysing official documents from the radical right party the Sweden Democrats, we find that its animal advocacy is shaped by an ideological core consisting of nativism, authoritarianism and populism. The SD argues, for example, that immigrants are more violent towards animals; that animal cruelty must be strongly punished; and that mistreatment of animals is contrary to the moral intuitions of ‘the people’. Rather than only being used instrumentally to denigrate the cultural practices of immigrants, however, the policies reflect a broader commitment to animal well-being. Still, they differ from the egalitarian and rights-based agenda of ‘animalist’ parties, promoting as they do a paternalistic animal-welfare agenda where compassion is owed to animals not because they are our equals, but rather because they are dependent on us. The findings improve our understanding of the radical right ideology and of how ethical principles in the animal-rights debate are integrated into broader ideological frameworks and translated into party policy.

How well do the policies of the Nordic radical right parties represent the preferences of their voters? This chapter addresses this question by matching the positions of radical right parties and their voters on a number of key issues. Going beyond aggregate dimensions such as left/right or GAL/TAN, the analysis focuses on specific policies related to the ideological core features of the radical right – nativism, authoritarianism, and populism – as well as to the environment and the economy. The results show that the radical right parties in the Nordic region provide voters with a unique policy package: they are more strongly opposed to immigration than are the parties from other party families, and they combine this position with an anti-European Union (EU) stance. However, in their cultural conservatism, their opposition to environmental protection, and their authoritarian stance on gay rights and civil liberties, the Nordic radical right parties are less representative of their voters.

In this study we assess policy representation by populist radical right (PRR) parties in ten West European countries. Going beyond aggregate left-right or socio-cultural (GAL-TAN) dimensions of political conflict, we study representation on policy issues related to the PRR parties’ core ideological features nativism, populism, and authoritarianism. Analysing data from party expert and voter surveys, we find that the PRR parties provide largely unique policy positions that are congruent with their voters’ preferences in terms of their opposition to immigration and the European Union. By contrast, the parties are less representative in terms of their value conservative and authoritarian positions on gay rights and civil liberties. The findings have relevance for our understanding of party strategy, voter behaviour, and the dimensionality of political competition.

This chapter analyses the government participation of the Nordic radical right parties. Why, for example, were most of the parties excluded from government cooperation for many years following their entry into their respective parliament? Why have some of the parties joined government coalitions as full cabinet members, while others have opted to remain parliamentary support parties? And why did two of the parties choose to leave the government in between elections? Drawing on theories of coalition formation, of party behaviour, and of mainstream-party reactions to the radical right, this chapter traces the transition of the Nordic radical right from opposition to power. The chapter shows that, although size and policy are factors of fundamental importance, we also need to consider party strategy if we are to explain the variation in government participation by radical right parties in the Nordic region.

This book traces the EPP Group’s institutional, organisational and political trajectory in the European Parliament, focusing on the period after the first direct elections in 1979. In doing so, it sheds light on the functioning of parliamentary party groups, while at the same time creating the conditions for a better understanding of their role in the process of European integration and in the EU’s political system.

Based on the conceptual framework of different disciplines—history, political science, European studies and political sociology—this book is the outcome of a research project involving scholars with diverse academic backgrounds and from different EU countries.