Sverigedemokraterna: det nya arbetarpartiet : En kvantitativ undersökning av vilka faktorer som förklarar varför arbetare stödjer Sverigedemokraterna

Sweden has in the past thirteen years seen an increased support for a rightwing populist party: The Sweden Democrats. Previous surveys and research show that the Sweden Democrats has taken a large part of their supporters from the Social Democrats, and that a large amount of their supporters are workers. The aim of this thesis is to use quantitative method to analyze which factors that explain which one of the two parties: the Sweden Democrats and the Social Democrats, that workers support. The two categories of explanatory factors that are mainly analyzed is materialistic and non-materialistic explanatory factors. The results show that the main factors that affect if workers support the Sweden Democrats rather than the Social Democrats is non-materialistic factors such as negative attitudes towards new liberal individualistic values such as religious freedom, increased gender equality and increased rights for LBTQ-people, but also negative attitudes towards multiculturalism and immigration.

The Danish People’s Party’s downfall, a possible future for the Sweden Democrats? : Comparative analysis between far-right populist parties in Sweden and Denmark

The purpose of this thesis aimed at trying to find out why the Sweden Democrats have increased their support, to become the second largest party in the Swedish parliament, while, the Danish People’s Party, has lost the majority of their support after being the second largest party in the Danish parliament to almost falling out a few years later. Is it possible for the Sweden Democrats to share the same fate? To find this out, we’ve decided to conduct this study using a qualitative comparative method, with a Most Similar System Design. The analysis mainly consists of two concepts to explain this phenomenon which are “Cordon Sanitaire” and “Normalization”.  The results of the analysis show that in Denmark, the Danish People’s Party’s views and policies on migration, have gotten normalized across the political spectrum. As such, they can no longer argue that they are anti-establishment, but instead, they have become a part of the establishment themselves. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats have been kept out of power, with a “cordon sanitaire”, and thus their view and policies have not gotten normalized and adopted by other parties, and therefore they have continued to grow. An interesting aspect of this is that recently, the Sweden Democrats have gotten normalized and they are now a support party for a right-wing government, which we argue might lead to a similar situation as in Denmark, meaning that the Sweden Democrats might lose support in the future