The Internal Supply-side causes for the Belated Rise of the Sweden Democrats

Abstract

Although historically regarded as an unsuccessful example of an anti-immigration party, the far-right Sweden Democrats, or Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), a party with questionable linkages to neo-Nazism, have grown visibly stronger at the national level since 2006. Then, in 2014, the party finally became the third largest in the Swedish parliament, Riksdag, largely due to the electoral appeal of its immigration-skepticism platform. This study aims to explain how this anti-immigration party belatedly rose to power by shedding light on party-centric, or internal supply-side factors-leadership, in particular-which most research has underestimated thus far. In this paper, we contend that the Sweden Democrats, after having gone through a ‘normalization’ or legitimization process, managed to overcome the ‘barrier of nonrespectability’ and offered a credible alternative to an inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric. In so doing, it successfully appealed to the portion of the electorate who were immigration-skeptics, yet left unrepresented in the existing Swedish political sphere. Indeed, the Sweden Democrats meticulously highlighted a clear niche regarding open immigration in Sweden and turned it to its electoral advantage. In this paper, we purport to furnish a qualitative analysis along with an empirical examination to test the validity of the contending hypotheses of internal supply-side factors.