Entertaining the electorate? Strategic satire and evolving formats of negative political campaigning

107 This article studies the transformation of Swedish political party system in the 1980s, and aims to develop its typology before and after the transformation. The article identifies several key prerequisites for such transformation: among them, the crisis of social democracy and an increase in the nationalist feelings in society. The latter is caused by the negative effects of attempts at social integration of the migrants and introduction of the principles of multiculturalism. Ethnic tension manifested itself in the wide-spread support for the Swedish Democrats party in the 2010 parliamentary election. From a political party system dominated by social democrats, Sweden has gone to a system with two leading parties — the left-wing Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party and the right-wing Moderate Party. The Swedish Democrats position themselves as an alternative to the two party blocs headed by the ruling parties (the Alliance and the RedGreens). The study employs an interdisciplinary approach and uses the methods of scientific synthesis. Its findings can be of practical significance for politicians, social activists, and academics alike.

THE ZIG‐ZAG COURSE OF THE NORDEK NEGOTIATIONS

Fifteen years ago, Jens Rydgren (2002) asked why no electorally successful radical right-wing party had yet emerged in Sweden. In this respect, Sweden was a negative case. Rydgren posited four main explanations: (1) social class mattered more in Sweden than elsewhere. Working class voters identified strongly with their social class and with the Social Democratic party, making them largely unavailable to radical right-wing mobilization; (2) socioeconomic issues still structured most politics in Sweden, and issues belonging to the sociocultural dimension – most importantly immigration – were of low salience for voters; (3) voters still perceived clear policy alternatives across the left-right divide; and (4) the leading radical right-wing alternative, the Sweden Democrats, was perceived as being too extreme. Since 2010, however, Sweden can no longer be considered a negative case, as the Sweden Democrats received 5.7 percent of the vote in the 2010 election and 12.9 percent in the 2014 election. In this paper we argue that in order to understand the rise and growth of the Sweden Democrats we should focus on changes in the factors enumerated above, that is: (1) the decline of class politics in Sweden; (2) the growing salience of sociocultural politics, and in particular the politicization of the immigration issue; (3) the increased convergence caused by a double move toward the center by the Social Democratic party and the Conservative party, leaving voters confused about policy alternatives; and (4) the process by which the Sweden Democrats have tried to distance the party from its neo-fascist past and erect a more respectable facade.

The Social Democratic Party (SAP) in Sweden held power from 1932 to 1976. The social democracy and welfare state model championed by SAP became so hegemonic that even the radical right-wing Sweden Democrats (SD) support the welfare state. The party’s ability to maintain its position can be attributed to the improvement of the Swedes’ quality of life through welfare state policies, development of democracy, achievement of income justice, and the expansion of social policies such as health insurance, housing, and child benefits. These policies sought to ensure social justice and secure the support of disadvantaged classes. Kjell Östberg’s book analyzes the rise and decline of SAP over an extended historical period, spanning from the mid-19th century—when capitalism began reshaping Swedish society—to the present day. The author aims to understand the rise and fall of social democracy in Sweden within the historical process of capitalist transformation and its aftermath. Employing the Marxist historical method—historical materialism—the author examines the reflection of class conflict on social democracy in Sweden and SAP’s response to capitalism’s contradictions.

Given the vast amounts of research on party competition, party strategy, political communication and electoral campaigning, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the study of national party elites' perceptions of voters and public opinion. This article argues that the mindset of leading party officials, and more specifically their perceptions of voter and public opinion rationality, driving forces and knowledge, is a much-neglected explanation for why parties adopt the electoral strategies they do. Analysed here are unique internal party documents from two Swedish parties during the period 1964 to 1991: the Social Democratic Party and the Conservative Party. A simple analytic framework is proposed for the study of party elite perceptions of voters and public opinion. In contrast to the overwhelmingly pessimistic view of voter rationality that still prevails in contemporary research, the findings presented in this article suggest that national party elites in general have had a surprisingly positive view of voters and, in particular, public opinion. Perceptions of voters and public opinion were largely unaffected by the parties' electoral fortunes, and did not become gloomier over time.

Inspired by Coleman’s call for a more ‘direct representation’, we address two neglected issues within the field of social media and political communication. We study a non-election period in Sweden (two randomly selected weeks in early 2016) and conduct a cross-platform comparison. The article is based on content analyses of the four prominent social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. We seek to answer the following questions: do parties use social media platforms in-between elections? If so, for what purposes? Do parties use social media to interact in a direct manner with citizens? We focus on three different Swedish parties: the Social Democrats (incumbent), the Feminist Initiative (underdog) and the Sweden Democrats (populist right-wing). Our findings suggest a bleak direct representation in-between elections. Parties are more active on social media platforms during election campaigns. Twitter is the preferred platform, especially by the incumbent party for broadcasting achievements.

Political communication has taken new and complex forms within the contemporary hybrid media system. In this article, we examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. We assess the digital television news channel Riks, which during the 2022 national election was operated by the Sweden Democrats party and distributed via YouTube. Deploying a mixed-methods approach, we analysed all videos published by Riks four weeks prior to the election. Results show that Riks blends descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genres, and strategically frames the most important political issues of the election campaign in favour of the party’s policies. Hence, the study contributes to political communication scholarship by emphasising how news has become an integral part of strategic party communication, challenging established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news.

As in many other European countries, the political system has undergone rapid changes in Sweden while a radical right‐wing party – The Sweden Democrats (SD) – has grown from a negligible position into one of the country's largest parties. SD has been winning voters from both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum, and particularly from Sweden's two largest parties, the Conservative Party (Moderaterna, M) and the Social Democratic Party (S). The present study investigated the extent to which SD voters who previously voted for one of these two parties differ from each other, and compared these SD voters with current Conservative Party and Social Democratic voters. The results showed that 1) economic deprivation offers a better explanation for the past mobility from S, than from M, to the SD; 2) no group differences were found between previous M and S voters in attitudes connected to the appeal of an anti‐establishment party; and 3) views on the profile issues espoused by the radical right, most importantly opposition to immigration, did not differ between SD voters who come from M and S. However, SD voters – particularly SD voters who had formerly voted for the Social Democratic party – differed from the voters of their previous parties in several aspects. It is thus possible that many SD voters will not return to the parties they previously voted for, at least as long as the immigration issue continues to be of high salience in the society.

The article analyses the electoral strategies of social democratic parties in the context of increased and new inequalities among its electorate. The literature on the politics of dualization argues that social democratic parties are essentially insider parties. By contrast, I argue that they also target outsiders by promoting policies that facilitate the integration of outsiders into the labour market and enhance their social protection. There are two reasons that make outsiders electorally attractive for social democratic parties: first, the share of outsiders has been growing strongly, while the share of insiders has been decreasing. As a consequence, social democratic parties cannot hope to win elections solely on the basis of their insider constituency. Second, outsiders are not as politically inactive as the original insider–outsider literature suggests which makes them electorally more attractive to social democratic parties. To analyse the electoral strategies of social democratic parties, I rely on original data on party statements as reported in newspapers during election campaigns between 2007 and 2010 in four continental European countries (Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands). The evidence clearly suggests that social democratic parties are no insider parties but propose policies in the interests of outsiders.

When the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party came to power in 1932, Sweden experienced a turning point in its history. For the first time the role of the Social Democratic Party in the construction of the welfare state became significant. Until the end of the 1910s the Social Democrats had concentrated their primary efforts on the problems of trade union recognition and the struggle for parliamentary democracy. After 1920 the Social Democrats became the largest party, but did not gain political power except for a brief interlude. The concept of the ‘Swedish Model’ has often been used in Sweden and abroad to describe the unique development of Swedish society in the twentieth century. However, historians and social scientists have tended to analyse Swedish society without a clear definition of the very concept, the ‘Swedish Model’.

Political parties are essential for the functioning of parliamentary democracy, yet parties have not received much attention in contemporary research on popular education. The aim of this article is to analyse the contemporary role of party-political education as a form of popular education in two labour movement parties in Sweden. The study is based on semi-structured interviews focusing on the reasoning behind the organisation of education in political parties. The interviews were conducted with ten interviewees who represented ABF (the Swedish workers’ educational association), the Left Party, and the Social Democratic Party. The thematic analysis resulted in four categories of roles ascribed to education in political parties: ideological training, training skilled members and leaders, training for a social infrastructure, and training for internal positioning and distinction. The first two categories correspond to knowledge-oriented roles, while the two last represent relationship-oriented roles. Findings show that party-political popular education still plays a significant role in contemporary Sweden. The shrinking member base of political parties creates challenges when new members and prospective representatives cannot be expected to have as extensive popular movement experience as previous representatives. In this situation, study activities are, to some extent, attributed more significance than previously.

The left‐right positions of the political parties in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are compared from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. To locate the parties, survey data on the voters' self‐placements along the left‐right continuum are used. In order to study changes in the left‐right polarity and the degree of consensus along the left‐right continuum in each of the countries, we use the mean party positions to calculate three different measures of party distances. The wing party distance is that between the party farthest to the left and the party farthest to the right. The rival party distance is that between the Social Democratic Party and the traditional Conservative Party. Finally, the mean party distance is the average distance between all pairs of parties. One of the main conclusions is that in Sweden and Iceland the left‐right continuum seems to contract, whereas in Norway and Denmark the left‐right polarity and the distances between the parties are increasing. In today's Nordic party space, the distance between left and right is longest in Denmark and shortest in Norway. Eventually, 39 Nordic parties are brought together on the same left‐right scale. The analysis reveals that there are some clearly distinguishable clusters of parties or party families in the Nordic countries, such as, for example, the socialist parties, the social democratic parties and the conservative parties. Other party groups differ greatly in left‐right position, like the progressive parties, the liberal parties and the centre parties.

The Social Democratic Party (SAP — Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti) holds a unique position in modern Swedish politics. Its achievements are notable on several counts. It has been the largest and most influential political party in Sweden in the postwar period, and the best performing social democratic party in Scandinavia. The party governed for so many years, and with rarely any interruptions, that it was able to implement policies built upon social democratic principles (such as equality, solidarity and social justice — see Tilton 1990). In many ways, the SAP has been the closest yet to achieving what many have regarded as a ‘Scandinavian social democratic model’ (Einhorn and Logue 1989, Milner 1989, Petersson 1994). Part of the success and durability of the SAP can be attributed to the fact that it has incorporated a ‘broad church’ of differing political opinion and ideology and that the party has been responsive to demands for modernization in order to guarantee the party’s popularity amongst Swedish voters. Following these lines of reasoning, the continuing electoral success of the SAP in the 1990s is therefore an essential precondition for the survival of any kind of ‘Swedish model’.KeywordsSingle CurrencyActive Labour Market PolicyEuropean Economic AreaFull MembershipSocial Democratic PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Backlash in policy attitudes after the election of an extreme political party

In several countries, local parties have increased their share of votes in local elections. This development has received limited scholarly attention compared to the immense interest paid to the fates of national level anti-establishment parties. Against this backdrop, we ask if something distinct characterizes those who choose to vote for genuinely local alternatives compared to other anti-establishment voters. Sweden is taken as the case in focus, a country where local parties have grown in numbers and strength throughout the past three decades. We view local parties as a part of a broader ‘anti-establishment’ family, and we explore if their voters a) are similar to those who vote for the most pronounced anti-establishment party in Sweden (Sweden Democrats), or b) if local party voters are a distinct anti-establishment category in their own right. Drawing on a survey data from 49 Swedish municipalities, we find that local party voters indeed distinguish themselves from both Sweden Democrat's voters and voters for the old and established parties, thus making them a distinct anti-establishment voter category of their own. These voters distrust their local politicians but at the same time are civically engaged.