Rödbrun röra: En kvantitativ innehållsanalys av Socialdemokraternas och Sverigedemokraternas ideologiska konvergens

Sammanfattning: Observing the growing importance of new political conflicts in today’s post-materialist party competition, this thesis seeks to develop a model with which it can analyse the bidimensional convergence between populist radical right niche parties and social democratic mainstream parties. The study applies quantitative content analysis on party manifestos of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and the Sweden Democrats, during their mutual parliamentary representation, 2010-2018, leaning on the reputable Manifesto Projects database. By defining their core ideological markers, the analysis sets out to research their relative focus on typical policies, and further; to develop a two-dimensional policy space containing both a socioeconomic axis and a populist radical right-wing axis. The results indicate there has been a convergence between both parties in terms of policy positioning insofar as the Sweden Democrats having adopted the profile of the labour left-wing as well as displaying a lesser degree of nicheness. In the same spirit, the Social Democrats accommodates an increasing level of a radical right-wing position while retaining their focus on left-wing policy, resulting in the parties converging notably on the aforementioned, two-dimensional scale.