Inte bara av egen kraft? : En kvalitativ studie av effekten av övriga partiers profilering i immigrationsfrågan på Sverigedemokraternas lokala framgång

Sammanfattning: This thesis sets out to study the effect of party strategy on the varying electoral success of anti-immigrant parties. In the last decades, Europe has seen a rise of anti-immigrant parties with varying success geographically and over time. In the last fifteen years Sweden has experienced a similar development with the Sweden democrats. Previous research has in different ways tried to explain the success of anti-immigrant parties but to a lesser extent provided explanations for the variation of their success. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the variation in anti-immigrant parties’ local electoral success can be explained by other parties’ stances on the immigration issue.  This is being investigated through a qualitative comparative case study of two municipalities in Sweden and the local electoral success of the Sweden democrats. Previous literature has been ambiguous about whether more restrictive stances on the immigration issue among the other parties will facilitate or impede the success of the anti-immigrant party. The study shows support for the facilitating hypothesis by discovering more restrictive stances on the immigration issue among the local parties in the municipality that showed a greater success for the Sweden democrats in the most recent local election, and less restrictive stances towards immigration in the municipality with less success for the Sweden democrats. Although the detected difference in stances between the two municipalities is relatively small, the study’s results do support the facilitating hypothesis and show no evidence to disprove it. The results also contribute support for the concept that parties’ issue stances affect the success of other parties.