Sverigedemokraternas genombrott efter kommunalvalen 2022 – En kvantitativ studie av koalitionsbildningar

Sammanfattning: Radical right wing populist parties are, or were, typically at some point isolated from executive power. After the Swedish elections in 2022, the Sweden Democrats became not only a support party to the national government, but made their way into local ruling coalitions in many municipalities. This study explores the municipalities which SD rules after the 2022 elections, through the lens of traditional coalition forming theory. The coalitions are examined through qualitative statistical methods. The data was based on coalition data from SKR (the Swedish association of Municipalities and Regions), which in combination with data from Valmyndigheten (the Swedish Election Agency) were used for calculations. The study hypothesised that both SD, and its potential mainstream right-wing coalition partners, would have motives to form larger coalitions than traditional theory assumes. It was found that in the municipalities where the cordon sanitaire against SD was broken, the coalitions indeed tended to be larger than in other municipalities. The significance of these results, as well as potential future research that could complement and further the research done in this study, is discussed at the end.