The Sweden Democrats, a radical-right populist party in Sweden, and its recent success

Economic Losers and Political Winners: Sweden’s Radical Right

Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan, Olle Folke, Torsten Persson, and Johanna Rickne

Abstract

We study the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a radical-right party that rose from negligible size in 2002 to Sweden’s third largest party in 2014. We use comprehensive data to study both its politicians (supply side) and voters (demand side). All political candidates for the party can be identi…ed in register data, which also lets us aggregate individual social and economic conditions in municipalities or voting districts and relate them to the party’s vote share. We take a starting point in two key economic events: (i) a series of policy reforms in 2006-2011 that signi…cantly widened the disposable- income gap between “insiders”and “outsiders”in the labor market, and (ii) the …nancial-crisis recession that doubled the job-loss risk for “vulnerable”vs “secure”insiders. On the supply side, the Sweden Democrats over-represent both losing groups relative to the population, whereas all other parties under-represent them, results which also hold when we disaggregate across time, subgroups, and municipalities. On the demand side, the local increase in the insider-outsider income gap, as well as the share of vulnerable insiders, are systematically associated with larger electoral gains for the Sweden Democrats. These …ndings can be given a citizen-candidate interpretation: economic losers (as we demonstrate) decrease their trust in established parties and institutions. As a result, some economic losers became Sweden-Democrat candidates, and many more supported the party electorally to obtain greater descriptive representation. This way, Swedish politics became potentially more inclusive. But the politicians elected for the Sweden Democrats score lower on expertise, moral values, and social trust –as do their voters which made local political selection less valence oriented.


Final Remarks

We study the Sweden Democrats, a radical-right populist party in Sweden, and its recent success. On the demand side of politics, we mostly expand earlier research on how occupations and job losses may help shape populist votes (Rydgren and Arzheimer 2018, Autor, et al. 2016, Dehdari 2018), by identifying groups of losers from two main economic events during the period when the electoral support for the Sweden Democrats expanded. Our most novel result here is that the local consequences of an important set of national policy reforms are a main correlate of local populist votes. We also show that the rise of the Sweden Democrats took place as the trust of voters in government diverged depending on their economic status. More importantly, our paper is the …rst to systematically analyze the supply side of a major
populist party, using individual-level data for the locally elected representatives of the growing Sweden Democrats. We exploit the same subgroup disaggregation as in the demand-side analysis and show that the Sweden Democrats over-represent the losing groups, while other parties under-represent them. Together, these …ndings rhyme with what we have called a citizen-candidate interpretation,
namely that the disgruntled groups not only support the Sweden Democrats electorally, but also join their ranks as members and run as political candidates. Our interpretation is that in the wake of economic grievances and diminished trust, political platforms lose credibility. And in the spirit of citizen-candidate models, proposals are credible when entering candidates share socioeconomic traits with voters, and thus appear committed to representing them faithfully. In sum, the economic shocks and the trust de…cit create both a supply and a demand for descriptive representation. We have also seen that elected local Sweden-Democrat politicians differ from local politicians of other parties in a number of other dimensions. In particular, they score lower on a number of personal traits and attitudes that many would consider valence variables in politics. In one sense, the Sweden Democrats thus appear to ful…ll a traditional role of new parties in democracies, namely to provide representation to some previously under-represented groups (at the same time, they offer less representation to other social groups, like women and non-OECD immigrants). In another sense, the new populist party appears to threaten the positive selection on ability in Sweden’s local democracy that we have recently documented elsewhere (Dal Bó et al. 2017).