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Why do people engage in high-cost political activities such as forming new political parties? Start-up costs are high. Moreover, rewards are unclear and uncertain. Since political parties are collective goods, people demanding new political parties face a collective action problem. It is therefore somewhat puzzling that new parties emerge. Drawing on theories from economics, sociology and political science, I argue that we, in order to understand the emergence of new parties, need to analytically move in on party-entrepreneurs to elucidate what motivates them. Methodologically inspired by the debate on bridging the gap between deductive and inductive strategies, I process-trace and compare three cases. The case studies identify individual level-mechanisms producing the decision toform a new party. People that voice demands within established parties, and face outright rejection, have experienced bad treatment from established politicians. These experiences contribute to disappointment, anger, and a sense of indignation - i.e. "intense emotions"- that mobilize entrepreneurs. Intense emotions create a lust for revenge, which becomes a psychological selective incentive, and is important for understanding why people engage themselves in high-cost political activities. ; Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Most studies of emerging Swedish parties and politics have mainly focused on the Swedish Social Democrats and their struggle for democracy and political power, most as a prelude to the so called "Swedish Model". Competing parties have received attention from historians on the national level, but their local origin remains to large extent an open field. The aim of this study is to investigate how local political factors shaped the emerging liberal party organizations in two small Swedish towns. By a case-oriented comparison two towns are contrasted, Skövde in Skaraborg county and Filipstad in Värmland. This thesis suggests that the distinction between national politics and municipal government, based on the interests of economic elites, was transformed during the period 1880-1920. During this period local elections and local government became increasingly sites for political struggle between different parties, with new agendas. With a framework that considered parties in light of their functions rather than organizational types and theoretical concepts borrowed from the sociology of social movements, the thesis main results suggest that political mobilization and liberal party-formation was depending on the local political traditions. The theoretical framework made it possible to pinpoint both similarities and differences between the cases. The results of the study indicate that the historical tradition is central to parties to emerge and flourish. This suggests that it is more meaningful to focus attention on local and regional processes to understand the historical development than has previously been done. ; De svenska partiernas historia är relativt väl känd på nationell nivå, men deras lokala ursprung är mindre utforskat och inte minst gäller det borgerliga partier. I den här avhandlingen undersöks hur lokalpolitiska faktorer formade de framväxande frisinnade, eller liberala, lokalorganisationerna i Filipstad och Skövde. Avhandlingen visar att politisk mobilisering och politisk organisering i städerna i hög grad formades av lokala och regionala politiska traditioner. Den visar också att kommunerna var politiserade långt före att de nationella partierna tog hand om valen och kommunala frågor. Studien visar att det fanns en kontinuitet mellan äldre lokala partier och de lokalavdelningar av nationella partier som etablerades efter sekelskiftet 1900. Det var en kontinuitet som återspeglades såväl ideologiskt som organisatoriskt. Avhandlingens resultat pekar på att det är mer meningsfullt att fokusera uppmärksamheten mot lokala och regionala politiseringsprocesser för att förstå den generella politiska utvecklingen i Sveriges historia än vad som tidigare har gjorts. Anders Forsell är doktorand i historia inom Forskarskolan i regionalt samhällsbyggande. Det här är hans doktorsavhandling.

The purpose of this thesis is to map and assess the organisational and ideological development of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform party, the ELDR. More specifically, it seeks to analyse the degree of integration between the members of the ELDR over time, to identify factors that may or may not generate integration, to relate the development of the ELDR to earlier research about European parties, and finally to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether or not the traditional national party families are about to establish parties at the European level. The thesis is based on the assumption that parties adapt to their environment, in this case, the system of multi-level governance that characterises the European Union. As the European parties are composed of national parties, they are also dependent on the member parties' opportunities and motives for cooperation. If there is integration, we can, however, not only expect the European parties to adapt to their environment. As they become independent actors, they may also influence their environment. In other words, we can anticipate interaction between the European and national levels that leads to mutual adaptation, or Europeanisation. To be able to capture the interaction between the two levels, theories from international relations and comparative politics are combined. Based on interviews, participant observation, documentary research and content analysis of European election manifestos, the analyses shows that the members of the ELDR have over time reached a rather advanced level of integration, both organisationally and ideologically. Although it is possible to identify constraining factors to this development, the ELDR has, at least from what is known from literature, reached about the same level of development as the two other European parties, the Christian democratic EPP and the Social democratic PES. The internal integration of the ELDR is the outcome of a successive transfer of power from the member parties to the ELDR. By now, the ELDR can therefore be defined as a rather independent actor and as a type of party at the European level. This type of party is, however, not comparable to national parties. It is instead adapted to the institutional structure of the European Union, with, at least partly, a different organisation and different functions from those of national parties. ; digitalisering@umu

Mellan 2002 och 2018 utvecklades Sverigedemokraterna från ett marginellt parti till en politisk kraft att räkna med: partiet fick cirka 18 procent av rösterna i riksdagsvalet 2018. Björn Fryklund och Sigrid Saveljeffs artikel är en analys av Socialdemokraternas och Moderaternas förhållningssätt till Sverigedemokraterna under denna period. En utgångspunkt är den amerikanska statsvetaren Bonnie Meguids PSO-teori (position, salience, ownership), vilken urskiljer tre huvudsakliga strategier som dominerande partier kan tillämpa mot nischpartier: avvisande, konvergerande och divergerande. Författarna visar att trovärdighet och demokratisk legitimitet har haft stor betydelse för vilka strategier S och M har valt. Det finns ett demokratiskt dilemma: väljarnas efterfrågan på partier med högerpopulistisk dagordning skapar motsvarande tillgång, och förr eller senare uppstår en konflikt med den liberala demokratins grundläggande värden. Det skapar ett strategiskt dilemma för de etablerade partierna: de tvingas balansera mellan att sträva mot sina egna mål och att hantera det demokratiska dilemmat. I Sverige har det demokratiska dilemmat blivit allt mer underordnat det strategiska dilemmat.Publiceringshistorik: Originalpublicering.(Publicerad 20 mars 2019)Förslag på källangivelse: Fryklund, Björn & Sigrid Saveljeff (2019) "Det politiska etablissemangets strategier gentemot högerpopulistiska partier", i Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, nr 10, s. 33–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.10.2 ; [The political establishment's strategies towards right-wing populist parties]Between 2002 and 2018, the Swedish right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna (the Sweden Democrats) developed from a marginal party to a political force to be reckoned with: the party received about 18 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election in 2018. Björn Fryklund and Sigrid Saveljeff's article is an analysis of the Swedish Social Democratic Party's and the liberal-conservative Moderate Party's approach to the Sweden Democrats during this period. One starting point is the American political scientist Bonnie Meguid's PSO (position, salience, ownership) theory, which distinguishes three main strategies that dominant parties can apply to niche parties: dismissive strategy, converging strategy or diverging strategy. The authors show that credibility and democratic legitimacy have been of great importance to which strategies the Social Democrats and the Moderates have chosen. There is a democratic dilemma: the voters' demand for parties with right-wing populist agenda creates the corresponding supply, and sooner or later a conflict arises with the fundamental values of liberal democracy. It creates a strategic dilemma for the established parties: they are forced to balance between striving for their own goals and dealing with the democratic dilemma. In Sweden, the democratic dilemma has become increasingly subordinate to the strategic dilemma.Publication history: Published original.(Published 20 March 2019)Citation: Fryklund, Björn & Sigrid Saveljeff (2019) "Det politiska etablissemangets strategier gentemot högerpopulistiska partier", in Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, issue 10, pp. 33–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.10.2

[Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?]The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in post-war Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties, the so-called right turn of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This article by Cas Mudde provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here populist radical right parties should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators. Despite their limited impact there is still reason to believe that the populist radical right parties might increase their influence in the near future. But even in the unlikely event that these parties will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. The populist radical right is, according to Mudde, not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.Publication history: Translation of the article "Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?" from European Journal of Political Research, volume 52, number 1 2013 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2012.02065.x).(Published 18 April 2016)Citation: Mudde, Cas (2016) "Tre decennier av populistiska radikalhögerpartier i Västeuropa", in Det vita fältet III. Samtida forskning om högerextremism, special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, issue 5, pp. 67–91. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.5.3 ; Den populistiska radikalhögern är den mest framgångsrika partifamiljen i Västeuropa under efterkrigstiden. Från forskarhåll och i medierna har det länge varnats för det ökande inflytandet från de populistiska radikalhögerpartierna, vad man kallar en högervridning av den europeiska politiken, men det finns få tydliga empiriska belägg för utvecklingen. Cas Muddes artikel ger en övergripande analys av den populistiska radikalhögerns påstådda inflytande på folket, partierna, politiken och styrelseformerna i Västeuropa. Hans slutsatser kan beskrivas som lugnande. Partiernas påverkan är i stort sett begränsad till frågor om invandring och integration, och även i detta sammanhang bör de snarare ses som katalysatorer än initiativtagare. Trots en begränsad inverkan finns det fortfarande skäl att tro att populistiska radikalhögerpartier skulle kunna få mer inflytande inom en snar framtid. Men även om partierna osannolikt nog skulle lyckas bli stora aktörer i västeuropeisk politik, förefaller det inte troligt att detta skulle leda till en genomgripande förändring av det politiska systemet. Den populistiska radikalhögern är, menar Mudde, inte en normal patologi inom den europeiska demokratin, utan relation till dess grundläggande värderingar, utan snarare en patologisk normalitet, som strävar efter att radikalisera mainstreamvärderingar.Publiceringshistorik: Översättning av artikeln "Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?" från European Journal of Political Research, volym 52, nr 1 2013 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2012.02065.x).(Publicerad 18 april 2016)Förslag på källangivelse: Mudde, Cas (2016) "Tre decennier av populistiska radikalhögerpartier i Västeuropa", i Det vita fältet III. Samtida forskning om högerextremism, specialnummer av Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, nr 5, s. 67–91. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.5.3

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

The purpose of this dissertation is to map and analyze the spatial and temporal variation in women's political representation at both the national and local level. In the dissertation it is argued that women's political representation is the outcome of the interplay between structures, institutions and actors. The perspective is a comparative one, in which quantitative analyses and more qualitative case-studies complement each other. When analysing spatial variation a mainly quantitative approach is taken, while the case-study approach is applied to the temporal variation. The first empirical chapter examines whether female representation in the lower houses of the world's parliaments co-varies with other indicators of the political situation of women in order to ensure the validity of the analysis. In the second empirical chapter female representation in parliaments of the world during the post-war period is analyzed. In the third empirical chapter the focus narrows down to women's political representation in Western Europe during the post-war period, where both the national and local level is analysed. The fourth empirical chapter consists of case studies of six countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands feature high female representation; France, Greece and Ireland low female representation. In the fifth empirical chapter women's political representation at the local level in Norway and Sweden is analysed during the post-war period. In the sixth empirical chapter the temporal variation in female representation in a number of Swedish municipalities is analysed, from the introduction of female suffrage in 1921 until 2002. The result is that both structures, institutions and actors are necessary to explain the spatial and temporal variation in female representation. There is no direct link between structures and female representation. The structure does affect the actors and co-varies with the institutions, but successful actors as entrepreneurs might boost female representation. Actors are important. The increase in female representation cannot be seen as an automatic process taking care of itself. Conscious actors are necessary both to affect and to monitor the development. An unfavourable structural context might be compensated for by actors and institutions which favour female representation.

The main question in this thesis is what kind of considerations political parties in the Swedish parliament have made between individual freedoms and state power in matters concerning information technology. Hence, it relates to a central and never ending debate about the proper relationship between the individual rights of citizens and protection of their personal integrity vis-à-vis state power and the interest of society in general, and in particular how this is affected by the rapid development of information technology. Four cases of legislative processes about information technology are analyzed. These cases concern parliamentary debates regarding the secrecy act (sekretesslagen) in 1980 (first debate), three debates concerning the personal data act (personuppgiftslagen) in 1998-99, three debates concerning the surveillance and crime prevention act (lag om hemlig rumsavlyssning & åtgärder för att förhindra vissa särskilt allvarliga brott med mera) in 2006-07 and three debates concerning the national defence radio establishment act (FRA & lag om signalspaning) in 2007-09. An analytical model is developed that includes two ideal types, individual freedom and state power, for the study and categorization of the parties and their positions in each debate. Thus, parties are categorized according to their proximity to the ideal types. The study illustrates that the majority of parties have a tendency to compromise between values constituting the two ideal types; they choose a so called hybrid position in between individual freedom and state power. The exception to this pattern is the Green Party and the Left Party that tend to choose a position close to individual freedom. Three hypotheses are tested. The first implies that parties tend to position themselves in-between the ideal type positions of individual freedom and state power (hybrid positions). This hypothesis gets strong support as hybrid positions are the most common outcome. The second hypothesis infers that a party has a tendency to support ...

The main purpose of this essay was to study whether niche parties that were represented in municipal councils in Sweden during the 2007-2010 term of office were politically relevant. Furthermore, factors that might facilitate political relevance for niche parties were studied. Political relevance was studied using two theoretical perspectives. The objective model of political relevance presents four categories of relevance based on the relations between political parties in a political assembly; governing parties, coalition parties, blackmail parties and isolated parties. The subjective model of political relevance relies on the party representatives' own judgments of the relevance of their parties. To study objective and subjective political relevance, party representatives were interviewed. The results showed that seven out of eight niche parties were politically relevant according to the objective model, and six out of eight niche parties were relevant according to the subjective model. For the study of possible facilitating factors, a comparative table was formed using statistics and official data. Percentage of seats and type of majority coalition seemed to affect the possibilities for niche parties to become governing parties. A large percentage of seats and being represented on the municipal executive board and committees seemed to facilitate subjective political relevance.

How is a hybrid state maintained? Today, several countries undergoing democratic reforms are also backsliding towards greater authoritarianism. This article draws on election data from Macedonia and Albania to show how a country can display elements of democratic improvement and democratic deterioration within the same policy field. The Albanian case shows how the political parties, with an anchoring in legislation, work to make the electoral administration politically dependent. This enables the political parties to exert control over central aspects of the distribution of power. By contrast, the case of Macedonia shows how undemocratic behaviors can become institutionalized and gradually accepted, even as other features of the electoral process undergo improvement. Common to both countries are patterns of patronage that serve to maintain a unique organization of power: the democratic façade is improved, but the undemocratic behavior remains.

At the turn of the century agrarian parties emerged in large parts of Europe. The parties had one thing in common: they stood up for the social, economic, cultural, and political interests of the agrarian society. The Swedish agrarian parties - 1 Bondeförbundet ' and 'Jordbrukarnas Riksförbund1 - were formed between 1913 and 1915.In this study the agrarian parties are not considered to be class parties. Instead, they are described as traditional parties, defending the old agrarian community against expansive industrialization. Their potential voters belonged to various social strata in the agrarian community, and their political programme, often characterized by a markedly negative view of modern society and by cultural protectionism, is summarized here under the term agrarianism. Agrarianism seen as a political theory and an applicable ideology had features in common with Conservatism as well as with Fascism and Socialism. Liberal values, however, were kept in the background.A modernization perspective is adopted in order to demonstrate that the agrarian parties were in fact traditional parties. It is assumed that regional variation in the electoral support of the agrarian parties reflects the modernization process, and, consequently, that the parties were weaker in industrial areas and stronger in socially and economically backward areas.The empirical studies show that the Agrarian parties stand out as traditional parties rather than class parties. Their voter support was stronger in areas where the historical and economic development was characterized by stagnation and conservatism, as well as in areas where social mobilization advanced slowly. In more industrialized and modernized areas conditions were quite the opposite. A study of Swedish interwar agrarianism with special regard to regional variations in party strength proves the agrarian parties to be the inheritors of a way of life formed by centuries of agrarian traditions. ; digitalisering@umu

This dissertation addresses party-culture in political parties represented in the Swedish parliament. Party-culture is investigated by studying collective self-images and norms in Swedish parliamentary party-groups (PPG). The aim of this investigation is to contribute to understanding of the conditions under which parliamentary work is carried out. In order to expand our understanding of these conditions this dissertation looks beyond the formal processes by which party-groups deliver their political message and make decisions, and instead highlights the cultural aspects of these party organizations in the parliament. The method of analysis is qualitative and the material for the study consists of 53 interviews with members of parliament from all represented parties. The parties studied are thus the Social Democratic, Moderate, Liberal, Christian Democrats, Left, Centre, and Green. In addition, some participant observation for the 1998-2002 mandate period in used. The empirical investigation shows that party-culture is revealed via four basic themes: political ability, feelings of political responsibility, the importance social fellowship, and the party's strength in relation to individual party members. The party's culture based on the four themes noted above provides a theoretical structure for interpretation that combines an Aristotelian idea about basic knowledge types, sophia and phronesis, with cultural theorists Mary Douglas' grid-group-analysis. Based on this interpretation method it is shown that party-cultures distinguish themselves from each other in a way that diverges from the left-right spectrum that dominates Swedish politics. At the same time as the parties demonstrate differences in party-culture, there are also some similarities between the parties, and these similarities suggest that the parties have adjusted themselves to a more general culture within the parliament, most visibly the focus on factual knowledge and a certain requirement for modesty from party members. ; Konverterat ISBN: 978-91-554-5882-9

Welfare, and the role of social democracy in defining its content and meaning, is often described as one of Sweden's distinguishing features. However, in the quest for liberalization and marketization, reforms in past decades have substantially changed the political landscape. These developments have led many to question the viability of describing the main political actors and their attitudes towards the welfare state in terms of left or right. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of ideological convergence and past and current political cleavages by analysing the welfare debate on freedom of choice between the two main political opponents in Swedish politics over three decades. Using a morphological approach, where ideologies are viewed as distinctive configurations of political concepts creating specific conceptual patterns depending on how they are combined, the analysis focuses on the content of the concept of choice by examining the conceptual relationships between political concepts such as choice, the public and the private, equality, equity and need. The analysis reveals a convergence suggesting that the parties have united around a narrower concept of freedom of choice that relates to how it is implemented in welfare services, that is, the choice between different providers of welfare services. However, important differences remain, which are expressed in the parties' differing conceptions of the power resources citizens need to become truly free individuals. These findings suggest that, while freedom of choice has become a central concept in the political debate, it is not central to the parties' ideologies. Instead, the core of the parties' ideologies appears to be articulated in e.g. the political cleavages that remain, which can be described as differing views on the role of politics and competing conceptions of need and equality. It is how these cleavages are translated into policies that will determine possible welfare choices in the future.

Ukraine has repeatedly shifted between the two sub-types of semi-presidentialism, i.e. between premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism. The aim of this article is to discuss to what extent theoretical arguments against premier-presidential and president-parliamentary systems are relevant for understanding the shifting directions of the Ukrainian regime. As a point of departure, I formulate three main claims from the literature: 1) "President-parliamentarism is less conducive to democratization than premier-presidentialism."; 2) "Semi-presidentialism in both its variants have built-in incitements for intra-executive conflict between the president and the prime minister."; 3) "Semi-presidentialism in general, and president-parliamentarism in particular, encourages presidentialization of political parties." I conclude from the study's empirical overview that the president-parliamentary system– the constitutional arrangement with the most dismal record of democratization – has been instrumental in strengthening presidential dominance and authoritarian tendencies. The premier-presidential period 2006–2010 was by no means smooth and stable, but the presidential dominance weakened and the survival of the government was firmly anchored in the parliament. During this period, there were also indications of a gradual strengthening of institutional capacity among the main political parties and the parliament began to emerge as a significant political arena.