Economic and Social Outsiders but Political Insiders: Sweden’s Populist Radical Right

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

The Review of Economic Studies, 2023, vol. 90, issue 2, 675-706

Abstract: We study the politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats, a major populist radical-right party. Based on detailed administrative data, we present the first comprehensive account of which politicians are selected into such a party. Surveys show that politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats share strong anti-establishment and anti-immigration attitudes that drastically set them apart from Sweden’s other parties. Searching for individual traits that link naturally to these attitudes, we classify the universe of Swedish politicians and voters by social and economic marginalization and exposure to immigration. Politicians from the Sweden Democrats over-represent marginalized groups without strong attachments to the labour market or to traditional nuclear families, which instead are under-represented among politicians in all other parties. Among voters, the Sweden Democrats have higher electoral support in precincts with higher shares of the same marginalized groups. We see the mobilization of the marginalized as an important driver of the party’s success. Finally, we uncover that Sweden-Democrat politicians score lower on a number of valence traits than other-party politicians. In sum, the rise of the Sweden Democrats raised political representation for marginalized groups, but this came at a valence cost.

Keywords: Political selection; Radical right; Populism; D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdac037 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:90:y:2023:i:2:p:675-706.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().