Political parties’s choices of who leads them can have a majorbearing on politics. Recent research shows that selectionprocedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties inbroadly ...comparable European parliamentary democracies. Themost common analytical approach is to focus on the ‘officialstory’ – that is, what the parties’ statutes say that they do whenselecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on thefinal stage of the selection procedure, in which the decisionabout who will lead the party is made by the ‘selectorate’. Yetthis, the ‘official story’, is only a part of the process, and quiteoften not even the most important part. In this article, we seek tomake the classification of selection processes more manageableand meaningful. We propose a typology of the ‘mode’ ofselection, in which the emphasis is on the management ofcompetition for the leader’s position before the decision reachesthe selectorate. We identify five modes of competition: open,enclosed, filtered, enclosed and filtered, and managed.
This study compares members of political youth organisations and explains variations in material incentives for enrolment using both organisation-level and individual-level factors. Empirically, it ...is based on a web survey of about 3,000 members of eight Swedish youth organisations. The analysis shows that young people have a complex combination of concerns, with the main dividing line being whether or not material incentives are important. At the organisational level, the prevalence of material incentives among members is positively related to the size of the mother party and whether it has government experience. Further, we find a positive association between material incentives and economic dependence on the part of the youth organisation on its mother party. At the individual level, we find that members who see the main role of the youth organisation as being to provide support for the mother party and for those politically aligned with it are more likely to have material motives for their enrolment.
The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of ...“precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable consequences for the party and for Swedish politics. Moreover, the selection involved the breakdown of a long-established procedure for leader selection in the party. We seek to explain this deviant case. We emphasise an unexpected cascade of decisions by regional party branches to hold membership ballots on the leadership candidates. This event, we argue, was critical for the outcome. We also suggest a causal mechanism, a shifting perception of procedural legitimacy, that facilitated the outcome—a mechanism that could be useful in understanding leader selection and moments of party change more generally.
Like most of its kind, the Swedish Green Party could originally have been described as anti-establishment and policy-seeking. The slogan 'neither left nor right' reflected its preferred position ...between the two traditional blocs in Swedish politics. Increasingly, however, the Greens edged leftwards, especially after propping up a minority Social Democratic government in 1998-2002. Indeed, from around that period, the party became open about its ambitions for office (Bolin 2016, p. 162-163). Prior to the 2014 election, after 8 years of centre-right government under the four-party Alliance, the Social Democrats and Greens had publicly declared each other 'natural partners' (Aylott and Bolin 2015a). In 2014, the left bloc, including the Greens, emerged slightly bigger than the Alliance. With the Left Party in a supporting role, the Greens and Social Democrats built a minority coalition. The Greens received six ministerial positions, which observers considered a good return. Their joint leaders (formally, spokespeople), Gustav Fridolin and Åsa Romson, became ministers for schools and for the environment, respectively.
This article offers a longitudinal perspective on communications during election campaigns from a political-party perspective, where strategic considerations about digital media are compared across ...time. Our analysis is grounded on the concepts of hybridisation and data-driven campaigning, where digital technology tends to play a central role without replacing all traditional campaign features. Empirically, the study is based on a longitudinal analysis of four election campaigns in Sweden during 2010–2022. The analysis shows that Swedish political parties have gradually integrated digital campaign features in their structure and strategy. The process is not linear, but rather back and forth, as party perceptions of the importance of communication channels vary across time. The results imply a development where all parties, regardless of size and ideology, are increasingly making rational judgments of which combinations of old and new campaign methods and communication channels are most effective.
Although the number of studies of new political parties is gradually increasing, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of when new parties manage to enter national parliaments. The objective of ...this article is to explain the circumstances under which new parties enter national parliaments for the first time. Unlike earlier research, this study does not focus on individual party families. Instead, generally applicable explanations are sought. This is achieved through an examination of the importance of the political opportunity structure, that is, the external environment new parties face in their quest for parliamentary representation. Using data collected for 18 Western European countries for the period 1960-2010, the analysis shows that institutional factors are important to understand new party parliamentary entry. The sociological factors analysed in the study, however, do not seem to be of equal importance.
The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the ...mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In this article, we sketch the background to the election; describe how the campaign unfolded; and interpret the results and outcome.
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as ...many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party system was transformed.
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