The Single-‐Issue Party Thesis and the Sweden Democrats1

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The Single-Issue Party Thesis and the Sweden Democrats1 Gissur Erlingsson, Kåre Vernby and Richard Öhrvall

Abstract When commenting on the European radical right, the term ‘single-issue party’ is frequently bandied about. We survey the various conceptualizations of the term and then apply them to the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party with roots in extremist subcultures that gained parliamentary representation in the 2010 elections. In the empirical analysis, we draw primarily on a unique survey of all parliamentary candidates to study: (1) the SD candidates’ positions on a large number of diverse issues, (2) what issues they prioritize, and (3) the degree of ideological cohesion among their candidates. Secondarily, certain voter characteristics associated with the single-issue party concept are surveyed. Here, we use a large-scale exit poll to study: (1) SD voters’ demographic characteristics and (2) what issues they prioritize. Throughout, the other main Swedish parties serve as points of comparison. Against what is commonly claimed, we find that the single-issue party label fits the SD poorly.

Keywords: Parties, voters, ideology, radical right-wing parties

1 We wish to thank participants in seminars at the EPSA annual meeting and the Network on Nordic Populism, and Ryan Bakker for comments. We also wish to thank Helena Bengtsson and SVT/SR, SOM institute, Swedish National Data Service (SND), Statistics Sweden and the Riksdag for providing data. This research was ﬁnancially supported by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.

Introduction In the Swedish national elections in 2010, the Sweden Democrats (SD) gained parliamentary representation. After emerging from neo-fascist and neo-Nazi subcultures in the late 1980s, the party has gradually moderated to broaden its appeal. This development is characterized by, among other things, the banning of uniforms at party gatherings, the changing of the party symbol from a fist and a flame to a blue anemone, and the renunciation of fascism and Nazism around the turn of the last century. Support for the party has grown steadily and in 2010 it received 5.7 percent of the vote in the national election and thereby gained seats in the parliament for the first time.

When commenting on new entrants to the sphere of European radical right- wing parties, both scholars and competing politicians have been quick to brand the Sweden Democrats a ‘single-issue party’. This term is notoriously vague, however. In this paper, we survey how it and related terms, such as ‘niche party’, have been conceptualized. Based on the literature, we conclude that the term “single-issue party” denotes a set of closely related concepts in the research on party types whose connotations partly overlap (cf. Mudde 1999). Some of these views emphasize the characteristics of the parties themselves, in other words, the ‘supply-side,’ in the parlance of party research (Ignazi 2002; Mitra 1988; Mudde 1999; Meguid 2005, 2008; Wagner 2011). Finally, there are scholars who focus on those who vote for the radical right, in other words, the characteristics of the ‘demand side’ (Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Mudde 1999).

Our literature review shows that these respective views have a number of observable implications regarding the party in question and, in some cases, the characteristics of its voters. This list is similar to that found in Mudde (1999). We argue that the conceptualizations focusing on the supply-side are best evaluated using data capturing the policy positions of party elites and the priority these elites accord to various types of issues. Conceptualizations focusing on the demand-side, by contrast, are best evaluated on the basis of data on voters’ economic and demographic characteristics, as well as the

2 motives underlying their choice in the ballot booth. We apply these insights to the question of whether or not the SD should be considered a single-issue party. For the supply-side, which, following the previous literature, is our primary focus, we draw on a new and unique survey data set that contains a rich body of information on the 2010 parliamentary candidates. Most importantly, the data include stated policy positions on a broad range of issues, as well as information on the issues they prioritize. As a secondary source of information, we use an election-day exit poll that contains information on voters’ socio-demographic characteristics and stated motivations.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, a brief history of the SD is presented. Second, we discuss the previous literature on the subject of whether or not radical right-wing parties should be considered single-issue parties. Third, we describe our data and measures. In the fourth part, we present our results. The final section presents our main conclusions.

A Brief History of the Swedish Case

Until recently – with the exception of the populist party New Democracy (ND) which was represented in the parliament between 1991 and 1994 – the radical right has been very weak in Sweden. In the 2010 elections, however, the SD gained parliamentary representation following a decade of growing electoral prominence. The party was formed in 1988 and back then it had intimate affiliations to outright racist and Nazi movements in Sweden. Larsson and Ekman’s (2001) mapping of the party’s origins leaves no doubt that those who founded the party in the late 1980s were deeply embedded in neo-Nazi networks. Partly because of its affiliations to hardcore neo-Nazi movements and explicit anti-immigrant profile, the SD was electorally marginalized in the 1990s, gaining less than 0.25 percent of the votes in the 1994 and 1998 parliamentary elections. In the 2002 local elections, however, the SD received a total of 49 seats in municipal councils, an increase from 8

3 seats in the previous election, cementing its position as the most important political party outside the national parliament (Larsson and Ekman 2001).

In 2006, the SD made a breakthrough in local elections. The party obtained a total of 280 seats in 144 out of 290 Swedish municipalities, a substantial increase compared to the 2002 elections, when it obtained representation in only 29 of the municipal councils. In the parliamentary election, the party did not get enough votes to pass the 4 percent threshold necessary to obtain representation. However, with 2.9 percent of the votes, it became entitled to financial support from the state until the upcoming 2010 election. Together with stronger finances, the attention the party subsequently received paved the way for further success, and in the 2009 European parliament election it got 3.3 percent of the votes. It is also worth noting that the SD’s rise has taken place against the background of falling membership on the part of most established political parties. Purportedly, membership rose from 1,802 in January 2006 to 5,846 in October 2011, an increase of over 320 percent (Dagens Nyheter 30.10.2011). Subsequently, the 2010 election proved to be the party’s major electoral breakthrough, winning 612 seats in 246 municipalities, and with 5.7 percent in the parliamentary election, the SD received 20 seats in the national parliament.

Since the mid-1990s, the party has purposefully and actively worked to change its original ideological profile by, for example, renouncing Nazism, banning uniforms at party meetings, and changing its party symbol. This process has had organizational consequences. In 2001, some of the more radical members, because the party had become soft on its original profile issues, decided to leave and to form the National Democrats. Under the current party leader, Jimmy Åkesson, elected in 2005, the party has continued its attempts to resemble more successful anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe, such as the Danish Peoples Party (Rydgren and Ruth 2011). Besides excluding members viewed as damaging the party’s profile, new issues have become more prominent in SD rhetoric, for example opposition to the EU and crime.

Whether these changes represent a real change in the nature of the party’s ideology is disputed. Some recent analyses of the party’s ideology suggest that it still ought to be labeled “national socialist” (Lindberg 2010), and that, despite current efforts, it has more in common with the German Nazi movement in the 1930s than with the modern European parties it professes to identify with, such as the Danish People’s Party (Wingborg and Lodenius 2009). Previous research argues that the party has evolved ideologically towards a position of ethno-nationalism, combined with a strong dose of social conservatism and a centrist, albeit unemphatic, position on economic issues (Rydgren 2006: 108–116). However, the party’s aspiration to renew its ideological profile has continued. Today, the party’s official ambition is to distance itself from perceptions that it is too “nationalistic.” In fact, in October 2011, the party formally declared that, ideologically, it should be labeled “social conservative” (“Sverigedemokraternas principprogram” 2011; Riksdag och department 2011).

The Single-Issue Party In the literature, the term “single-issue party” has been used to denote a set of closely related concepts. Under the same umbrella we will include the term “niche party,” since there is a considerable degree of conceptual overlap between scholars who use this term and those who use the term “single-issue party.” Throughout, we will discuss the implications of the various single- issue party concepts for characterizing the Sweden Democrats.

The most direct approach to determining the nature of radical right-wing parties is to look at the parties themselves: the “supply-side”. One prominent view is that parties that possess a distinctive and recognizable ideology cannot be considered single-issue parties (for example, Ignazi 2002; Mudde 1999). The central issue then becomes whether the radical right-wing parties that have emerged in Europe in recent decades possess a distinct and recognizable ideological core. Several authors do find such a core when

5 comparing a wide array of radical right-wing parties (Ignazi 2002; Mudde 1999, 2007). Another closely related conceptualization of the single-issue party thesis relies on the classic notion of a party as an institution whose purpose is to aggregate diverse views on a wide variety of issues into public policy (Mitra 1988; Mudde 1999). Viewed against this benchmark, a party that focuses only on a few issues and that fails to present well-defined positions on most other issues is, of course, an aberration.

In more recent research, the term “niche party” has become increasingly common, but, as Wagner (2011) points out, the conceptualization of niche parties overlaps to a considerable degree with that of single-issue parties. The leading definitions of niche parties argue that this type of party emphasizes a limited range of (typically non-economic) issues, most notably immigration in the case of the radical right, and fail to present a cohesive political vision on issues outside their core policy domain (Meguid 2005, 2008; Wagner 2011). This conceptualization is clearly related to the abovementioned view that the purpose of parties is to aggregate diverse views. A competing conceptualization of the niche party, which we will not emphasize much here since its conceptual overlap with the single-issue party concept is slight, categorizes radical right-wing parties as niche parties because they are believed to represent extreme views on one or more of the major policy areas (Adams et al. 2006; Ezrow 2008; Jensen and Spoon 2010).

If we focus on the supply-side, then, and follow the previous literature on single-issue parties, the presence of the following characteristics would suggest that the SD should be viewed as a single-issue party:

Supply-side criteria:

1. The party lacks a distinct and recognizable ideological core. This would be evidenced by a failure to take consistent and/or distinctive positions on political issues.

2. The party is unable to perform the task of aggregating diverse views. This would be evidenced by a focus on a narrow set of core issue areas and a lack of cohesive views on other issues.

As already mentioned, some conceptualizations of the single-issue party emphasize the voters: the demand-side. In particular, Kitschelt and McGann (1995: 26) have argued that a key distinguishing feature of niche or single- issue party voters is that they come from a wide variety of economic and demographic groups and care mainly about one political issue: immigration in the case of the radical right (cf. Mudde 1999). Although Kitschelt and McGann (1995) go on to reject this characterization of radical right-wing parties, more recent research argues that immigration skepticism is the overriding factor affecting individuals’ propensity to vote for the radical right (for example, Norris 2005; Rydgren 2008). This is perhaps not so surprising, since the immigration issue cuts across traditional political cleavages (van der Brug and van Spanje 2009).

As Fennema (1997) points out, there is no necessary direct link between the socio-demographic and ideological characteristics of a radical right-wing party’s voters and the nature of the party. However, given that several researchers have considered the electorate of a single-issue party to be one of its important features, we will examine it, too (see, for example, Kitschelt and McGann 1995). According to the indirect approach, then, if the SD are a single-issue party, their electorate will exhibit at least some of the following characteristics:

Demand-side criteria:

1. The party’s voters lack a distinct social profile. This would be evidenced by a relative lack of representation of certain economic and demographic groups among their voters.

2. The immigration issue alone motivates the party’s voters. This would be evidenced by the lack of influence of other issue areas, such as the economy, on the voters’ choice of party.

Data and Measurement The Candidates When evaluating whether the SD meet the supply-side criteria for being a single-issue party, our main strategy is to draw on survey data on the policy preferences of all major Swedish parties’ parliamentary candidates. This will help us to assess the ideological nature of the SD and compare them to the other parties. Although there exist several competing approaches, the main alternatives would have been either to analyze party programs or the actual voting behavior of SD MPs. We believe, however, that there are strong reasons not to rely on these alternatives in our case.

With regard to party programs, most parties – and especially a party that has emerged out of neo-Nazi subcultures – will have powerful incentives to present a bland version of their policy intentions. This would make it difficult to judge whether or not the SD meet the supply-side criteria for being a single-issue party. Party programs also tend to smooth over divisions within the party, thus making it impossible to judge its degree of cohesiveness. In principle, studying the actual voting behavior of SD MPs using roll-calls would have made it possible to for us to judge whether or not the party is cohesive in comparison to others. However, our own analysis of all roll-call votes in the Swedish parliament since the SD entered it in 2010 and until May 2012 – a total of 988 votes – reveals that cases of defection from the party line are extremely rare and that this pattern holds true for the SD as well. 2

2 There are various measures of party cohesion based on roll-call votes. Rice’s (1928) “Index of vote likeness” and varieties of it are commonly used to measure cohesion. However, in its original form it is designed only for “Yes” and “No” votes. In the Swedish parliament there is also the possibility to abstain. We therefore used the “Agreement index” (AI) as suggested by Hix et al. (2005), rescaled to go

Returning to our candidate survey, the Swedish public service broadcasters conducted a survey of all parliamentary candidates’ opinions on a large number of very diverse political issues before the 2010 election. In total, 5,627 candidates were included in the population and of them 2,751 filled out the questionnaire, a response rate of 49 percent.3 Among those who were elected to the parliament in the 2010 election, 83 percent responded.4 Using this unique data set, we are able to study: (1) SD candidates’ positions in a wide variety of policy areas, (2) what areas they prioritize, and (3) the degree of ideological cohesion among SD candidates. In all these aspects we are also able to compare SD candidates with the candidates of the other political parties.

We include candidates from the ten largest parties in our analysis. They are listed in Table 1, together with their year of establishment and their seat and vote shares in the 2010 parliamentary election. Of these ten parties, the seven that are listed first were represented in the parliament prior to the 2010 election. Of those that were not, only the Sweden Democrats won seats in the 2010 election.

[Table 1 about here]

We create indices measuring candidates’ positions on five issues: economy, environment, immigration, gender equality, and law and order. They are, in turn, based on between four and eight items, which take the form of a from 0 to 100. We found that even the party with the lowest score – the Greens who scored 98.4 – had very low rates of defection. The Sweden Democrats had virtually no defections, scoring 99.7. 3 The total number of candidates differs slightly from the official figure of 5,665. This is due to additional candidates added at a later stage. However, the difference is miniscule and not important for the results presented here. 4 The response rate among SD candidates amounted to 69 percent in total, and 90 percent among the elected candidates.

9 statement with which the candidate can “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree.” The indices are normalized to run from 0 to 100, and are constructed such that higher values indicate a more conservative position. In particular, the theoretical minimum is 0, which occurs when all of the party’s candidates “strongly agree” with the liberal statements and “strongly disagree” with the conservative statements included in the index. The theoretical maximum is 100, which occurs when all of the party’s candidates “strongly agree” with the conservative statements and “strongly disagree” with liberal statements that are included in the index.

Furthermore, we obtain saliency scores for each of these five indices. This is done by using the candidates’ own indications of the importance of the issues. In particular, they were also asked to indicate, for each statement, whether it refers to an issue that was close to their heart or not. We normalized the index to run from 0 (theoretical minimum) to 100 (theoretical maximum). There was no limit to how many statements a party’s candidates could indicate as important, so a score of 0 means that none of the candidates indicated any items in a particular area as important, whereas a score of 100 means that all of them indicated all items in an area as important. By comparing the saliency indices for the SD candidates to those of other parties, we will be able to say whether the Sweden Democrats are a niche party in the sense of de-emphasizing economic issues relative to non- economic issues.

Finally, in order to measure the cohesiveness of a party’s candidates on these five issues, we created an index measuring the party-wise heterogeneity of candidate positions on each of the five issues. Letting j stand for the party in question and k stand for the issue, we computed the following index of cohesion:

10 where the numerator of the second term in brackets is the standard deviation of party j’s candidates’ positions on index k (which has been normalized to run from 0 to 1) and the denominator is the maximum attainable standard deviation given the number of respondents in party j for index k.5 Higher values of the index indicate that the party’s candidates hold more cohesive views. The index has a theoretical minimum of 0, which occurs when half of party j’s candidates position themselves on one extreme, and the other half on the other extreme, on each item included in index k. The theoretical maximum is 100, which occurs when all of party j’s candidates agree on all issue items included in index k.6

The Voters Although we will give priority to the results obtained from the analysis of party candidates, we will also carry out an analysis of the party voters. Our analysis is based on the 2010 Valu exit poll, carried out by SVT (the Swedish public service television company). The survey was conducted in four Swedish cities in different parts of the country (Göteborg, Lund, Stockholm, and Umeå). Data were collected from both absentee voters and voters voting on election day. The sample consists of 11,889 voters, of whom 11,563 voted in the parliamentary election.7 It should be noted that the four cities were not randomly selected. Nevertheless, the distribution of votes over the parties is

5 The reason for normalizing the observed standard deviation is that the maximum attainable standard deviation decreases with the size of the sample (which, in our case, is determined by the number of respondents from the party in question). 6 For a candidate to be included in the calculation of a specific index, he or she must have responded to at least half of the item questions included in the index. For more information on the indices and the items included in each, see the Appendix. 7 Some respondents in the sample were only entitled to vote in the local elections that took place on the same day. Also, if we only consider those who voted for one of the ten political parties in focus here, there are 11,457 respondents.

11 fairly close to the actual election results.8 Furthermore, since we are interested mainly in the voters for each party, rather than levels of support for different parties, we consider the data to be suitable for our purposes.

As already mentioned, some previous research has consider the defining feature of single-issue parties to be the fact that that they mobilize diverse economic and demographic groups whose core concern is with one political issue (Kitschelt and McGann 1995). In our case that political issue is immigration. In order to test whether the Sweden Democrats are to be considered a single-issue party based on this definition, we will study the demographic composition of their and the other parties’ voters and what political issues they consider to be most important. As with the candidates, we are concerned only with the ten largest political parties.

The demographic aspects we will study are age, sex, country of birth (foreign- born or not), employment status (unemployed or not), and whether the respondent is a blue-collar worker or not. For each of these aspects the distribution within each party is calculated. The share of unemployed is calculated after excluding retirees. In the same way, employers and those who have never worked are excluded when the share of blue-collar worker is estimated. All variables are based on the respondents’ answers to the questionnaire.

In the Valu exit poll, the respondents were asked whether a set of policy issues had any importance when they made their decision on which party to vote for in the election to the parliament. We will study questions regarding the policy issues that resemble the issues studied in the analysis of the parties’ candidates, in other words, the economy, the environment, immigration, gender equality, and law and order. For each question the respondents could choose from the following five response categories: “very

8 The number of respondents per party and a comparison of that distribution to the actual election results are included in the Appendix.

12 important,, “fairly important,” “neither important nor unimportant,” “fairly unimportant,” and “very unimportant.” Unfortunately, we do not have the same extensive set of questions as we have for the candidates, so we have to use a single question for each political issue. However, in order to make comparisons easier, we have created an index by rescaling the answers on those questions so that they range from 0 to 100, calculating the average for each party’s voters. This means for a given political issue that if all a party’s voters consider the issue to be very unimportant with regard to their decision to vote for that party, the index will be zero; if they all consider the issue to be very important for that decision, the index will be 100.

Results The Candidates In Table 2, we show the average positions of each party’s candidates on our five indices. As can be seen, these five indices are correlated. For most parties, a conservative position on one of them indicates a conservative position on the others as well. This is the case for all established parties, as well as the relatively new Feminist Initiative. As expected, the Pirate Party9 stands out by holding the most liberal position on law and order; on other matters, however, they are fairly conservative. Most importantly, the SD take the most conservative position of all parties on all non-economic issues. On

9 The Pirate Party was founded in 2006 and constitutes the world’s original Pirate Party (subsequently, Pirate Parties have established themselves in other countries as well). The Swedish Pirate Party has a narrow policy profile, focusing on three questions: (1) personal integrity, (2) file sharing and anti-commercial downloading and (3) immaterial rights and copyright restrictions. The party had a very sudden and unexpected success in the Swedish European Parliament election in 2009, receiving 7.1 percent of the votes, but performed poorly in the 2010 election (Erlingsson and Persson 2011).

13 the economy, however, they take a centrist position,10 somewhere between the Christian Democrats and the Green Party, albeit closer to the former.

[Table 2 about here]

Turning to issue salience, Table 3 shows the average weight that the candidates of each party accord to different areas. When it comes to what issue is the most prioritized for each party, the results largely match our prior ones. In particular, the Moderates, the Liberals, the Social Democrats and the Left Party consider the economy to be the most important issue. The Green Party emphasizes the environment, whereas the Christian Democrats, the Centre Party and Feminist Initiative consider gender equality to be the most important issue.11 The Pirate Party emphasizes law and order, whereas candidates for the SD think that immigration is the most important issue.

Interesting to note here, however, is that the SD candidates accord levels of importance to issues other than immigration that are comparable to many of the other parties. They place a strong emphasis on law and order, and are typical when it comes to their emphasis on gender issues. This, together with the positions they tend to take on these issues, paints a picture of a consistent and strong social conservatism among the party’s candidates. Interestingly, this view is almost perfectly mirrored in the party’s Program of principles, whose opening lines are: “The Sweden Democrats are a social conservative

10 This middle-ground position on the economy is well illustrated by the following formulations in the party’s program of principles: “To us, a responsible, regulated market economy, built on long-term thinking, is a matter of course. Growth is necessary to maintain our level of welfare, but it needs to be balanced against other important values” (Sverigedemokraternas principprogram, 2011: p 20). 11 The fact that the Centre Party emphasizes gender will perhaps come as a surprise to some. This is mainly a consequence of their ardent support for a tax deduction for household services. Information about items included in each index can be found in the appendix.

14 party with a basically nationalist outlook and views social conservatism and the preservation of a solidaristic welfare model as the most important instruments for creating a good society.” When it comes to the economy, they resemble most other parties, with the exception of candidates for the Moderate Party and the Left Party, for whom the economy tends to be the most important issue, and the Pirate Party, for whom the economy generally matters little.

[Table 3 about here]

Finally, we turn to the issue of ideological cohesion. Our index of cohesiveness is shown in Table 4. As one would expect, the views of a party’s candidates on a particular issue are more cohesive if this is the party’s most salient issue. In nine out of ten cases, the party’s main issue is also the issue on which most of its candidates agree, the exception being the Centre Party. Comparing the same issue across different parties, despite a few exceptions, it is also clear that parties that emphasize a particular issue also tend to be those whose candidates have the most cohesive views on the same issue. Clearly, then, party members exhibit less agreement when asked about issues that lie outside the core concerns of their party. Looking outside the parties’ core issues, it is however clear that the SD candidates are among those that exhibit the most cohesiveness. In fact, they have the highest degree of agreement if one averages across all five issue-areas, followed by the Moderate Party, the Left Party and Feminist Initiative. It is hence obvious that they cannot be described as a party whose sole unifying theme is the critique of existing immigration policy, but rather as an ideologically homogenous social conservative party.

[Table 4 about here]

In sum, our analysis of candidates’ positions speaks against characterizing the SD as a single-issue party. They take an extreme and cohesive position on their most prioritized area: immigration. However, they prioritize and appear

15 to be cohesive in other areas as well. Specifically, they are distinctly socially conservative on matters of gender,12 and law and order.13 These are also areas that they prioritize highly, and where they appear to hold fairly cohesive views. When it comes to economic issues, they take a centrist and fairly cohesive position. They thus fail to meet what we have termed the demand-side criteria for being a single-issue party.

The Voters We now shift our focus to the voters in the Swedish 2010 parliamentary election. In Table 5, we present the demographic and socioeconomic composition of those who voted for each of the ten major parties. From the table we can see that SD voters consist mainly of men (62 percent). This is more marked than in the case of most other parties, but it is still not the most extreme. The Pirate Party has even a higher share of men among their voters. Also the Feminist Initiative is also more extreme than the SD, however in the other direction, with women accounting for 74 percent of their voters. Furthermore, the SD has a fairly high share of both young people and the elderly among their voters, but they are not extreme in comparison with other parties. We also conclude that the party has a small share of foreign- born among their voters, only 2 percent, but they are on a par with the Centre Party and the Pirate Party. Finally, the SD voters include large shares of unemployed and also blue-collar workers. The party stands out with the

12 Interestingly, in the Program of principles, they have chosen to label the section in which their views on gender are displayed “The Sweden Democrats, the family and equality between men and women.” Equality between sexes is hence viewed as subordinate to, and part of, the party’s views on family policy. 13 In the Program of principle’s section on “A community governed by law,” it is clear that law and order is one of the party’s most important issues: “Aside from the preservation of the nation, the most important task for the state is to guarantee its citizen’s security and safety”. Here, a conservative tone is also found in the formulation “it is important that crime is punished quickly and consistently and that laws are in correspondence with the popular view on what is right and wrong.”

16 highest share of blue-collar workers among the voters, followed by the Social Democrats. To summarize, the Sweden Democrats clearly have stronger support in some demographic and socioeconomic groups than in others, but the party does not diverge that much from other, more established Swedish political parties.

[Table 5 about here]

From the results we have seen so far, it is difficult to reach the conclusion that SD voters are more diverse than other parties’ voters. However, it could still be the case that they only emphasize one single issue. In order to see whether that is the case, we now consider what political issues are considered to be of importance among the voters of each of the parties. The results are presented in Table 6 as indices for voters for each party and for each political issue. If an index is 0 then all the party’s voters consider the political issue to be of very small importance for their choice of party, and if it is 100 then all consider the issue to be very great importance.

As can be seen in Table 6, most parties’ voters emphasize the importance of the economy. For five out of 10 parties, the economy is the political issue that the voters consider most important among those we are studying. However, the Green Party’s voters consider the environment to be of great importance, the Left Party’s and the Feminist Initiative’s voters stress gender issues, and the Pirate Party’s voters give quite a lot of weight to issues of law and order.

As with the party’s candidates, SD voters consider immigration to be the most important political issue. However, the party’s voters also claim that economy and law and order are of importance for their choice of party. In fact, SD voters give more weight to law and order as a political issue than voters for any of the other parties.

[Table 6 about here]

Based on the results presented above, we can conclude that the SD voters cannot be seen as consisting of diverse economic and demographic groups whose core concern is with one political issue. Hence, the SD do not fulfill the demand-side criteria for being a single-issue party that we set up in the theoretical section.

Conclusion In this paper we have studied the most recent addition to the group of successful radical right-wing parties in Europe: the SD. Our main contribution has been to study in what ways, if any, this particular party can be considered a single-issue party using a large unique dataset containing information on parliamentary candidates’ views on a diverse set of issues. From the literature on single-issue parties we derive supply-side and demand-side criteria that can be used to evaluate parties. First, although non-economic issues, and most notably immigration, are typically the most salient issue for the party’s candidates, economic issues unrelated to immigration are also considered to be fairly important to them. Second, the coherence of the Sweden Democrats’ views is surprisingly high, even when one goes outside their core area. In fact, they appear to be one of the most ideologically cohesive parties to run in the 2010 elections. Third, and turning to the demand-side criteria, the SD’s voters cannot be seen as consisting of unusually diverse economic and demographic groups. Finally, their voters’ core concern is not with one single political issue. In sum, our results suggest that the SD are more than a single-issue party. Our findings for this recent entrant into the European party universe thus echo those of Mudde’s (1999) decade-old assessment of radical right-wing parties in other European countries.

Appendix: The Questions Used in This Paper

The Candidates Each question consisted of a statement to which the respondent could answer “1=Strongly Disagree”, “2=Disagree”, “3=Agree”, “4=Strongly Agree”

18 or “Don’t know.” All questions were recoded such that higher values indicate a more conservative position before creating the indices described in the main text. For all indexes, factor analysis revealed no more than one factor with an eigenvalue over 1, and reliability scores (Cronbach’s alpha) were between 0.65 (Immigration) and 0.93 (Economy).

The respondents were also asked to indicate, for each of the statements, whether the statement referred to an issue that was close to their heart or not, in other words, was of particular importance for them. Among the respondents, 73 percent stated that one or more statements were of that kind. It is worth noting that the respondents were not limited as regards how many statements they could indicate as important. However, most respondents only highlighted a few statements in this way, for example, among those who mentioned at least one statement as referring to an issue close to their heart, 79 percent mentioned five or fewer.

In the following we list the statements included in each index.

Economy Q17 “The wealth tax should be reinstated” Q18 “The tax rate for those with high incomes should be raised” Q19 “The same tax rate should be applied to pensions and wages” Q21 “The tax on work-income should be lowered” Q27 “The maximum time on health insurance should be limited” Q29 “There should be more competition in the public sector” Q30 “Unemployment insurance should be mandatory” Q35 “It should be made more difficult for personnel agencies to circumvent employment protection legislation”

Environment Q1 “Congestion taxes should be introduced in more big cities” Q2 “Sweden should invest in high-speed trains” Q3 “Sweden should allow licensed hunting of wolves” Q4 “Nuclear power should be further expanded” Q5 “The tax on gasoline should be raised”

Immigration Q9 “No municipality should be allowed to refuse to take in refugees” Q10 “Fewer asylum seekers should be accepted into Sweden” Q11 “Refugees without documents should be able to receive free health care” Q12 “Teachers should not be allowed to wear a face-covering veil in Swedish schools” Q32 “Swedish health care should only offer to carry out circumcision when it has a medical value” Q47 “It should be a criminal offense to be a member of a racist organization”

Gender Equality Q13 “A bigger share of parental leave should be reserved for the fathers” Q14 “The use of affirmative action in university admission should be abolished” Q15 ”The child-raising allowance should be abolished” Q20 ”The tax deduction for household services [RUT] should be kept” Q22 “The sex purchase law should be abolished”

Law and Order Q7 “It should be a criminal offense to download copyright protected material from the internet for personal use” Q24 “Violent crimes should lead to tougher sentences” Q25 “The FRA law [a legislative package that authorizes the state to wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden's borders] should be torn up” Q42 “It should be possible to transfer students with disciplinary problems from their school against the will of the student and their parents”

The Voters The analysis of the voters is based on the 2010 Valu exit poll, carried out by SVT (the Swedish public service television company). The sample consists of 11,889 individuals. If we consider only those who voted for a party in the parliamentary election, the number of respondents is to 11,483 individuals, 3,851 of whom were absentee voters (34 percent). This is fairly close to the actual share of absentee voters in the 2010 election, which was 39 percent (Valmyndigheten 2011). The sample consists of voters from four cities. The

20 cities are not randomly selected, but since we are mainly interested in the voters within each party, we consider this not to be a major concern. However, it should be noted that the distribution of votes over the parties is fairly close to the actual election results, as can be seen in Table A1.

[Table A1 about here]

Furthermore, in the analysis of the voters, we use a set of questions that were introduced with the following question: “How important were the following issues for your choice of party today in the parliamentary election?” The questions used referred to the Swedish economy (Q24), the environment (Q22), immigration (28), gender equality (31), and law and order (Q27). For each of the questions the respondents could choose from the following five response categories: “very important,, “fairly important,” “neither important nor unimportant,” “fairly unimportant,” and “very unimportant.” We created an index by rescaling the answers on those questions so that they range from 0 to 100, where 100 refers to “very important” and 0 refers to “very unimportant” and the response categories in between receive 25, 50, and 75. We then calculated the average for each party’s voters.

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Table 1. Parties Included in the Study, with Background Characteristics Party (Abbreviation) Established Seats Votes Moderate Party (M) 1904 107 (30.1%) 1 791 766 (30.1%) Centre Party (C) 1913 23 (6.6%) 390 804 (6.6%) Liberal Party (Fp) 1902 24 (6.9%) 420 524 (7.1%) Christian Democrats (Kd) 1964 19 (5.4%) 333 696 (5.6%) Green Party (Mp) 1981 25 (7.2%) 437 435 (7.3%) Social Democrats (S) 1889 112 (32.1%) 1 827 497 (30.7%) Left Party (V) 1917 19 (5.4%) 334 053 (5.6%) Sweden Democrats (Sd) 1988 20 (5.7%) 339 610 (5.7%) Feminist Initiative (Fi) 2005 0 24 139 (0.4%) Pirate Party (Pp) 2006 0 38 491 (0.6%)

Table 2. Average Candidate Positions by Party and Issue Party Economy Environment Immigration Gender Law and Order Moderate Party 82 69 51 76 79 Centre Party 77 43 44 68 58 Liberal Party 80 58 41 65 73 Christian Democrats 70 56 39 76 71 Green Party 39 10 31 26 34 Social Democrats 16 26 33 17 46 Left Party 12 18 27 11 27 Sweden Democrats 57 72 96 82 81 Feminist Initiative 17 15 21 8 25 Pirate Party 56 43 47 79 11 Note: Higher values indicate a more conservative position on the issue.

Table 3. Average Salience by Party and Issue Party Economy Environment Immigration Gender Law and Order Moderate Party 14 9 3 11 9 Centre Party 10 11 6 13 5 Liberal Party 10 10 10 10 9 Christian Democrats 10 7 7 30 5 Green Party 7 24 12 7 9 Social Democrats 11 6 5 10 3 Left Party 17 11 13 14 9 Sweden Democrats 9 11 40 11 15 Feminist Initiative 9 7 20 33 6 Pirate Party 6 7 8 12 74 Note: Higher values indicate the issue’s higher salience.

Table 4. Cohesiveness Index by Party and Issue Party Economy Environment Immigration Gender Law and Order

Moderate Party 82 77 68 77 74 Centre Party 74 73 69 71 64 Liberal Party 76 74 73 71 66 Christian Democrats 74 69 67 81 68 Green Party 72 80 70 65 63 Social Democrats 79 71 75 75 70 Left Party 80 75 74 78 69 Sweden Democrats 77 73 88 80 77 Feminist Initiative 75 76 75 80 69 Pirate Party 59 56 63 63 72 Note: Higher index values indicate greater cohesion.

Table 5. Demographic and Socioeconomic Composition of Voters by Party (percent) Party Women Young Elderly (65 Foreign- Unemp Blue- (18–29 years and born loyed collar years) older) Moderate Party 46 19 15 4 2 27 Centre Party 56 21 16 2 2 28 Liberal Party 51 22 16 3 3 27 Christian Democrats 50 16 25 4 3 27 Green Party 57 37 6 4 5 36 Social Democrats 55 22 19 9 8 58 Left Party 54 30 9 7 6 45 Sweden Democrats 38 31 13 2 11 64 Feminist Initiative 74 40 6 8 4 33 Pirate Party 24 58 5 2 11 48 TOTAL 51 24 15 5 5 40 Note: Retired persons are excluded from calculations of the percentage of unemployed. In the same way, employers and those who have never worked are excluded from the calculation of the share of blue-collar workers. All distributions are based on survey answers.

Table 6. Average Salience among Voters by Party and Issues Party Economy Environment Immigration Gender Law and Order Moderate Party 91 70 65 67 80 Centre Party 88 78 63 68 71 Liberal Party 87 69 68 67 75 Christian Democrats 87 68 66 62 76 Green Party 71 94 66 79 55 Social Democrats 83 76 67 79 72 Left Party 75 81 69 84 59 Sweden Democrats 82 61 90 60 85 Feminist Initiative 67 83 73 95 49 Pirate Party 57 48 48 50 61 Note: Higher values indicate a higher salience for the issue.

Table A1. Respondents in the Valu Exit Poll 2010 and Election Results in the 2010 Election to the Parliament, by Party (numbers and percent) Party Valu exit poll Election results Respondents Percent Moderate Party 3,255 28.3 30.0 Centre Party 815 7.1 6.6 Liberal Party 902 7.9 7.1 Christian Democrats 624 5.4 5.6 Green Party 1,174 10.2 7.3 Social Democrats 3,192 27.8 30.7 Left Party 864 7.5 5.6 Sweden Democrats 458 4.0 5.7 Feminist Initiative 88 0.8 0.4 Pirate Party 85 0.7 0.6 Other parties 26 0.2 0.4 Total 11,483 100 100

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