economic and social outsiders but political insiders: sweden’s...

Economic and Social Outsiders but PoliticalInsiders:

Sweden’s Radical Right ∗

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

March 2020

Abstract

We study the politicians and voters of Sweden’s radical-right party. On the politician side,the Sweden Democrats overrepresent groups that are marginalized in terms of labor-marketattachment, socioeconomic background, and the traditional nuclear family; groups that otherparties underrepresent. On the voter side, these marginalized groups also support the SwedenDemocrats more strongly. Thus, we interpret the party as a citizen-candidate movement: peoplewith certain traits enter into politics to credibly represent those with such traits in policy-making. We also uncover that, relative to other parties, politicians elected from the SwedenDemocrats score lower on a number of valence traits. All in all, our results suggest that radical-right parties may pose a tradeoff for democracies between better representation for marginalizedgroups and worse valence of elected politicians.

Keywords: Political Selection, Radical Right, Populism.

∗We thank participants in a CIFAR program meeting, conferences at BI, Harvard, Helsinki, NBER, Nottingham,NORFACE, Munich, Rotterdam, Oslo, Uppsala, Tinos, Warwick, and Zurich, and seminars at Ben Gurion, Berkeley,Copenhagen, Hebrew, IIES, LBS, LSE, Rockwool Foundation, Stanford, TSE, UCL, UPF Uppsala, Yale, and Warwickfor helpful comments. We also thank Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons for kindly sharing theirRoutine Task Index data, Olof Backstrom for sharing the code for the SELMA labor-market status model, and JensRydgren for sharing valuable research. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Central BankTercentenary Foundation, Torsten and Ragnar Soderberg Foundations, and the Swedish Research Council.

1 Introduction

In the last two decades, many developed democracies have seen a marked strengthening of radical-right parties, a trend that manifests itself across continents and electoral systems. Such parties andpoliticians are visible throughout Europe. They are also resurging in Australia, Israel, Japan, as wellas on other continents. Radical-right elements currently take part – or have recently taken part – inthe governments of Austria, Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Philippines, Poland, Slovenia, Turkey,and the United States (Rydgren 2018). These parties and politicians share some broad features.Most of them stress traditional values, law and order, and glorify past times, while some of themchallenge the core values of liberal democracy (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012). The dominant messagemixes a populist, anti-establishment stance with a nativist, anti-immigration program (Mudde 2007).

Many scholars, across several academic fields, have explored the drivers of the radical-right move-ment. Virtually all this research considers “the demand side” – in the sense of voter support for theradical right – in particular countries, at particular times. Literally, hundreds of papers have putforward numerous socioeconomic and sociocultural explanations for such voter support (see, amongothers, Knigge 1998, Lubbers et al. 2002, Ivarsflaten 2008, Norris and Inglehart 2019, Mutz 2018,Dehdari 2018).1

But “the supply side” – in the sense of individual candidate selection – remains basically unin-vestigated.2 Except for case studies of specific politicians, we know of only one systematic study. Inhis highly cited monograph, David Art (2011) argues that the selection of politicians is key: radical-right parties succeed when they attract highly educated and politically experienced activists, but failwhen they attract low-status politicians with little experience. The author supports this claim usingdata from interviews and information on the professions of party politicians from various Europeanparties.

Despite the lack of academic attention, the supply side appears prominently in the narrative of thepopulist radical-right: traditional parties are painted as elites who are out of touch with reality (Norrisand Inglehart 2019). By contrast, populist radical-right parties and politicians portray themselvesas the (true) representatives of a mass of outsiders without political representation – as PresidentDonald Trump calls them: the forgotten people.

In this paper, we offer a first comprehensive account of radical-right selection and the represen-tation it offers for social and economic outsiders. We study the Sweden Democrats, a radical-rightparty that went from a negligible political presence in 2002 to being the country’s third largest partyin 2014. We exploit Sweden’s detailed registry data, which provides a panel of yearly observationsfor the entire adult population in 1979-2012. These data allow us to characterize the economic andsocial circumstances of not only individual politicians in different political parties, but also of anyother population group. In this way, we bring the same measurement to bear on the supply side(the selection of individual politicians) as on the demand side (the voter composition of precincts ormunicipalities).

We thus compare politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats to those from other politicalparties and to the full population. Specifically, we ask whether radical-right politicians are selected– and get their political support – from different social groups than politicians in other parties.

Our choice of social groups reflects the strong anti-establishment program that the SwedenDemocrats share with other radical-right parties. We motivate our classifications by drawing onthe social-psychology theories of social identity (Tajfel 1974) and social dominance (Sidanius and

1As of February 2020, Kai Arzheimer’s bibliography on the Radical Right in Western Europe alone stood at 907articles (http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/extreme-right-western-europe-bibliography)

2In the existing literature, the supply side is sometimes given a broader meaning to include factors at the level ofradical-right parties.

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Pratto 1999). Group conflict along a key socioeconomic dimension can arise if individuals who aremarginalized in that dimension see themselves as members of an in-group and more established in-dividuals as members of an out-group. Such group identification and a sense of being at the bottomof a social hierarchy can raise the appeal of an anti-establishment political program among membersof the marginalized group, especially if they experience a relative decline in their social or economicstatus.

Economic and social groups This simple idea of intergroup conflict is general enough to accom-modate hypotheses based on economic insecurity as well as on cultural backlash, to use the labelsin Norris and Inglehart (2019). Specific appeals to marginalized groups abound in the literature onradical-right politics, where leading scholars have argued that political preferences systematically re-late to key economic and social circumstances, including labor-market socialization (Betz 1994, Ignazi2003, Kriesi et al. 2006), social background by parental economics status (Inglehart 1981, Inglehartand Flanagan 1987), and family structure combined with labor-market conditions (Kitschelt 1994,Kitschelt and Mcgann 2005). We use detailed individual-level register data to turn such qualitativearguments into operational classifications of core and marginalized groups, in three key economic andsocial dimensions.

First, labor-market attachment is key for people’s identity in a country like Sweden. Borrowingfrom Lindbeck and Snower (1994), we label the tightly attached as insiders and the loosely attachedas outsiders. Operationally, we rely on research in quantitative sociology, namely the SELMA catego-rization model (Kindlund and Biterman 2002), which uses detailed data on people’s income sourcesover time to measure their individual attachment to the labor market. Among those with a stablejob, we make a further subdivision into vulnerable and secure insiders, based on the risk of replace-ment by automation. Here, our classification relies on occupation-level values of the Routine TaskIntensity (RTI) index (Goos et al. 2014).

Second, we classify more or less marginalized individuals by social background. As in our ownrecent work (Dal Bo et al 2017), we measure this by exploiting information on parents and childrenin different registers. Operationally, we measure the social background of individuals via quantilesof their parents’ income at a similar stage in the life cycle.

Third, we consider the key social divider of family type. As has long been common in sociology(see e.g., Parsons and Bales 1956), we see the traditional nuclear family as a married (or partnered)couple with children, as distinct from those (adults) who live alone or do not have any children. Wemake this classification operational by linking information in three different registers.

Main findings: politicians We first study average national patterns on the supply side from 2002,the first election when the Sweden Democrats are measurably represented (see Figure 1 below), to2014, the last election for which we have data.

For labor-market attachments, we find that Sweden-Democrat politicians include more outsidersand vulnerable insiders than the population. Instead, the other political parties overrepresent secureinsiders. Results are analogous for family types: the Sweden Democrats overrepresent the single anddivorced relative to the partnered. The other parties greatly overrepresent the partnered, in particulartraditional nuclear families. For social background, the patterns are weaker but qualitatively similar.Compared to the population, Sweden Democrat politicians more (less) often have parents whoseincomes 30 years ago were in the lowest (highest) income quartile.

Similar patterns prevail at the local level: wherever marginal groups of outsiders, vulnerableinsiders, and singles are particularly large, the Sweden Democrats offer them more representationrelative to other parties.

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Main findings: voters A natural question is whether these outcomes exclusively reflect supplyfactors – e.g., lower opportunity costs of political entry – or if demand factors are also present. Per-haps, voters and Sweden-Democrat candidates with similar traits also have similar political attitudes– these common values make voters increase their demand for candidates who look like them.

To answer that question, we study how Sweden-Democrat electoral strength relates to the popula-tion composition across different electoral units. In particular, we study municipalities and precincts(the smallest units with electoral data) within municipalities. Across both units, we find a strongpositive correlation between Sweden-Democrat vote shares and the population shares of weakly at-tached labor-market outsiders as well as vulnerable insiders. This makes it implausible to attributethe surge in candidates from economically marginalized groups solely to supply-side factors. A sim-ilar, but weaker, correlation exists for poor social backgrounds. For singles, the evidence is moremixed.

Citizen candidates Our group analysis says that, compared to other parties, Sweden-Democratpoliticians and voters are disproportionately drawn from marginalized groups, especially those inlabor markets. This suggests that the Sweden Democrats can be understood in terms of citizen-candidate models (Osborne and Slivinsky 1996, Besley and Coate 1997). These models assume thatcitizens with certain traits enter into politics to shape policy. As candidates cannot commit to policybefore elections, this makes citizen candidates preferable to voters who share the same traits. Thekey assumption is that some observable trait of candidates credibly signals their policy preferences tovoters. The simplest way this may occur is by candidates sharing social characteristics with voters.

To interpret, convincingly, electoral patterns through the lens of a citizen-candidate model is nottrivial. To our knowledge, it has not been done before, perhaps because it requires matching richinformation on the characteristics and views of both citizens and candidates. We have just that typeof information and provide three pieces of evidence in favor of the citizen-candidate interpretation.One piece is the similarity of economic and social characteristics among Sweden Democrat votersand politicians that we already established. This correspondence supports a citizen-candidate in-terpretation if traits like labor market status help candidates to credibly signal a policy position.The second piece of evidence validates the assumption of credible representation in citizen-candidatemodels. We show that descriptive representation is associated with substantive representation byusing new surveys designed to match the views of citizens and candidates. Specifically, we showthat – along two crucial dimensions – the attitudes of radical-right voters and politicians match eachother, while simultaneously departing dramatically from those of other-party voters and politicians.The third piece of evidence is that the vast majority of Sweden-Democrat politicians have neverbeen candidates (> 90 percent) nor elected representatives (> 98 percent) for another party. Thus,Sweden-Democrat candidates do not look like candidates in Downsian models, who enter politics foropportunistic reasons and adjust their ideological stance, or switch parties, to match voters.

Timing and trigger points The results we have described so far concern average patterns from2002 to 2014, but ignore timing. The most rapid growth for the Sweden Democrats occurred between2006 and 2014, when the party doubled its size in each of two (four-year) electoral periods. While it isdifficult to make causal claims, we do get analytical traction from our group classification when tryingto understand the historical timing. In particular, we look for declines in the status of marginalizedgroups between 2006 and 2014. We cannot identify any such losses for social background and familystatus, but it is easy to point to salient losses for marginalized labor-market groups.

These falls in relative status are tied to two dramatic economic events in the period of Sweden-Democrat growth. In 2006, a center-right coalition of parties took power and implemented a far-

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reaching reform agenda of earned-income tax credits financed by social-insurance austerity to “makework pay”. Over a mere six years, the reforms led to large shifts in inequality across labor-marketinsiders and outsiders. The second event is the 2008 financial crisis, which was followed by a 5-percentdrop of GDP in a single year. This deep recession drastically raised job insecurity for vulnerableinsiders relative to secure insiders.

Sweden-Democrat growth does not just coincide with the timing of these events. Nation-wideentry among the party’s politicians is also increasing in the relative losses incurred by the subgroupsamong outsiders and vulnerable insiders. Moreover, the party’s vote-share gains from 2006 to 2014are significantly related to the extent of economic losses of outsiders and vulnerable insiders in paneldata for municipalities over time.

Radical-right parties, like the Sweden Democrats, use strongly anti-immigrant rhetoric. Surveyevidence also shows the party’s voters and politicians to be disproportionately anti-immigrant. Itturns out, however, that none of our findings on selection and electoral patterns are driven by anymeasurable local immigration proxy. In particular, the demand-side correlations are robust to a longlist of covariates, including the stocks and flows of immigrants from different regions, immigrantshaving jobs or being welfare recipients in a geographic area, as well as crime rates, media reportingon immigration, and measures of local political context. Moreover, out of a dozen indicators for localimmigration and crime, none of them are significantly correlated with Sweden Democrat vote shares.

Implications for political selection The growth of the Sweden Democrats contributes to a moreinclusive political class, by boosting the representation of economically and socially marginalizedvoters. This reflects a responsive democratic party system. But this fidelity in terms of representationcomes at a cost.

Relative to other parties, politicians elected from the Sweden Democrats score lower on a numberof “valence” traits – such as ability, expertise, social trust and moral values. Thus, their entryreorients Swedish local politics away from the positive selection that we recently documented in DalBo et al. (2017). As a result, our study reveals a tradeoff between broad representation and valenceof the political class.

Road map of paper The next section provides some background on Swedish elections, on theSweden Democrats, and on earlier research about their electoral supporters. In Section 3, we discussour data and define the key social groups for our analysis. Section 4 examines the supply side ofpolitics – i.e., ‘who becomes a Sweden Democrat?’ In Section 5, we turn to the demand side – i.e.,‘who votes for the Sweden Democrats?’ Section 6 puts forward our citizen-candidate interpretation,showing that radical-right voters and politicians share not only economic and social traits but alsopolicy-relevant attitudes. In Section 7, we explore the triggers of 2006-14 Sweden-Democrat growth,and examine the role of immigration. Section 8 studies the relative valence of Sweden-Democratpoliticians and describes the valence-representation tradeoff. We conclude in Section 9. A WebAppendix collects some auxiliary material on data and empirical results.

2 Background

This section provides a brief background on Sweden’s electoral institutions and on the SwedenDemocrats’ history, ideological stance, policy orientation, and voter support.

Swedish elections Every four years, Sweden runs elections at the level of 290 municipalities, 20counties, and the nation. All these elections take place on the second Sunday in September with a

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turnout between 80 and 90 percent. In each election, citizens cast a separate party ballot, a rankedlist with a large number of candidates. Based on the results, 13,000+ municipal-council members,1,100 county councilors, and 349 members of parliament are appointed.

In Sweden’s proportional-representation (PR) system, seat shares in the municipal councils andthe national parliament align closely with the vote shares of political parties. Since 1998, voters canalso cast an optional preference vote for one candidate. But as only about a third of all voters exploitthis option, the preference-vote reform only allows a handful of politicians from lower ranks to bypassthe party’s list order and win a seat.3

History of the Sweden Democrats The Sweden Democrats were founded in 1988. In its earlydays, the party was a marginal force in national and local politics. It won political representation forthe first time in 1991, with two municipal council seats. Although some regions exhibited strongersupport than others, the party’s national vote share was only about 1 percentage point until 1998.Panel (a) of Figure 1 shows how support for the party rose over time. In the national parliamentaryelections of 2006, the Sweden Democrats only received 2.9 percent of votes, still below the 4-percentthreshold to gain the first seat. The party broke this threshold in 2010, by earning 5.7 percent ofthe national vote. Another major breakthrough was the 2014 election, when the Sweden Democratsbecame the third largest party with a 12.9 percentage-point vote share and with considerably highersupport in some municipalities.

Panel (b) of Figure 1 shows the number of seats won by the party over time at the three levelsof Swedish politics. Despite its recent success – and differently from its sister parties in many otherEuropean countries – the Sweden Democrats have generally been denied essential political influence.However, this “cordon sanitaire” was broken in some municipalities after the 2014 election, when theparty did play an essential role in putting a governing coalition in place (Aftonbladet 2014).

[FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]

The Sweden Democrats have found it difficult to recruit candidates for their party lists, especiallyduring the early era of the party’s success. Thus, the characteristics of the elected and non-electedcandidates in our data mostly reflect self-selection into the new party, rather than screening by partyleaders.

As described in Widfeldt (2008), the party initially grew out of an organization known as “KeepSweden Swedish” (Bevara Sverige Svenskt, BSS). Over time, the Sweden Democrats moderated theirpolitical stance from biological racism towards cultural national chauvinism. They came to argue thatsocial conflicts ensue when people from different cultures attempt to live together (Widfeldt 2008).In the early 2010s, the party replaced nationalism with social conservatism, and put more emphasison traditional family values and on law and order (Rydgren 2018). Recent work on European-wideparty ideologies has classified the Sweden Democrats as a typical radical-right party (Rydgren 2007,2018) and as part of the populist right (van Kessel 2015, Norris and Inglehart 2019).

Political stance As with other radical-right parties, the Sweden Democrats adopt a clear anti-establishment stance. They also appeal to a nostalgic picture of Sweden’s past, drawing on theconstruct of the “people’s homestead”, a 1920s Social-Democratic vision that emphasizes working-class employment, traditional families, and a strong welfare state.

3This reflects voter “abstention” from the optional vote, a concentration of votes for candidates at the top of theballot, and high thresholds. See Folke et al. (2016) for a thorough analysis of the preference-vote system and itsconsequences.

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Using the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys, we can gauge Sweden-Democrat policy stances on generalleft-right policies and on immigration (Web Appendix Figure W1). Anti-immigration policy is theparty’s signature issue, and the experts in the Survey rate the Sweden Democrats as very anti-immigrant, compared to the Social Democrats or Conservatives (see also Erlingsson et al. 2012).The party has argued that (non-white) immigration takes a large toll on the public finances andthreatens job prospects for natives. When it comes to the left-right spectrum, the party ranks inbetween the Social Democrats and the Conservatives. In the national parliament, it has often votedwith the center-right bloc. But its stance on taxes and labor-market issues is more ambiguous. Aleft-leaning think-tank concludes that for the 2010-2014 election period

“the Sweden Democrats are ambivalent [on tax issues]. The party wants to spend like a left-

wing party, but tax like a right-wing party. . . the party thinks that it can solve this equation

by lowering immigration and international aid.” (Tanksmedjan Tiden 2014).

In municipal politics, the Sweden Democrats have often supported center-right coalitions on taxcuts and privatization, warned of an Islamization of cities and neighborhoods, and demanded “multi-cultural accounting” that would describe the local budget by separately earmarked money spenton natives and immigrants (Wingmar 2011). The party also emphasizes law and order, challengesmulti-cultural education and feminist-inspired pedagogical frameworks, and often strives to directmore resources towards elderly care (Mulinari and Neergaard 2017).

Who votes Sweden Democrat? Based on survey data, Sweden-Democrat voters are dispropor-tionately male, working-class, and low-educated (Sannerstedt 2014, Erlingsson et al. 2012, Oskarsonand Demker 2015, Jylha et al. 2018). The party’s voters are also less trusting of politicians, politicalinstitutions, the court system, and news media than voters of other parties (SCB 2011, Jylha et al.2018).

Earlier research disagrees somewhat on the role of economic vulnerability in driving supportfor the Sweden Democrats. Dehdari (2018) finds that layoff notifications among low-skilled nativeworkers during the financial crisis raised the Sweden-Democrat vote share in precincts of notifiedworkers. A weak labor-market attachment among the party’s voters also shows up in high self-reported support among the unemployed, people on disability insurance, and people on long-termsick leave (Erlingsson et al. 2012, Sannerstedt 2014, Jylha et al. 2018). Some scholars argue thatbecause these categories together do not make up a majority of the party’s voters, economic insecuritycannot be a major driver of the party’s rise (Sannerstedt 2014, 2015, Jylha et al. 2018). Section W1in the Web Appendix discusses these results with regard to survey design and sample stratification.

Data from surveys and exit polls suggest that most of those who cast their ballots for the SwedenDemocrats would otherwise vote for one of the two strongest parties, the Social Democrats and theConservatives. Inflows were larger from the Social Democrats between 2006 and 2010 and from theConservatives between 2010 and 2014 (SCB 2011, 2016).4 On a left-to-right scale, Sweden-Democratvoters put themselves somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum (Sannerstedt 2015).

4Another possibility is mobilization via higher turnout (even though turnout in Swedish elections, around 85 percent,is internationally very high). A direct test in our data reveals that turnout did not go up significantly in municipalitieswhere the Sweden Democrats made their largest gains. This evidence is not definitive, however, as turnout could havefallen absent the gains of the Sweden Democrats.

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3 Data

In this section, we discuss the data for our study and introduce the measures we use to classify thepopulation into economic and social groups.

Register data Our empirical analysis is entirely based on individual-level data, except for voteshares which come aggregated at the level of the electoral precinct or municipality. One importantdataset encompasses all elected and non-elected individual candidates running for national or mu-nicipal political office between 1982 and 2014.5 Altogether, our sample includes more than 200,000unique politicians, more than 50,000 of which have been elected at least once. Electoral results con-taining vote shares for every party in every election are linked to our dataset from records kept bythe Swedish Electoral Agency.

We link these politician data to several administrative registers from Statistics Sweden for theadult population (everybody aged 16 years or older). For most variables, our data holds annualrecords from 1979 to 2012 for everybody in the entire population, about 14 million unique men andwomen. These data contain precise information on demographic and socioeconomic variables (e.g.,age, sex, education level, and occupation). Thus, we can precisely characterize how the personaltraits of politicians compare to those in the entire population.

The Multigenerational Register identifies parent-child relations (we use only biological parents).As the income data begins in 1979, it is truncated. Nevertheless, we observe the income of fathers in1979 for 78 percent of the politicians elected after 2002. To identify different family types, we alsouse personal and family ID-codes for linking to the Marriage Register and the Birth Register.

Various types of annual earnings for the entire population are available from the Swedish TaxAuthority. We also have annual information about an individual’s sector of employment for the wholeperiod. As occupations are only recorded on a yearly basis from 2003, we complement the occupationdata with earlier information from censuses (conducted every fifth year).

Survey data We supplement these various register data with a variety of surveys. Of special noteis a 2017 survey directed to the universe of current local politicians. This survey was carried outin 2017 by a subset of the authors, in collaboration with political scientists from the University ofGothenburg (KOLFU 2017). It had a response rate of close to 70 percent and asked the politiciansnumerous questions about their preferences, motivations, and personality traits (see Sections 7 and9 below). In the same year, a survey conducted together with another set of Gothenburg politicalscientists posed a subset of the same questions (verbatim) to a random sample of Swedish voterstogether with questions about their party sympathies (SOM 2017).

Key economic and social groups As previewed in the introduction, we divide the populationinto core and marginalized groups along a few different dimensions. The first, economic dimensionconcerns the attachment to the labor market. Here, we consider the possession of a steady job, aswell as the risk of losing that job. The second, socioeconomic dimension concerns social background.To gauge this, we exploit past parental incomes of current politicians and others, with populationquantiles of the highest (lowest) incomes representing the established (marginalized) group. Thefinal, social dimension concerns family types. Here, we take the core group to consist of traditionalnuclear families of two partnered adults who have children, as opposed to adults living alone or not

5Prior to every election, each political party must report its ordered list with a personal identification code for eachpolitician. These lists are kept by Statistics Sweden or (in some cases) by regional electoral authorities. After theelection, another record is created with a complete account of all elected politicians from each party.

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having any children of their own. We now define these different groups more precisely in relation tospecific data sources.

Insiders and outsiders in labor markets Our operational definition of insiders and outsidersrelies on the Social Exclusion and Labor Market Attachment (SELMA) framework. This was devel-oped by sociologists Kindlund and Biterman (2002) and Backman and Franzen (2007) to distinguishwhat they call core members of the labor force. Following their definitions, we classify individualsas insiders if their labor income exceeds 3.5 “basic amounts” (SEK 156,800 in today’s prices, aboutUSD 18,700) in each one of the last three years.6

Other individuals are classified as outsiders. The whole outsider group makes up 35-40 percent ofthe grown-up, working-age population during our period of analysis. However, we also follow SELMAdefinitions to further subdivide outsiders into subgroups by the main source of their incomes. Theweb appendix Table W2 provides a detailed description of the subgroups in SELMA.7

We only exploit the SELMA classification for the working-age population. Given our purposes,we exclude students from the outsiders as their labor-market attachment is difficult to classify. Forsimilar reasons, we do not classify retirees by labor-market attachment.

The crude (binary) insider-outsider distinction is used in Sections 4 and 5 on average supply-and demand-side patterns, while the finer outsider distinctions are used in Section 7 on timing andtrigger points.

Vulnerable and secure insiders. Even if we restrict attention to those with regular jobs, notall insiders have a similar labor market. In particular, they face differential risks of losing their jobsdue to technological change, outsourcing, or general business downturns. To classify workers in thisdimension, we again follow earlier research – this time by Autor (2013), Autor and Dorn (2013), andGoos, Manning, and Salomons (2014). These scholars distinguish occupations with different RoutineTask Intensity (RTI) defined by the typical tasks they entail. Specifically, occupations that requireseveral (few) routine tasks, compared to manual or abstract tasks, have a high (low) RTI. We expectthat individuals in such occupations are more exposed in times of high job loss.

How do we identify such individuals in our register data? These data include 2-digit occupation(ISCO) codes for each employed person. Using the RTI index from Goos, Manning, and Salomons(2014), we divide all individuals with a 2002-2012 occupational code into RTI quartiles.

In a first binary classification, we call those insiders (by the earlier definition) whose occupationsbelong to the upper two RTI quartiles – i.e., above the median – vulnerable. By contrast, we refer tothose insiders who work in occupations in the lower two quartiles of the RTI index as secure. We usethis classification in Sections 4 and 5. In Section 7, we instead rely on the finer subgroups definedby the RTI-quartiles.

6The benchmark amount is updated each year for inflation and used in various Swedish social insurance programs.An income exceeding 3.5 benchmark amounts is expected to cover nearly all full-time jobs in minimum-wage sectors.Only a handful of occupations in the hotel and restaurant services would fall below the cutoff (Social Rapport 2010).

7Students are defined by receipt of student benefits and enrollment in higher education (those in military trainingincluded). Retiree status is based on age and age-related pension receipts. Those in unstable employment have acombination of income from labor and other sources, such as unemployment benefits or sick leave, over the last threeyears. Individuals on extensive sick leave are those with at least 90 days of such leave in at least two of the past threeyears. Those on a disability insurance have received benefits above a certain threshold. Finally, excluded from thelabor market have suffered extensive unemployment (at least 180 days in two out of the past three years), who havebeen economically inactive (income below 0.5 benchmark amounts in all three years), or who have recently immigratedto Sweden.

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Privileged and non-privileged backgrounds Social background, as given by economic privilege,is another key dimension of being more or less established in society. Operationally, we follow our ownrecent work (Dal Bo et al 2017). Thus we measure the social background of a particular individual ata particular stage in her life cycle by the position of her parents in the national income distribution,within their sex and birth-year, at a similar stage of their life cycle.

Specifically, we exploit the 1979 income distribution to define quantiles of parental incomes. Forthe politicians elected between 2002 and 2014, our measure of social background is the income quartileof his or her (biological) father 23 to 35 years earlier, provided the father was an adult (at least 18years old) in 1979.8 The 23-35 year time span approximates pretty well the (average) generationalgap. To obtain this social background measure, we rely on a combination of the Income Register andthe Multigenerational Register.

Nuclear and non-nuclear families In a final and social classification, we ask whether individualsare part of society’s most established family type. As sociologists have long emphasized (see forinstance Parsons and Bales 1956), the traditional living arrangement in modern Western societyis the nuclear family. This family type is usually defined as a married (or partnered) couple thatcurrently stays together with their children, or had been staying with them in the past. By contrast,adults who live alone, or who have not had any children of their own, do not belong to the traditionalfamily type.

To make this classification operational, we rely on data from the Marriage Register and theBirth Register. These sources plus (personal) ID codes allow us to directly define married couplesand individuals with children. We approximate partnered (unmarried) individuals as one of twosimilar-aged individuals who reside on the same address and have the same (family) ID-code.

Anti-establishment views by group Our classification above rests on the simple idea that a pop-ulist anti-establishment political program may be more likely to resonate with marginalized groups.While it is hard to directly validate this assumption, we can use survey data to shed some light onits plausibility. The politicians in the survey (KOLFU 2017) gave their informed consent to linkresponses (anonymously) with some (but not all) registers. These links allow us to classify the par-ticipants into different labor-market and family groups. We can also use the background informationin the SOM-voter surveys to classify the respondents into labor-market groups.

Figure 2 shows the share of these politician and voter groups who express high distrust in thenational parliament, a proxy for anti-establishment attitudes. For each dimension, the most marginal-ized group is marked to the left (black color), and the most established group(s) to the right (lighter,gray or white, color). The distrust in pariament is clearly higher for those with weaker attachmentsto the labor market and those who do have not formed traditional families.


4 Politicians

In this section, we examine who becomes a Sweden Democrat. Specifically, we try to assess how theparty’s elected representatives in municipal councils compare to those of the established parties interms of our population groups.

8As discussed in Dal Bo et al (2017), we can also use mother’s income with similar results.

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Labor-market groups The left panel of Figure 3 shows the composition of our labor-marketcategories (excluding students) for three sets of individuals. From left to right, these are the electedlocal politicians from the Sweden Democrats, the population, and the elected local politicians fromother parties.9 The shares in this bar graph are computed as an average over the 2002-2014 electoralperiods.10 As the black and gray segments of the middle bar show, 35 percent of the (non-student)population are outsiders and 29 percent are vulnerable insiders. Together these two groups of,more or less, marginalized labor-market participants represent 64 percent of the adult (non-student)population.

As the bottom (black and gray) segments of the leftmost bar show, the Sweden Democratsoverrepresent each one of the marginal groups. Together, politicians who are outsiders or vulnerableinsiders make up 74 percent of the party’s local councilors. Other parties instead underrepresentthese marginal groups, which only make up about 41 percent of their representatives. The flip side isa massive overrepresentation of the secure-insider group (the white segment of the bar) by traditionalparties: 59 percent of the representatives versus 36 percent of the electorate. Among these otherparties, those to the left – the Social Democrats and the Left Party – and to the center-right sharethe same patterns (not shown).

Social-background groups The middle panel of Figure 3 shows the social background of politi-cians compared to the population, as measured by the quartile of their fathers’ incomes in the 1979national income distribution among men born in the same years. The bar in the middle provides abenchmark, showing that fathers in the population (who were adult in 1979) has almost exactly 25percent in each quartile. This is a result and not a definition: the birth-year-specific national incomedistributions for men in 1979 include non-fathers. Thus, sample selection on income does not seemto be a big problem when studying fathers.


The rightmost bar shows the distribution for elected politicians from other parties. This corrobo-rates findings by Dal Bo et al (2017), who found the social background for the aggregate of Sweden’slocal politicians to be more or less a replica of the social background of the entire population.11 Asthe leftmost bar shows, Sweden-Democrat politicians overrepresent poor social background with 32percent of their fathers in the lowest 1979 income quartile (the black segment of the bar). Thissurplus comes at the expense of rich social backgrounds, as 20 percent of fathers are in the highestincome quartile (the white segment of the bar). Quantitatively, this lopsidedness is small, with theoverrepresentation of poor-family upbringing being only about 7 percentage points.

Family groups The right panel of Figure 3 plots the family situation for politicians and thegeneral population. As explained in Section 3, we distinguish the married (partnered) parents withchildren (the white segment) from those who are childless – single or cohabiting – or single parents(the shaded segments). Here, 52 percent of the general population are partnered with children,compared to a whopping 68 percent of politicians in the other parties. By contrast, only 43 percent

9We have also performed the analysis in this section on the full ballots of nominated candidates, rather than onthe candidates elected from these ballots. If anything, the results we report get stronger with this wider definition ofrepresentation.

10Since our individual data ends in 2012, we have to impute an individual’s 2014 group status from her 2012 data.11The Dal Bo et al (2017) results were expressed in terms of percentiles rather than in terms of quartiles. Also, that

paper did not consider Sweden Democrat politicians as a separate category.

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of Sweden-Democrat politicians belong to a nuclear family, a lower but less-distant number from thefull-population share.

In this social dimension, as in the labor-market dimension, Sweden-Democrat politicians clearlyunderrepresent the most established groups – nuclear families and secure insiders, respectively – whileother parties clearly overrepresent them.

An overrepresentation index We can refine the analysis around Figure 3 by estimating thefollowing regression for the full population of politicians from each group g

Lgi,t = βgSDi,t + Zi,t + εgi,t. (1)

In this expression, Lgi,t denotes a binary indicator for councillor i in group g and election t, and SDi,t

is a binary indicator for i being a Sweden-Democrat politician.When studying political selection unconditional patterns have descriptive value. But to the extent

that some demographic characteristics are widely expected to correlate with radical-right support, itis also valuable to control for them. The stereotypical radical-right sympathizer is (white) middle-aged, low-educated, and male. To hold such traits constant, we add indicators, Zi,t, for gender, age,and education. Indeed, compared to other parties, the Sweden Democrats field candidates who areless often female (26 vs. 44 percent), more often under-35 (23 vs. 13 percent), more often retired (23vs. 16 percent), and less often tertiary-educated (25 vs. 48 percent).12

We use the estimates to measure relative Sweden-Democrat supply. For each g, we compute

βg

E(Lgi,t | other party)

− 1. (2)

This index is equal to 0 if the Sweden Democrats have the same share of elected from subgroup gas do other parties. It takes a positive (negative) value if the party overrepresents (underrepresents)the group. For instance, a 100-percent overrepresentation corresponds to an index value of 1.

Sweden Democrat overrepresentation across groups Figure 4 plots this overrepresentationindex, in the three dimensions we consider. The black dots in the figure show the average indexes(together with 95-percent confidence intervals), estimated without controls. The dark-gray dots showthe estimates with controls Zi,t for sex, education, and age, while the light-gray dots show estimateswhen we also add municipal fixed effects.

The leftmost graph confirms that the Sweden Democrats overrepresent outsiders and vulnerableinsiders, at the expense of secure insiders. This is true even as we add demographic and geographiccontrols, though the overrepresentation indexes fall from about 120 to 100 percent for outsiders andfrom about 95 to 55 percent for vulnerable insiders.

Extending the analysis to people that have not yet entered the labor market, or have already leftit, the Sweden Democrats do not overrepresent these groups in the raw data (students), or when weinclude controls (the retired).


The middle graph in Figure 4 corroborates the impression gleaned from Figure 3. That is, Sweden-Democrat politicians are more often selected from a poor social background compared to other

12The reported results rest on a formulation where these four binary indicators enter additively. No result changesimportantly in a saturated formulation with a full set of interactions among all indicators.

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politicians and the population. While the difference is statistically significant, it is quantitativelysmall: about 10 percent, once we hold constant demographic and geographic covariates.

Finally, the rightmost graph shows that the Sweden-Democrat overrepresentation of singles re-mains a robust feature of the party’s elected politicians. It is on the order of 60 to 80 percent,conditional on demographics and geography. As in Figure 2, the party robustly underrepresentsnuclear families relative to the other parties.13

Similar patterns emerge when we focus on the nominated, rather than elected, candidates on theballots (see Figure W2 in the Web Appendix).

Selection at the municipal level So far, we have only presented analyses at the national level.In Figure 5, we explore whether the Sweden Democrats continue to overrepresent the economicallyand socially marginalized at the municipality level. The figure again differentiates between SwedenDemocrats and other parties, and includes a 45-degree (dotted) line to show where population andpolitician shares coincide.

As the two upper panels make clear, local parties do produce more elected politicians amonglabor-market outsiders and vulnerable insiders, respectively when a larger share of the working-age population in their municipality hold that status. But as seen from the two regression lines, theSweden Democrats do so at a higher rate compared to the other parties. In terms of levels, traditionalparties have markers below the 45-degree line, meaning they underrepresent labor-market outsidersand vulnerable insiders almost everywhere (as we could have guessed from Figures 3 and 4). TheSweden Democrats instead have markers above, or close to, the 45-degree line and thus overrepresentthese marginal groups in most municipalities.


The two lower panels of Figure 5 repeat the analysis for the social categories. Based on the resultsin Figures 3 and 4, we use the shares of the municipal population and politicians with a father in thelowest 1979 income quartile. Here, the two regression lines both have a slope close to unity. Eventhough on average the Sweden Democrats overrepresent those with a poor social background, theseregression lines lie close to each other. Of course, this closeness corresponds to the small national-leveloverrepresentation documented in Figure 4.

Finally, the lower right panel displays the corresponding results for family structure. In line withthe results in Figures 3 and 4, other parties systematically underrepresent the single and divorcedalmost everywhere, while the Sweden Democrats systematically overrepresent them, especially inmunicipalities where the non-partnered are a dominant share of the local population.

Summing up The Sweden Democrats offer considerably more local representation to the twomarginalized labor-market groups than do the other parties in the Swedish political system. Inaddition, the party overrepresents the single – including single parents and the divorced – while otherparties overrepresent members of nuclear families. For social backgrounds (parental income), the

13We have used social background in terms of income as one classifier. One may reasonably ask if the current familystructures of different parties simply reproduce patterns in previous generations. The data suggest that the SwedenDemocrats overrepresent the single and divorced by more than their own parental background would suggest. In thepopulation, 43 percent of individuals are single or divorced compared to 66 percent of Sweden Democrats and 29percent of politicians from other parties. In 1979, 20 percent of the population was single or divorced, whereas thisapplied to 27 percent of parents to Sweden Democrats politicians and 16 percent of parents to other politicians. Theoverrepresentation index for the single/divorced among Sweden Democrats is 0.23, while among their parents it wasonly 0.07.

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differences are qualitatively similar but quantitatively small. Overall, Sweden Democrat politiciansdo indeed overrepresent groups of individuals with tenuous attachments to the most establishedgroups in society, especially in the labor-market and family dimensions.

5 Voters

In this section, we study how voting for the Sweden Democrats relates to the labor-market, social-background, and family groups we have distinguished. For this analysis, we aggregate the indivdual-level group classifications to the level of a specific locality in a particular election period.

Methodology In one aggregation, we analyze voting across Sweden’s 290 municipalities. But wealso perform the same analysis across the country’s 5,600 precincts. Precincts, the lowest level atwhich election results are recorded, form subsets of municipalities and have an average population ofabout 1,200 people.

For the municipality analysis, in the top row of Figure 6, we plot the relationship between theSweden-Democrat vote share and the share of each marginalized group, one by one. To obtain theobservations and the regression line, we use data from four election years, namely 2002, 2006, 2010and 2014. For each of our measures, we hold constant election-year fixed effects, such that the y-axisshows vote-share deviations from the election-year mean. A dot in each scatterplot corresponds to anaverage over 50 observations. Note also that the y-axes in the four plots have the same scale steps,so the slopes of the regression lines are easier to compare.

For the precinct analysis illustrated in the bottom row of Figure 6, we plot the same relationshipfor each marginalized group. Here, we only use data from 2002, 2006, and 2010, as the precinct delin-eations for 2014 are not available in our data. But our analysis now includes interacted municipality-election-year fixed effects, such that the x-axis shows deviations from the municipality mean. Onceagain, a dot represents 50 observations and the y-axes are drawn with the same scale.

Labor-market groups In Section 4, we saw that elected Sweden Democrat councilors systemat-ically overrepresented marginalized groups in the labor market. The first and second panels of thetop row in Figure 6 show that an analogous relation holds for the party’s electoral support. In otherwords, the Sweden Democrats saw larger vote shares in municipalities with larger shares of outsidersand vulnerable insiders relative to the year-specific mean. The cross-municipality slope coefficientbetween the share of outsiders and Sweden-Democrat vote share is 0.074 (se = 0.027). The corre-sponding slope for the share of vulnerable insiders is 0.139 (se = 0.013). A 20 percentage-pointshigher outsider share in the municipal population is thus associated with a 1.5 percentage-pointshigher vote share for the Sweden Democrats, while a 20 percentage-points higher share of vulnerableinsiders is associated with a 2.8 percentage-points higher vote share.

Looking at the same panels in the bottom row, we see clearly positive and tightly estimated rela-tionships across precincts, within municipalities. The within-municipality slope coefficients betweenthe Sweden-Democrat vote share and the precinct shares of outsiders and vulnerable insiders are0.030 (se = 0.007) and 0.0865 (se = 0.005), respectively.


Social-background groups In Section 4, we looked for overrepresentation by Sweden-Democratpoliticians of people with poor social backgrounds. While we uncovered such overrepresentation

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qualitatively, it was quantitatively small. The third top-row panel of Figure 6 shows that the Sweden-Democrat vote share is not as strongly correlated with the municipality’s share of fathers in the 1979bottom national income quartile. The slope coefficient is 0.043 (se = 0.025) and only statisticallysignificant at the 10 percent level. The relationship becomes considerably stronger at the precinctlevel, as seen from the corresponding plot in the bottom row. The slope is now 0.059 (se = 0.009),although some non-linearity is also apparent.

Family groups In Section 4, we documented that Sweden Democrat elected politicians systemat-ically overrepresent those who do not belong to traditional nuclear families. However, in contrast tothe other panels, especially the ones for marginalized labor-market groups, we do not find a strongand stable association between Sweden-Democrat vote shares and the share of singles or divorced ina locality. With a slope coefficient of −0.081 (se = 0.028), the relationship at the municipal level isnegative, as shown in the upper rightmost panel. At the precinct level, the relation is instead weaklypositive with a slope coefficient of 0.013 (se = 0.003), as shown in the lower rightmost panel.

6 Citizen Candidates

In this section, we propose an interpretation for the findings in Sections 4 and 5. We also offeradditional evidence in favor of that interpretation.

Our suggested interpretation All in all, our findings on politicians and voters suggest thatmarginalized groups do play a role in the political supply and demand for the Sweden Democrats.This is particularly evident for members of marginalized labor-market groups, who appear to besupplying as well as demanding Sweden-Democrat politicians. A concentration of voters with poorsocial backgrounds seems to boost demand for Sweden Democrats, especially at the most local level,whereas the supply of politicians responds only weakly to this form of marginalization. Marginalizedfamilies, on the other hand, play a more important role in the supply of Sweden-Democrat politiciansthan in the political demands from the electorate.

These patterns invite a citizen-candidate interpretation, at least along labor-market lines.14 Ifpolitical parties cannot write binding contracts with their voters, sharing a similar labor-marketsituation with voters will make Sweden-Democrat politicians credible candidates in the eyes of out-siders and vulnerable insiders. In this section, we add other pieces of evidence that buttress such acitizen-candidate interpretation.

Earlier political experience A new party – like the Sweden Democrats – could conceivably bemade of old opportunistic politicians who have simply reshuffled themselves into a new party label.But then, the citizen-candidate interpretation would lose its appeal: it would be difficult for voters totake seriously politicians who suddenly abandoned a mainstream party for a radical-right alternative.

We would thus like to verify that most politicians who stand as candidates and get elected forthe party are new to the political arena. To do so, we use our ballot data since the 1982 election (10elections in total) to compute the fraction of local councilors for the Sweden Democrats who haveever appeared on a list or been elected for another party. This analysis shows that over 90 percenthave never been nominated, and over 98 percent have never been elected before they appear on aSweden-Democrat list. The corresponding numbers are much lower for the other parties (results

14See Osborne and Slivinski (1996) and Besley and Coate (1997) for the original formulations of the citizen-candidatemodel.

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available upon request). In other words, Sweden Democrat councilors do not look like opportunistic(office-motivated) Downsian candidates, who judge their chances in other parties as poor.

Descriptive and substantive representation Similarity of an important trait – like labor-market status – could credibly signal to voters that a certain candidate will faithfully representthem. However, for descriptive representation to translate into substantive representation, politi-cians have to espouse the same views as their voters. Finding that politicians and voters share thesame attitudes would thus further support a citizen-candidate interpretation.

As mentioned in Section 2, the anti-establishment and anti-immigration stances are the twostarkest features of the Sweden Democrats. To shed light on these features, we turn to survey dataon attitudes. Specifically, we compare the attitudes towards the establishment through the lens ofa question about distrust in the national parliament as a proxy for the establishment (in the sameway as in Figure 2). When it comes to anti-immigration attitudes, we use a question about refugeeimmigration. For both attitudes, politicians and voters were asked exactly the same questions in the2017 KOLFU and SOM surveys. Since voters were also asked to state their party sympathies, we cancheck whether the attitudes of politicians from a certain party are congruent with the attitudes oftheir voters. These unique features make it worthwhile to consider these surveys, even though theywere taken after our sample period.

The left graph in Figure 7 compares voters’ and politicians’ views on a proposal to reduce refugeeimmigration, with average politician views on the x-axis and average voter views on the y-axis. Eachparty is marked by a circle, with a diameter proportional to its vote share in the 2014 parliamentaryelection. Among voters for other parties than the Sweden Democrats (the unfilled circles) only 5-35 percent see reducing immigration as a good proposal, while only between 2-25 percent of theother-party politicians do. These percentages contrast starkly with the views of Sweden-Democratsupporters and politicians (the filled circle). Among supporters, 80 percent think that restrictingrefugee immigration is a very good idea and about 90 of the party’s politicians agree.

The right graph in Figure 7 compares levels of distrust in the political establishment. Amongother parties, only 5-25 percent of voters and politicians say that their distrust in parliament is veryhigh or quite high. Among the Sweden Democrats, the corresponding number is about 60 percent.


The unfilled and filled markers in both graphs lie close to the 45-degree line, showing a closecongruence between the attitudes of voters and politicians. Remarkably, Sweden-Democrat votersand politicians have highly congruent attitudes, which strongly diverge from the attitudes held byvoters and politicians in all other parties. The filled and unfilled circles are on opposite sides ofthe 45-degree lines, with Sweden-Democrat (other-party) politicians expressing stronger (weaker)antipathies than their voters.

7 Trigger Points

Which particular events, if any, lie behind the rapid growth of the Sweden Democrats between 2006and 2014? This section shows how we gain traction on that question by exploring how the relativestatus changes over time for the marginalized groups we have defined.

Points of departure No prospective status shifts stand out in the two social dimensions during2006-14. Since we measure the social backgrounds of active politicians and voters by relative parental

15

incomes in 1979, these were clearly predetermined. Moreover, we cannot isolate any obvious shiftsin the relative social status of traditional and non-traditional families during the period. But it iseasy to find a policy shift and an economic shock which dramatically altered the relative status ofour core and marginalized labor-market categories. We therefore turn to this shift and shock.

The make-work-pay reforms and Sweden Democrat supply In 2006, Sweden elected a newcenter-right government coalition that enacted a series of reforms aiming to “make work pay.” Thesereforms used roll-backs of various social benefits, flowing to the unemployed and those on disabilityand sick leaves, to finance a sequence of tax cuts via Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC).

The tax and benefit cuts, almost by definition, shifted incomes from outsiders to insiders in thelabor market. This is illustrated in the left panel of Figure 8, which plots average disposable incomesfor insiders and various categories of outsiders from 2002 (taken as the benchmark year for bothgroups) to 2012. Between 2002 and 2006, the income gap between insiders and the various outsidergroups only increase marginally.


But after 2006, the income gaps widen sharply. One clearly sees a hike of average insider disposableincome due to the first EITC tax cuts in 2007 (later tax cuts are confounded with the financial crisis– see below). One also sees a cut in average outsider income due to the initial benefit austerity in2008. By 2012, the cumulated relative deterioration of average outsider income since 2006 is about20 percent.

There is substantial variation in the 2006-12 disposable-income losses, relative to insiders, acrossdifferent subgroups of outsiders. Outsiders who had unstable work, disability insurance, or remainedunemployed, all faced a relative income loss of around 20 percent. The outsiders farthest away froma stable job thus faced the largest loss in their relative disposable income.

The right panel in Figure 8 displays how much the supply of Sweden-Democrat politicians over-represented each of the outsider groups, when we adapt the specification in (1) and report theoverrepresentation coefficients in (2). Clearly, the Sweden Democrat overrepresented the outsidergroups in proportion to how much they were hurt by the make-work-pay reforms.

The financial crisis and Sweden Democrat supply The negative shock from the financial crisisaffected employment security, but only for some groups. The risk of job termination rose markedlyfor individuals employed in above-median RTI occupations – i.e., those we have labeled vulnerableinsiders. Figure 9 plots the average job-loss risks over time for individuals with insider status in 2006.For each year on the horizontal axis, the vertical axis displays the share of these 2006 insiders whohad non-zero unemployment benefit payments in that year (meaning, they were unemployed at leastfor some time).

Clearly, the two quartiles of most vulnerable insiders saw higher average job losses, especiallyafter the financial crisis. Rising unemployment hits those in the fourth RTI quartile even harderthan those in the third quartile. By 2009 or 2010, when the employment impact is strongest, thesecure insiders in the two lowest RTI-quartiles do not see any substantial rise in unemployment froma level of about 4 percent in 2008. In contrast, the risk of job loss for the vulnerable insiders goes upto more than double that number and stays above 7 percent until the end of the sample period.


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Section 4 documented that Sweden-Democrat politicians, on average, overrepresented vulnerableinsiders. Since the financial crisis generated substantial inter-quartile variation, it is worth examiningwhether that overrepresentation reflects the differences among insiders. The right panel in Figure 9shows a clear overrepresentation for both the third and the fourth quartiles of the RTI distribution,though markedly higher for the fourth quartile. In sum, the higher the employment risk broughtto a group by the financial crisis, the more that group increased its supply of Sweden-Democratpoliticians.

The evidence presented thus far in this section ties back to the analysis on political supply inSection 4, but in the temporal context of the fiscal reforms and the financial crisis between 2006 and2014. This context helps account for the explosive growth of the Sweden Democrats in these eightyears. That account will be more convincing, however, if we can also link the Sweden-Democratelectoral support to the timing of these shocks and local inequities brought by them. We now takeon this task.

Sweden Democrat demand – regression specification Let vsm,t denote the Sweden Democratvote share in municipality m and election t. We now regress this variable on outsider-insider inequality(ineqm,t) and the vulnerable-insider share (sharem,t). Specifically, we estimate,

vsm,t = α · ineqm,t +∑

βt · ηtsharem,t + ηt + Xm,tλ+ δm + εm,t . (3)

To allow for an effect of the evolving income gap, which is so evident in Figure 8, we run (3) withtwo alternative measures of insider-outsider inequality:

ineqm,tm,t =

N outm,t

Nm,t

·I inm,t

Ioutm,t

and ineqn,2006m,t =N out

m,2006

Nm,2006

· Iint

Ioutt

. (4)

The first (ineqm,tm,t) measure is based on the ratio of insider and outsider disposable incomes in the

municipality itself in the current electoral period. The second (ineqn,2006m,t ) measure gives a speci-fication analogous to a reduced-form Bartik-style design, with national insider-outsider inequalitytimes the initial (pre-reform) share. We do not pursue a full IV-analysis, however, as a standardBartik instrument is unlikely to satisfy the exclusion restriction. Still, the variation in ineqn,2006m,t is

more plausibly exogenous than the one in ineqm,tm,t. We express both ineqm,t measures as z-scores to

facilitate interpretation.We allow the coefficients on the vulnerable-insider share to differ across electoral periods, to take

into account the variation in unemployment risk, which is so evident in Figure 9. As with inequality,we use two alternative measures: sharetm,t is the municipality’s current share and the other share2006m,t

is the fixed 2006 (pre-recession) vulnerable-insider share in the municipality.To non-parametrically remove the aggregate time trend in the Sweden-Democrat vote share,

we always include election-period fixed effects, ηt. To focus on variation within municipalities, wealways include municipality fixed effects, δm. We always include a “standard” control vector Xm,t

of municipality-level variables thought or known to correlate with voting for radical-right parties,namely the local shares of foreign born, tertiary educated, and employed in main industrial sectors(1-digit SNI level). Given the attention paid to the links between radical-right voting, immigrationand crime, we also run a specification with an “additional” control vector including a variety ofmeasures (see further below). Finally, we cluster the standard errors at the municipality level.

OLS demand-side results Column (1) in Table 1 reports the OLS version of the municipality-panel correlation of the Sweden-Democrat vote share with insider-outsider inequality based on the

17

time-varying local measure (ineqm,tm,t). The effect is positive and quite precisely estimated. A one

standard deviation increase in insider-outsider inequality is associated with a 0.8 percentage-poinhigher vote share of the Sweden Democrats.

Column (2) shows that insider-outsider inequality and Sweden-Democrat votes remain signifi-cantly, but more weakly, related when we add the evolving share of vulnerable insiders (sharetm,t).The estimates show that the rising unemployment risk for vulnerable insiders documented in Figure8 is indeed associated with increasing Sweden Democrat vote shares in the two elections followingthe financial crisis, especially the 2014 election (the 2006 election is the reference category).

[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]

Bartik-style demand-side results Column (3) replaces the local, current-share measure of insider-outsider inequality with the national, pre-reform-share measure (ineqn,2006m,t ). Again, voting for theSweden Democrats is positively related to insider-outsider inequality. This relation is still quiteprecise, but much stronger than in column (1). A one standard-deviation hike in insider-outsiderinequality is now associated with more than a 1.8 percentage-points higher vote share of the SwedenDemocrats.

Column (4) adds the pre-recession-share measure of vulnerable insiders (share2006m,t ). The associ-ation found in column (3) remains strong, albeit smaller in size, when we add the vulnerable-insidervariables. The relations between Sweden-Democrat voting and the share of vulnerable insiders re-main similar to those in column (2), with the largest estimates for the two elections following thefinancial-crisis recession.

Is it immigration? As discussed in Section 2, Sweden Democrat rhetoric has been markedly anti-immigrant. Much existing research stresses how immigration shocks could boost radical-right supportby promoting economic insecurity among natives who worry about scarce jobs (Billiet et al. 2014,Sekeris and Vasilakis 2016, Hangartner et al. forthcoming) or scarce government welfare programs(Borjas 1999).15 Sweden-Democrat proposals and campaigns indeed fuel such threats.16

Figure W3 in the Web Appendix plots average Sweden-Democrat vote shares against the share ofthe population made up by immigrants in the municipality or the precinct. While the raw data showa positive relation, this relation disappears once we include controls for the share of the populationthat belong to marginalized groups.

In addition to this cross-sectional analysis, we expand the panel-data regression analysis in Table 1,by adding a battery of immigration and crime variables to the control vector Xm,t.

17 We motivate and

15Billiet et al. 2014, and Guiso et al. 2017 show that economic insecurity is associated with anti-immigrant attitudesin the European Social Survey. Moreover, the most vulnerable economic groups exaggerate immigrant numbers, whichtriggers further anti-immigrant sentiments (Alesina et al. 2018).

16Before the 2010 election, a party commercial featured burka-clad women with strollers winning a running race forthe national budget against senior ladies with walkers. The message – a culturally distinct group crowds out supportfor vulnerable Swedes – could not be clearer. The video was censored by Swedish Public TV, which helped make itviral.

17Specifically, we add controls for the share of foreign born outside the OECD, the share of foreign born outside theOECD plus people born in Sweden with at least one parent born outside the OECD, the change in the proportion ofimmigrants since the last election year, the share of immigrant outsiders in the municipal population, the weightedindustry share of immigrants, the election year to election year change in that variable, and finally the weightedoccupation share of immigrants. In addition we use statistics provided by the Swedish National Council for CrimePrevention, to control for the total number of crimes per inhabitants, and the number of crimes per inhabitants in twosub-categories: larceny (most proximate to gang violence), rape and sex offences (massively politicized by the SwedenDemocrats), and total crime. In these data, attempted offences are counted as crimes, and multiple offences againstthe same person are each counted as an individual crime.

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describe the variables in the Web Appendix (Section W2). These variables all appear prominently inearlier radical-right research. Columns (5) and (6) present the estimates when all these new controlsare added to the specifications in columns (3) and (4). The earlier point estimates remain largelyintact, although the coefficient on insider-outsider inequality is less precisely estimated. Moreover,only two immigration variables (immigrant share including Nordic born, and the change in theimmigrant share) and one crime variable (rape and sex offenses) are significantly related to theSweden Democrat vote share, when added on their own. Most importantly, our main estimates areonly marginally affected by the immigration and crime controls. Table W3 in the Web Appendixdiplays the full set of coefficient estimates from different specifications with immigration and crimecontrols.

The stable results for our labor-market measures and the fragile reults for the immigration vari-ables may appear surprising. But it is worth bearing in mind (data and results available upon request)that: (i) Sweden did not see any dramatic immigration hike during 2006-2014, (ii) absent such hikes,the Swedish public did not become more anti-immigrant according to survey data, (iii) attitudes toimmigration did not shift differentially across the labor-market groups we have emphasized. How-ever, better understanding the radical-right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is an important task for futureresearch.

Summary We certainly do not claim to have nailed the causal relationships in the data. Neverthe-less, the results in this section strongly indicate a consistent set of trigger points across politicians andvoters. Among politicians, members of groups who lost the most from the make-work-pay reformsand the financial crisis joined the Sweden Democrats in much larger numbers during 2006-14 thanmembers of the groups who came out of these events unscathed.

Among voters, the Sweden Democrats had their big surge in 2006-14. In this period, the partyclearly grew the most in places where the reforms made outsider incomes drop the most relativeto insiders. The same is true in places with the largest fractions of vulnerable insiders, who riskedlosing their jobs in the financial crisis. The associations are statistically precise and quantitativelynon-trivial.

For example, we can use the result in Column (4) to attribute part of the Sweden-Democratvote gain in 2006-14 to the changing insider-outsider income gap in the same period. If we assumethat the within-municipality estimate applies within the whole nation, we can multiply 1.6 with thenational hike in inequality (at a constant outsider share) of 1.8 standard deviations. In this back-of-the-envelope calculation, the wider income gap alone can thus account for about 3 percentage pointsout of the 10 percentage-point Sweden-Democrat gain.

All in all, these results not only speak to likely trigger points for the Sweden-Democrat expansion.They also reinforce the citizen-candidate interpretation we put forward in Section 6. Here, thatinterpretation says that marginalized labor-market groups, whose status suffered from the make-work-pay reforms and the financial recession, raised their demand for descriptive representation to ensuresubstantive representation. The same negatively impacted groups supplied such representation, byentering as candidates for the Sweden Democrats.

8 A Representation-Valence Tradeoff

The rise of the Sweden Democrats suggests a notable plasticity of Sweden’s democracy. As discussedin Sections 4 and 5, the new political party gave voice to, previously underrepresented, marginalizedgroups in Swedish society. As discussed in Section 7, following economic events that afflicted the

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relative status of (some of) these groups, the new political party made of novice politicians surgedin the polls and raised the representation of the aggrieved.

In this short section, we ask whether this adjustment in representation entails any trade-offs.Specifically, we ask if the selection of politicians into the Sweden Democrats differs from that intoother political parties, when we move beyond marginalized economic and social groups. Our ownrecent research has shown that the Swedish political class is, by and large, positively selected (DalBo et al 2017) in terms of various valence characteristics. Is that true of the Sweden Democratpoliticians as well?

Relative valence Figure 10 compares politicians from different parties on a set of traits chosento approximate an aptitude for local politics. Its left graph shows the difference between the sharesof Sweden-Democrat and other-party politicians who have: political experience as a councilor, jobexperience in the public sector, and a tertiary education. The difference in political experience isabout −40 percentage points, a natural disadvantage for a newer party made of novices. The differ-ences in other expertise variables are somewhat smaller: compared to Sweden-Democrat politicians,other-party politicians are 30 percentage points more likely to have job experience in the public sector(the major concern for Swedish local politics), and about 25 percentage points more likely to havecompleted a tertiary education.


The right graph in Figure 10 shows differences in a few other traits, all measured in termsof standard deviations (in the sample of politicians). The leftmost dot shows the difference in theearnings score, an ability measure based on the residuals estimated from a rich Mincer equation for thewhole population, a score developed by Besley et al. (2017) and used by Dal Bo et al. (2017). Sincewe know that the Sweden Democrats are more often outsiders, we compare the earnings score onlyfor politicians who are labor-market insiders. Among these insiders, Sweden-Democrat politiciansstill score 0.5 standard deviations below other-party politicians.

While the earnings score is computed from register data, the remaining scores in the figure comefrom our own survey among the universe of local politicians (KOLFU 2017). With a smaller sampleof about 9,000 politicians, the confidence intervals are a bit wider. In the middle, we consider public-service motivation in the form of a so-called Perry score. As suggested by administration scholars Kimet al. (2013), this is computed from the answers to a battery of questions about private and altruisticmotives. On average, Sweden-Democrat politicians score 0.6 standard deviations below politiciansin other parties. Lastly, we use the HEXACO module of questions developed by social psychologistsLee and Ashton (2004) to construct an index for morality (honesty and humility). Sweden-Democratpoliticians again score the lowest, now by about 0.25 standard deviations.

Implications As these comparisons show, the Sweden Democrats not just represent other groupsin society than the established parties. Their representatives carry different qualifications, attitudes,and outlooks on life. This suggests how a representation-valence tradeoff can arise, when the partysystem responds to supplies of and demands for representation by marginalized groups.

9 Final Remarks

Our paper is the first to systematically explore the supply side of a major populist party, usingindividual-level data for the locally elected representatives of the growing Sweden Democrats. We

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analyze the selection of the party’s representatives, by referring to core and marginalized groups indifferent economic and social dimensions. On average, marginalized labor-market and family groupsare clearly overrepresented among Sweden-Democrat politicians, but underrepresented among other-party politicians. During the party’s fastest growth in 2006-14, the labor-market groups that sufferedthe most from two main economic events supplied the party with the largest number of politicians.These results challenge the conventional wisdom derived from Art (2011), who held that a radicalright party can only be successful by recruiting politicians from successful and highly-qualified groups.

On the demand side of politics, we mostly expand earlier research on how economic circumstancesand events may help shape populist votes (Rydgren and Arzheimer 2018, Autor, et al. forthcoming,Dehdari 2018). We may be the first to document the role for poor social background, as measured byparental income, in driving radical-right support. We also show (as does Fetzer 2019) how the localconsequences of an important set of national policy reforms are a main correlate of local populistvotes.

Together, these findings suggest a citizen-candidate interpretation: aggrieved individuals notonly support the Sweden Democrats electorally, but join their ranks as members and political candi-dates. Our interpretation is that political platforms lose credibility in the wake of grievances amongmarginalized individuals. As in citizen-candidate models, policies become credible when enteringcandidates share the socioeconomic traits of voters, and thus appear committed to representing themfaithfully. An implicit assumption in such models is that descriptive representation generates sub-stantive representation. We validate that assumption, by demonstrating how the Sweden Democratsconcentrate politicians and supporters who radically diverge from other parties in terms of theiranti-immigrant sentiment and distrust in the political establishment.

On the one hand, we have uncovered how economic and social circumstances plus economicshocks among marginalized groups have spawned both a supply of politicians and a demand forrepresentation. In this sense, the Sweden Democrats play the traditional role of new parties indemocracies, namely to speak for previously underrepresented groups (while speaking less for othergroups, like women and non-European immigrants).

On the other hand, we have uncovered how elected radical-right politicians score lower than other-party politicians on a number of personality traits and attitudes that many would regard as valencecharacteristics in politics. In this sense, the new radical-right party threatens the positive selectionon ability in Sweden’s local democracy that we have recently documented (Dal Bo et al. 2017). Allthings considered, radical-right parties may thus present democracies with a tradeoff, where broaderrepresentation of voters diminish the caliber of politicians.

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Figure 1: Sweden-Democrat Votes and Seats over Time.

Figure 2: Trust in Parliament in Different Labor-market and Family Categories

Notes: The graph shows the proportion of politicians or voters who respond that they have “low trust” or “very lowtrust” in the national parliament. The voter data is from the (annual) 2004 to 2015 SOM surveys, and the politiciandata from the 2017 KOLFU survey. As the KOLFU responses are linked to (some) registers, we can use the samedefinitions of groups as in the text. As the SOM survey response are not linked to any registers, we have to rely onan alternative definition of outsiders. Relying on the SOM background data, we define a voter as an outsider if sheis employed in a government labor-market program, unemployed, on disability insurance, non-employed, or employedwith a low household income. The SOM background data does include occupation, so we can use the same definitionsof vulnerable and secure insiders as in the text.

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Figure 3: Comparison of Labor-market, Social-background and Family Categories

Notes: The figure compares the composition of labor-market categories (right), social background categories (middle)and family categories (right) among Sweden Democrat politicians, the population, and politicians in all other parties.The politicians are all municipal councilors elected in 2002, 2006, 2010, or 2014, in pooled cross-sections. The popula-tion bars are average shares in pooled cross-sections of the full population of permanent residents in 2002, 2006, 2010,and 2012. The labor-market categories follow the SELMA model of labor market attachments, (detailed in Section3 and Appendix Section W2). Data from 1979 were used to compute the quartiles of annual earnings for the fathersamong all men with the same birth year. Fathers are only included if they are of adult age in 1979 (i.e., 18 or older).Family type is measured in administrative data, available for the full population and drawn from the Marriage andBirth Registers. These registers are based on mandatory personal ID codes, are available for all permanent residentsin each year, and are linked to politicians via their personal ID codes. Partnership is approximated as two adults ofsimilar age with the same family ID code and residing on the same address.

Figure 4: Labor-market, Social-background and Family Categories in Sweden Democrats Relative toOther Parties, Conditional on Demography and Geography.

Notes: The figure shows regression estimates for the relative size of labor-market (left), social-background (middle)and family categories (right) among Sweden-Democrat politicians compared to politicians from other parties. Any-axis value of 1 means that a certain category is twice as large (100 percent larger) in the Sweden Democrats than inother parties. Regressions are run without control variables (black dots) and with controls (gray dots, see legend fordetails). The data is pooled cross-sections for all municipal councilors in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. The classificationinto categories is detailed in Figure 3.

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Figure 5: Representation of Economic and Social Groups in Municipal Assemblies.

Notes: The figure plots binned averages of shares of social groups among elected municipal councilors (y-axis) againstthe share of the same social group in the municipal population (x-axis). The gray dots show the representation ofeach group among Sweden-Democrat politicians, and the black dots show the representation in all other parties. Thedashed, 45-degree line shows where the share of a group among the elected politicians perfectly corresponds to thepopulation share. The shares are calculated as an average across all elections between 2002 and 2014 and plottedfor the pooled cross-sections. Municipalities are dropped if there are no elected Sweden Democrats. They are alsodropped from the top-right graph if there are zero labor market insiders elected from the Sweden Democrats. Theclassification into categories is detailed in Figure 3.

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Figure 6: Sweden Democrats Electoral Success across Municipalities and Precincts.

Notes: The figure shows correlations between the Sweden Democrats’ vote share and four socioeconomic characteristicsof local populations: the share of labor-market outsiders (left), the share of vulnerable labor market insiders (centerleft), the share with fathers in the lowest income quartile (center right), the share of people whose father’s incomebelonged to the lowest quartile in 1979 (center left), and the share of singles or divorced (right). The classification ofthe categories are detailed in Figure 3. The top row of graphs is based on data from 290 municipalities and four electionyears (2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014). These plots include year fixed effects so that the y-axis shows deviation from theelection year mean. Each point is the binned average of 5 observations. The bottom row of graphs compares 5,000electoral precincts in three election years (2002, 2006 and 2010). These scatter plots include interacted fixed effectsfor municipality and election year so that the y-axis shows deviations between precincts and the municipality-meanwithin election years, and the x-axis shows deviations from the municipality mean. Each point is the average of 50observations.

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Figure 7: Anti-immigration and Anti-establishment Attitudes of Elected councilors and Self-identifiedVoters for Sweden Democrats and Other Parties

Notes: The figure shows averages of two attitudes in survey data among politicians (municipal councilors, in thex-axis) and voters (y-axes). Filled circles are averages for Sweden Democrats and unfilled circles are averages for theother parties in the Swedish parliament. The left graph shows anti-immigrant preferences, measured as a dummyvariable for the opinion that “Reducing refugee immigration” is a “Very good proposal.” The right graph shows theproportion with “low trust” or “very low trust” in the national parliament. Voter data is from the 2017 SOM surveyand politician data from the 2017 KOLFU survey.

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Figure 8: Average Income Trends and Relative Political Representation of Labor-market Categories

Notes: The left graph shows trends in real average disposable income for labor-market categories with year 2002as a common baseline, for all labor-market categories defined in the SELMA model. We thank Olof Backstrom forkindly sharing the code for the model. The right graph shows estimates from a regression of belonging to one of theselabor-market categories on a dummy variable for being a Sweden Democrat politician in pooled cross-sectional datafor all municipal councilors. A y-axis value of 1 means that individuals from a certain population category appeartwice as often (100 percent) among Sweden Democrat politicians than among politicians in other parties. Regressionsare run without control variables (black dots), or with controls (gray dots, see legend for details). The data is pooledcross-sections for all municipal councilors in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. The numbers below the graph note eachgroup’s loss of income vs. insiders in 2006-12.

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Figure 9: Job-Insecurity Trends and Relative Political Representation of RTI Quartiles

Notes: The left graph shows trends in the share of people who received unemployment benefits or participated in anactive labor-market program in the last year. It splits those who were labor-market insiders in 2006 into quartiles,depending on the RTI- intensity of their jobs. The authors thank Marten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons forkindly sharing these RTI indices. The right graph shows estimates from a regression of belonging to each RTI quartileon a dummy variable for being a Sweden Democrat politician. A y-axis value of 1 means that a certain RTI Quartileis twice as large (100 percent) in among Sweden Democrat politicians compared to the other parties. Regressions arerun without control variables (black dots), or with controls (gray dots, see legend for details). The data is pooledcross-sections for all municipal councilors in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014.

Figure 10: Traits of elected Sweden Democrat councilors compared to other-party councilors

Notes: Data on political experience, public sector experience, tertiary education and earnings score come from admin-istrative registers for municipal councilors elected in 2002 to 2014. Data on public-service motivation, honesty-humilityand generalized trust come from the 2017 KOLFU survey (sources for the different survey instruments are detailed inthe text).

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Table 1: Regression Results for Municipal Sweden Democrat Vote Share in Parliamentary Elections

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Inequality 0.82 0.69 1.84 1.61 1.44 1.43(0.27) (0.28) (0.86) (0.81) (0.92) (0.90)

Share vulnerable insiders -0.03(0.07)

D2002 × Share vulnerable insiders -0.05 -0.06 -0.05(0.01) (0.01) (0.01)

D2010 × Share vulnerable insiders 0.04 0.04 0.03(0.01) (0.01) (0.01)

D2014 × Share vulnerable insiders 0.22 0.20 0.20(0.03) (0.03) (0.03)

Observations 1,159 1,159 1,159 1,159 1,157 1,157

Election fixed effects X X X X X XMunicipality fixed effects X X X X X X2006 shares, National inequality X X X XStandard municipal controls X X X X X XAdditional municipal controls X X

Notes: Robust standard errors clustered at the municipality level are in parentheses. All regres-

sions are estimated with OLS. Standard municipal control variables are the share of foreign born,

share with tertiary education, and share employed in each of the nine 1-digit industrial sectors.

Additional municipal controls include the share of foreign born outside the OECD, the same share

plus people born in Sweden with at least one parent born outside the OECD, the change in the

proportion of immigrants since the last election year, the share of immigrant outsiders in the mu-

nicipal population, the weighted industry share of immigrants, the election year to election year

change in that variable, and finally the weighted occupation share of immigrants, as well as total

crime, total number of crimes per inhabitant, and the number of crimes per inhabitants in two

sub-categories: larceny, and rape or sex offences.

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economic and social outsiders but political insiders: sweden’s...

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