From Populism to Ethnic Nationalism Radical Right-Wing Populism in Sweden Book

During the last 15-20 years a new party family of radical right-wing populism (RRP) has emerged in Western Europe, consisting of parties such as the French Front National and the Austrian Freedom's Party, among many others. Contrary to the situation in the other Scandinavian countries, such parties have been largely unsuccessful in Sweden. Although Sweden saw the emergence of the populist party New Democracy - which partly can be classified as a RRP party - in the early 1990s, it collapsed in 1994, and no party has so far been successful enough to take its place. Most of the literature on populism and right-wing extremism deals with successful cases; this book takes the opposite direction and asks how one can explain the failure of Swedish radical right-wing populism.

Jens Rydgren is a researcher at the Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. He is the author of The Populist Challenge: Political Protest and Ethno-nationalist Mobilization in France (Berghahn Books 2003) and of numerous articles dealing with political sociology and ethnic relations.