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Introduction
Niklas Bolin is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University. His research interests are Political Organizations and Parties, Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior and Comparative Politics.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2012 - April 2016
Education
September 2005 - June 2012
Publications
Publications (68)
Despite the continued electoral progress of the radical right, there are reasons to believe that its full electoral potential has yet to be revealed. Previous research suggests that it suffers from a stigmatisation effect and that many voters will find its proposals less compelling compared to if they were presented by a mainstream party even for p...
This study compares members of political youth organisations and explains variations in material incentives for enrolment using both organisation-level and individual-level factors. Empirically, it is based on a web survey of about 3,000 members of eight Swedish youth organisations. The analysis shows that young people have a complex combination of...
Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the 'official story'-that is, what the parties' statutes s...
This study investigates how members of party youth wings perceive their respective youth wings and identifies areas they believe require improvement. Empirically, the study surveys the youth wings of eight Swedish political parties, exploring members' experiences using open-ended questions. The findings confirm that political and social aspects hol...
Youth wings fulfil vital democratic functions. They connect parties with young people, socialise them into political life, and train future candidates and officials. Yet, youth wings have been largely overlooked by party scholars. In this article, we present the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset. With responses from over 5000 members of...
The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we pr...
Youth wings fulfil vital democratic functions. They connect parties with young people, socialise them into political life, and train future candidates and officials. Yet, youth wings have been largely overlooked by party scholars. In this article, we present the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset. With responses from over 5,000 members o...
Leading up to the 2024 European Parliament election, much attention was given to the anticipated gains of populist parties across Europe. While some populist parties made significant advances, the overall outcome was more moderate than expected. Sweden deviated from this general trend, witnessing gains for left-wing parties and a surprising setback...
The study explores the perspectives of political parties regarding news media coverage in election campaigns. By analyzing official post-election analyses produced by Swedish political parties from 2010 to 2022, the study offers a novel approach to the study of political party views of news media. The findings largely support the arguments proposed...
This article offers a longitudinal perspective on communications during election campaigns from a political-party perspective, where strategic considerations about digital media are compared across time. Our analysis is grounded on the concepts of hybridisation and data-driven campaigning, where digital technology tends to play a central role witho...
Trots de politiska ungdomsförbundens centrala roll som såväl en kanal för politisk inflytande som rekryterare av nytt blod till partipolitiken är forskningsläget skralt. Profetior om morgondagens partipolitiska engagemang med utgångspunkt i ungdomsförbunden står således på relativt svag empirisk grund. I den här texten görs dock ett försök till en...
Politiska partiers och ungdomsförbunds besök för att informera om sin politik och verksamhet har
traditionellt varit vanliga inslag i den svenska skolan. Besöken har ansetts bidra till såväl
genomförandet av skolans demokratiska uppdrag som till att unga rekryteras in i partipolitiken.
Återkommande hävdas dock att politiska företrädare inte ges det...
The populist Radical Right Sweden Democrats (SD) have long been excluded from cooperation with other parties. As other parties have moved closer to the party's more restrictive migration policy, and as older party leaders from the extreme Far Right have departed, some of the arguments in support of isolating the SD have waned. However, the party is...
The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the...
The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandon-ment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the M...
In this article, the aim is to enhance our understanding of who has power over leader selection in political parties. To this end, we apply an analytical framework in which the selection process is divided into three phases: gatekeeping, preparation and decision. The focus is on determining the extent to which each of these phases is influential fo...
Valrörelser är demokratins högtidsstund. Då mobiliserar de politiska partierna allt de har för att nå så många väljare som möjligt.
Men hur går det egentligen till? Hur väljer partierna sina budskap och hur resonerar de när de lägger upp sina kampanjer?
I Politik är att vinna presenterar tre forskare en ny analys av hur valkampanjer bedrivs i Sv...
Högerradikala partier fortsätter att nå väljarframgångar i många europeiska länder. Från att tidigare ha varit relativt små partier är de idag bland de större i många länder. Trots denna väljarmässiga utveckling tycks både väljare och andra partier fortfarande betrakta partier från denna partifamilj som annorlunda än övriga partier. Tidigare forskn...
Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of p...
This book explores the varying ways in which political parties in Europe make arguably their most important decisions: the selection of their leaders. The choice shapes the representation of a party externally. It also influences the management of internal conflict, because there will always be some disagreement about the party’s direction. The rul...
Political parties shape politics, and the most important person in a party is usually the leader. Party leaders make the political weather. Take a recent example from Britain. In 2015 the Labour PartyLabour Party (UK), somewhat unexpectedly, lost a national election. Its leader resigned and a new one was needed. “Jeremy CorbynCorbyn, Jeremy is not...
The international trend towards more inclusive leader selection (Cross and Blais in Party Politics 18: 127–150, 2012) seems to have gone largely unnoticed by Swedish parties. At least on the surface, the process works as it has done for decades. Almost exclusively to SwedenSweden, it centres on a valberedningvalberedning, a selection committeeselec...
In modern democracy, party leaders are key actors. Not only do they hold the highest offices of their organisations; they are also figureheads externally. Party leaders take centre stage in elections, parliamentary debates and in government formation. They are constantly present in the media; political news is simply incomplete without them.
Are right-wing populist parties fundamentally diff erent from other types? Th is article explores one aspect of what we call the exceptionalist thesis. Th e thesis could be applied to a wide range of party characteristics, but here we focus on leadership. In this context, our case study is of the Sweden Democrats (SD). First, we examine how SD sele...
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's...
The mediatization of politics denotes a long-term process through which political actors have become increasingly dependent on news media, the key mechanism being the adaptation to news media and news media logic by political actors. One aspect of this is related to how political parties communicate during election campaigns , and how important the...
Euroflections is an academic report on the European elections 2019. With Euroflections we want to provide the public with interesting reflections on the election campaigns and their main actors, namely the voters, the parties and the media. In total, more than 70 experts in political science and political communication representing almost every EU...
The Reparliamentarization of Sweden? The Use and Relevance of Parliamentary Resolutions to the Government
In contrast to the theory of deparliamentarization amongst parliamentary democracies,
this article points to the Riksdag’s use of so-called resolutions (tillkännagivanden)
to the Government as a sign of growing reparliamentarization. Resolution...
The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. U...
Under de senaste åren har frågorna om invandring och integration blivit allt mer omdebatterade och allt fler svenskar anser att de är viktiga samhällsfrågor (Oscarsson & Bergström 2015). Det gäller både bland dem som har en positiv respektive negativ syn på flyk-tinginvandring (Bergström med flera 2015). Trots att motståndet mot att Sverige tar emo...
It is today commonplace to view radical Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2016.1145685.View all notes right parties as masters of their own fates. However, whereas most authors in the field focus on dominant leaders, the impact of party organizations remains understudied. To remedy some of this...
The parliamentary election of 14 September 2014 induced decidedly mixed feelings in the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna). It led to the ejection of the centre-right government and the installation, for the first time, of Green cabinet ministers. However, the party also experienced a small but unexpected loss of votes compared to its scor...
With the increased electoral success of anti‐immigration parties, questions regarding what impact the parties actually have naturally follow. Previous research has rarely explored this question. Furthermore, within this body of research, one is given different answers. While some argue that anti‐immigration parties have made an impact on public pol...
Although the number of studies of new political parties is gradually increasing, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of when new parties manage to enter national parliaments. The objective of this article is to explain the circumstances under which new parties enter national parliaments for the first time. Unlike earlier research, this stud...
During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western
Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these
frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has
increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also
attracted more scholarly interest.
Despite this increased atte...
Swedish democracy is changing once again. The parliamentary democracy originated with a separation-of-powers system that was far from democratic, but the "working constitution" (in Swedish, "den levande författningen"; see, e.g., Mattson and Petersson 2008) gradually became quite similar to the parliamentary democracy ideal type and the Westminster...
