In the 2010 Swedish general elections the nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) crossed the threshold and entered parliament. The other parties in parliament reacted with strong antagonism; the mainstreaming of the ‘radical right’ had finally come to Sweden. This article analyses the media coverage of the SD following the 2006 elections, when it emerged as a high-profile party in the public arena. The presence of the SD in Swedish politics encourages both SD allies and opponents to emphasize their views on what constitutes social cohesion in Sweden. We see the public debate surrounding the SD as a rhetorical struggle between different nationalist claims.

This article explores the ideological positioning of Sverigedemokraterna (SD; the Sweden Democrats) in contemporary Swedish politics. Comparative research on nationalist parties pays very little attention to SD, despite the fact that following the general elections in 2006 it came close to consolidating a permanent position in Swedish politics. In the analysis, we highlight the recurrent rhetorical figures in the public debate as manifested in the media coverage from September 2006 to May 2007. The ideological positioning of SD evolves in the interaction between its self-image and the counter arguments adopted by SD-antagonists. Although the established parties were careful to distance themselves from SD, our analysis indicates a possible taming of SD in the run-up to the general elections in 2010. The party’s monocultural nationalist messages may also become more widely accepted and still allow it to be considered as ‘one of the good guys’.

Organisational actors in the public sector are often characterised as path-dependent and tending to reject or translate change in accordance with institutional norms, while management change is often interpreted as emanating from “above” (international organisations, governments, thinktanks). In this article we present, inspired by Dunleavy’s bureau-shaping approach, a complementary understanding of incremental changes which goes beyond the existing explanations. Our claim is that incremental changes often are caused by ‘pull-factors’ inside the organisation. Based on an in-depth study of five Swedish public agencies 1980-2005 we present an inductively-derived typology of organisational change. In the five organisations considered, it is shown that the management level has been able to influence changes which emanate from “push-factors” in the environment (such as streamlining, cost reduction and symbolic adaptations). But the paper also highlights more gradual changes – “small but significant steps” - such as increased hiring of social scientists and managerialisation as important features in the process of reconstructing the agencies as policy-making, rather than operational, units, in line with Dunleavy’s general argument. A conclusion to this is that improved policy-making capacity, paradoxically, may reduce Swedish public agencies’ ability to steer.

New Public Management (NPM) reform ideas are, in the literature, usually portrayed as exogenous models which somehow permeate public organisations (cf. Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). Hitherto, the question whether internal organisational motives for creating new units has been a contributing factor to the diffusion of NPM ideas has been notably overlooked. It is our contention that theories on bureau-shaping can complement other frameworks for describing the diffusion of NPM reforms. That is, bureaucrats (i.e. public management) can use the ‘discourse’ of NPM for pursuing the creation of new, more policy-shaping and second order functional, units and offices (for example, benchmarking, communication etc) within public organisations, thereby replacing old bureaucratic layers with ‘novel’ offices detached from the daily operative functions of bureaucracy. The aim of our paper is to discuss and review strategies for empirical studies of bureau-shaping theory in the light of public management reforms. Whilst Dunleavy's original thoughts have been widely discussed and contested, few actual attempts have been made to transfer them to empirical studies. In this paper, we examine some of the main traits of criticism, as well as some of the few attempts to apply the theory empirically. In addition, we propose a research strategy for a comparative empirical study of bureaucratic change within local and state administration in Sweden and Denmark inspired by bureau-shaping theory. From a preliminary case study, we conclude that bureau-shaping may be more of a systematic organisational response to administrative reforms than the utility-maximising strategy of individual bureaucrats.

This article investigates the public debate on the politics and voters of the Swedish neo-nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) as it is manifest in the media coverage from the elections in September 2006 to May 2007. We firstly aim to identify ideological positions manifest in the public debate of SD-politics and their voters in the fields of democracy and culture. Secondly, we aim to abstract the results of this inquiry to a general level of societal reconfigurations of European societies. Methodologically, we use ideology analysis to (1) identify manifest messages articulated through different positions in the public debate and to (2) scrutinize rhetorical figures, which inadvertently or deliberately, sustain the messages and provide them with a certain degree of credibility. Even if representatives from the established parties seek to maintain a dichotomy between SD and the rest, the analysis of the usage of rhetorical figures reveals a net of identity relations rather than a mere distinction between “Us” and “them”. SD endeavours to act at the margins of the European Grammar, which conveys, on the one hand, common values of democracy, rule-of-law and human rights and, on the other hand, a politics of fear based on a perception of the outside world as ultimately dangerous. Our findings suggest that processes of Europeanization not only indicate increased convergence between various post-national or cosmopolitan views. On the contrary, the Europeanization of neo-nationalism, somewhat paradoxically, shows proof of how also xenophobic nationalist movements have benefited from, or at least profited on the European Integration process.