Political Networks: The Case of the Swedish Anti-immigration Party

This paper seeks to assess the role of social networks in the emergence and diffusion of anti-immigration political party. For many years, Sweden has been a 'blank space' for anti-immigration parties. Within the last decade, a small and extreme Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats, SD) came out from political wilderness, becoming the second most popular party in polls and attracting nearly 10,000 members. How did it manage to grow so quickly? Are social networks more important for emerging parties? Are they more important for emerging extreme right parties? To answer this question we propose to examine data on nearly 6,000 SD candidates running for political offices in Sweden in elections held between 1990 and 2012 (national legislative body, municipal assemblies, county councils and European Parliament). With unique Swedish data, we are able to determine individual family ties of candidates, establish whether they attended the same institutions (workplaces, schools, correction facilities) and if they were neighbors at any point in time. We are going to apply diffusion models that account for social network effects and test them against competing hypotheses such as reaction to increasing diversity or simple geographic diffusion. Importantly, this paper is the first attempt to look at anti-immigration party and compare it with other types of parties.