The Persistence and Electoral Adaptation of Extreme Right Organizations in Sweden (2010-2018)

How do extreme right organizations adapt through moments of adversity? What mechanisms explain their persistence after electoral defeat? Throughout their life cycle, extreme right organizations undergo various critical events that give rise to phases of growth, consolidation, stagnation, and eventual decline. Some groups are more adaptable than others, at times bouncing back from the loss of leadership figures, repression by law enforcement, disruption by rival groups, or strategic failures. One such critical event in the life cycle of extreme right groups – and social movements more generally – is the move from protest to party politics. CasaPound in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Oath Keepers militia in the United States, and the Movement Against Illegal Immigration in Russia have sought to institutionalize, advancing their agendas through the ballot box, political parties and political institutions. Poor electoral results may, however, prove to be a moment of reckoning as these organizations struggle to navigate contradictions between conforming to party politics on the one hand, and retaining support from their movement base on the other. This article sheds light on these dynamics by investigating the electoral adaptation strategies and organizational persistence of two extreme right organizations in Sweden. Leveraging a most-similar case study design and process tracing, the study retraces how the Party of Swedes (PoS), and the Swedish Resistance Movement (SRM) have responded to frustrated electoral breakthroughs in 2010-2018. It argues that the organizational forms and mechanisms these groups employed to adapt to electoral politics, whether through isomorphic change (PoS) or hybridization (SRM), shaped how they balanced the imperatives of conforming to party politics and retaining radical milieu support. Despite that the two organizations were long-lived and were similar on many other accounts, their distinct adaptation strategies led to dissimilar organizational outcomes after elections. The PoS disbanded in 2015 after its unsuccessful 2014 electoral campaign, while the SRM fragmented but survived its 2018 debacle at the polls. By examining mechanisms of extreme right electoral adaptation and persistence, the article contributes to works on far-right movement institutionalization, extreme right mobilization and political violence.