SYNAS – TILL VARJE PRIS? En teoriprövande studie om mediebevakning av Sverigedemokraterna inför valen 2006, 2010 och 2014.

Abstract

The fact that media and politics are strongly intertwined and mutually dependent on each other is known since long. Particularly, research suggests that media coverage plays an important role in the rise of populist parties. Despite the current phenomenon of rightwing populist parties on the march all over the world, research on the importance of media as a potential success factor is insufficient. Therefore, the main purpose of this thesis is to test ideas regarding success factors of Swedish populist party Sweden Democrats derived from two theories. Both are based on the relationship between media and politics: Agenda-setting theory and the Second level of the agenda-setting theory. The thesis is using quantitative content analysis, testing the theories by examining the media coverage of the Sweden Democrats in two local newspapers during the election campaigns of 2006, 2010 and 2014. The newspapers were specifically chosen from one region of Sweden where the party has a low level of voter support, and from one where the support is high, in order to examine if any differences in media coverage exist. The result partly coincides with the hypotheses derived from the two theories, and the coverage did in fact differ between the two newspapers. However, the study does not prove a correlation between voting behavior and media coverage.