In Swedish migration and asylum politics 2015 and 2016 were turbulent years, with a rapid move from mass demonstrations welcoming refugees, including speeches by the prime minister, to the largest asylum seeker inflow in history, to border closure. Support for the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), an anti-immigration party, has fluctuated since 2015, as asylum policies have moved towards their position. Yet it has been constantly above the party's 2014 general election result, which was an all-time high. Public debate also appears to have taken a nationalist turn. Previous research shows that exclusive forms of national identity are strong explanatory factors of attitudes to immigration. In this study we are interested in whether narratives on national identity in Sweden have been exclusionary during this turbulent time.
We begin with a short historic overview of Sweden as an immigration country, giving key statistics and useful background knowledge about recent changes in party politics and policies. In order to investigate recent narratives on national identity and how they relate to public opinion, we then undertake a mixed method design, where we combine a qualitative analysis of speeches by political party leaders with a quantitative analysis of new public opinion survey data. The combination of methods enables us to examine the elite discourses on national identity by political party, and public understanding of national identity by party preferences, and the consequences of such understanding. The chapter ends with a short summary of our findings. Themes to be explored in this case study are party politics, policy, narrative, rhetoric and identity.