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The Acknowledgement section was not included in the previous version of this article, originally published on 16 August 2013. It has been included in this final version.
Introduction
In the Swedish national elections in 2010, the Sweden Democrats (SD) gained parliamentary representation. After emerging from neo-fascist and neo-Nazi subcultures in the late 1980s, the party has gradually moderated to broaden its appeal. This development is characterized by, among other things, the banning of uniforms at party gatherings, the changing of the party symbol from a fist and a flame to a blue anemone and the renunciation of fascism and Nazism around the turn of the last century. Support for the party has grown steadily. Its presence in local and regional assemblies grew steadily in the 2002 and 2006 elections, and in 2010 it received 5.7 per cent of the vote in the national election and thereby gained seats in the parliament for the first time. Although the party is relatively small, the party has enough seats to - at least theoretically - tip the balance of power between the two blocs in Swedish politics.
When commenting on new entrants to the sphere of European radical right-wing parties, both scholars and competing politicians have been quick to brand the SD a 'single-issue party'. However, this term is notoriously vague. In this article, we survey how it and related terms, such as 'niche party', have been conceptualized. On the basis of the literature review, we conclude that the term 'single-issue party' denotes a set of closely related concepts in the research on party types whose connotations partly overlap (cf. Mudde, 1999). Some of these views emphasize the characteristics of the parties themselves - in other words, the 'supply-side' - in the parlance of party research (Mitra, 1988; Mudde, 1999; Meguid, 2005, 2008; Ignazi, 2010; Wagner, 2012). Finally, there are scholars who focus on those who vote for the radical right, in other words, the characteristics of the 'demand side' (Kitschelt and McGann, 1995; Mudde, 1999).1
Our literature review shows that these respective views have a number of observable implications regarding the party in question and, in some cases, the characteristics of its voters. This list is similar to that found in Mudde (1999). We argue that...