Justifying and Negotiating Responses to the Radical Right: The Case of the Swedish Labour Movement and the Intra-Organizational Arena

Abstract How did the Swedish labour movement – the Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the blue-collar union confederation, Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) – respond to the rise of the radical right-wing party (RRP) the Sweden Democrats (SD) between 2007 and 2018? To address this question, we conduct a chronological, qualitative analysis of textual sources to analyse not only the external responses but also the intra-organizational process that accompanied these responses. The article highlights the role of timing , as well as that of intra-organizational learning for understanding the nature, and indeed the efficacy, of externally observable responses by political actors to RRPs. The SAP and LO learned to acknowledge the outcomes of their past choices and then used this knowledge to adjust their future strategies. We argue that changes to strategy are therefore best understood as a chain of events rather than discrete episodes, and that securing internal consent for such strategic shifts represents a central task in this process.