Populist narratives and materialist values : A quantitative study on populist context and value orientations in Sweden

In this thesis it is studied whether local support for populist parties is correlated with an increase in materialist value orientations on the individual level, the Swedish Democrats are used as a proxy for measuring populist voter support within Swedish municipalities. Theoretically, this thesis mainly draws upon the framework presented by Inglehart (2008) and his theory on value change. Moreover, the thesis utilizes survey data collected from the SOM institute measuring individual attitudes and behavior for the years of 2014 and 2018. Data on election outcomes are collected from SCB, and data on asylum seekers received by municipalities is collected from the Swedish Migration Agency, to control for the 2015 refugee crisis. Bivariate and multiple OLS regression is used to investigate whether populist context on the municipal level correlate with an increase in materialist values on the individual level. In the bivariate regression analysis, initial support is found for increased voter support in municipalities correlating with individuals expressing higher materialist values. However, this correlation disappears and is no longer significant in the multiple regression models once several control variables are accounted for. Additional robustness tests do not challenge these results. Several limitations are highlighted, such as the small sample size available for testing and the use of the Swedish Democrats as a proxy measure for a larger populist context. In the conclusion, the thesis calls for the use of longitudinal design structures and expanded measures capturing both value orientations and populist context.