Trespassing the Threshold of Relevance : Media Exposure and Opinion Polls of the Sweden Democrats, 2006-2010

Democratic theory seldom meets democratic practice and fluctuations in public opinion and media representations of the same political actor do not easily converge. In September 2010, Sweden’s anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), crossed the electoral threshold to participate in Sweden’s parliament and it has continued to grow. In this article, we analyze the effect of media exposure on fluctuations in opinion polls for political parties, or the media effect. Our results show the media effect is more important for SD than for other parliamentary parties. Media exposure sometimes matters, but not to the same degree everywhere and not necessarily at the same time