Continuity or Change? The refugee crisis and the end of Swedish exceptionalism

According to the policy-making literature, external shocks are one of the mostimportant pre-requisites for major policy changes. This article investigates how therefugee crisis affected Swedish political parties’ asylum and family migration policypreferences. The results indicate that the refugee crisis contributed to the breakingup of a long-established policy paradigm of openness and equal rights previouslyshared by most parties in parliament. A more fragmented party system has emergedwhere a new paradigm of controlling numbers has also found strong supportoutside the anti-immigration party the Sweden Democrats