Niklas Bolin
Biographic Data
| ID | 1616784 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Niklas Bolin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Niklas |
| FAMILY NAME | Bolin |
| SIGNATURE | BOLIN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mid Sweden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2597-363X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 222 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The personal efficacy of party youth wing members
Although young people are said to be increasingly withdrawing from participation in political parties, some still join because they believe they can influence them to achieve change. We examine this sense of personal efficacy among contemporary youth wing members and ask: how is youth wing members’ personal efficacy associated with their activity levels and membership length, and with intra-party democracy and youth wing integration into the part…
The added value of youth wings: Do they nurture the members their parties want
Political parties expect youth wings to recruit and socialize young people into the norms and values of the party, nurturing aligned future grassroots members, officials, and candidates. However, embeddedness in youth wings – understood in terms of membership length and activity levels – may not necessarily deliver this. In our study, we examine whether youth wings nurture the members parties want using YOUMEM survey data from over 5000 members o…
Party Youth Wings as Forces of Renovation: A Study of Young Women Members’ Efficacy and Ambition
Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power, but have been overlooked by gender scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using YOUMEM survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germa…
Influence or support? Member perspectives on youth wings in political parties
Political parties maintain connections with various sub-organisations to engage different segments of society. Common among these are party youth wings. These relationships are often described as mutual, where votes are exchanged for policies. However, little research delves into how members of these sub-organisations perceive their roles in relation to the senior party. Based on a web survey of approximately 3000 respondents, this study investig…
Inside party youth wings: The Youmem project
Youth wings fulfil vital democratic functions. They connect parties with young people, socialise them into political life, and train future candidates and officials. Yet, youth wings have been largely overlooked by party scholars. In this article, we present the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset. With responses from over 5000 members of 12 centre-left and centre-right youth wings in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Swede…
Young radicals, moderates and aligned: Ideological congruence and incongruence in party youth wings
The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we propose a new typology of members as radicals, moderates and aligned, and develop a theoretical framew…
The reality of representation in Europe: The mode of leader selection in political parties
Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the 'official story' -that is, what the parties' statutes say that they do when selecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on the final stage…
A Community of People Like Me. An Analysis of Members’ Perceptions of Their Engagement in Party Youth Wings
This study investigates how members of party youth wings perceive their respective youth wings and identifies areas they believe require improvement. Empirically, the study surveys the youth wings of eight Swedish political parties, exploring members’ experiences using open-ended questions. The findings confirm that political and social aspects hold greater importance for youth wing members compared to material benefits. Additionally, the analysi…
Shifting perceptions of intra-party democracy: Leader selection in the Swedish Liberal Party
The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable conseque…
Locating power in party leader selection
In this article, the aim is to enhance our understanding of who has power over leader selection in political parties. To this end, we apply an analytical framework in which the selection process is divided into three phases: gatekeeping, preparation and decision. The focus is on determining the extent to which each of these phases is influential for the outcome and thereby locating the distribution of intra‐party power. Underpinning the analysis …
A new right: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2022
The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In t…
The stigmatisation effect of the radical right on voters’ assessment of political proposals
Despite the continued electoral progress of the radical right, there are reasons to believe that its full electoral potential has yet to be revealed. Previous research suggests that it suffers from a stigmatisation effect and that many voters will find its proposals less compelling compared to if they were presented by a mainstream party even for policy issues they agree upon. This study employs a unique survey design, with two experiments conduc…
Analysing intra-party power: Swedish selection committees over five decades
Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composi…
Attracting tomorrow’s leaders: Who joins political youth organisations for material reasons
This study compares members of political youth organisations and explains variations in material incentives for enrolment using both organisation-level and individual-level factors. Empirically, it is based on a web survey of about 3,000 members of eight Swedish youth organisations. The analysis shows that young people have a complex combination of concerns, with the main dividing line being whether or not material incentives are important. At th…
Continued Absence: A Case Study of EU Salience in the Swedish Parliamentary Election of 2022
Previous research suggests that the European Union (EU) has limited significance in Sweden. Political parties rarely address the EU during election campaigns, and few voters consider it a significant factor in their voting decisions. Media coverage of the EU is also infrequent. However, the 2022 election took place in a context where the EU's importance could be expected to be greater than usual, at least on the surface. Public's support for the …
A party system in flux: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. Th…
The price of power: The greens in the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election
Like most of its kind, the Swedish Green Party could originally have been described as anti-establishment and policy-seeking. The slogan ‘neither left nor right’ reflected its preferred position be
Managed intra-party democracy: Precursory delegation and party leader selection
The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selec…
Polarising Pluralism: The Swedish Parliamentary Election of September 2014
The parliamentary election in Sweden on 14 September 2014 resulted in defeat for the four-party centre-right coalition that had governed for eight years.1 It was displaced by another coalition, com
The Swedish Greens: A Big Step Forward - And Several Steps Back
The parliamentary election of 14 September 2014 induced decidedly mixed feelings in the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna). It led to the ejection of the centre-right government and the installation, for the first time, of Green cabinet ministers. However, the party also experienced a small but unexpected loss of votes compared to its score in the previous election. Moreover, partly because a far-right party built impressively on its bre…
Do Anti‐immigration Parties Matter? The Case of theSwedenDemocrats and Local Refugee Policy
With the increased electoral success of anti‐immigration parties, questions regarding what impact the parties actually have naturally follow. Previous research has rarely explored this question. Furthermore, within this body of research, one is given different answers. While some argue that anti‐immigration parties have made an impact on public policy, others find no such evidence. This article shows that some of this inconsistency is a consequen…
Towards a two-party system? The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2006
The Swedish Social Democrats are one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world. Between 1932 and 2006 they were out of government for just over nine years, and had not needed
Towards a two-party system? The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2006
The Swedish Social Democrats are one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world. Between 1932 and 2006 they were out of government for just over nine years, and had not needed
A party system in flux: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. Th…
Polarising Pluralism: The Swedish Parliamentary Election of September 2014
The parliamentary election in Sweden on 14 September 2014 resulted in defeat for the four-party centre-right coalition that had governed for eight years.1 It was displaced by another coalition, com
Managed intra-party democracy: Precursory delegation and party leader selection
The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selec…
Do Anti‐immigration Parties Matter? The Case of theSwedenDemocrats and Local Refugee Policy
With the increased electoral success of anti‐immigration parties, questions regarding what impact the parties actually have naturally follow. Previous research has rarely explored this question. Furthermore, within this body of research, one is given different answers. While some argue that anti‐immigration parties have made an impact on public policy, others find no such evidence. This article shows that some of this inconsistency is a consequen…
A new right: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2022
The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In t…
The stigmatisation effect of the radical right on voters’ assessment of political proposals
Despite the continued electoral progress of the radical right, there are reasons to believe that its full electoral potential has yet to be revealed. Previous research suggests that it suffers from a stigmatisation effect and that many voters will find its proposals less compelling compared to if they were presented by a mainstream party even for policy issues they agree upon. This study employs a unique survey design, with two experiments conduc…
Attracting tomorrow’s leaders: Who joins political youth organisations for material reasons
This study compares members of political youth organisations and explains variations in material incentives for enrolment using both organisation-level and individual-level factors. Empirically, it is based on a web survey of about 3,000 members of eight Swedish youth organisations. The analysis shows that young people have a complex combination of concerns, with the main dividing line being whether or not material incentives are important. At th…
Inside party youth wings: The Youmem project
Youth wings fulfil vital democratic functions. They connect parties with young people, socialise them into political life, and train future candidates and officials. Yet, youth wings have been largely overlooked by party scholars. In this article, we present the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset. With responses from over 5000 members of 12 centre-left and centre-right youth wings in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Swede…
The Swedish Greens: A Big Step Forward - And Several Steps Back
The parliamentary election of 14 September 2014 induced decidedly mixed feelings in the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna). It led to the ejection of the centre-right government and the installation, for the first time, of Green cabinet ministers. However, the party also experienced a small but unexpected loss of votes compared to its score in the previous election. Moreover, partly because a far-right party built impressively on its bre…
The price of power: The greens in the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election
Like most of its kind, the Swedish Green Party could originally have been described as anti-establishment and policy-seeking. The slogan ‘neither left nor right’ reflected its preferred position be
A Community of People Like Me. An Analysis of Members’ Perceptions of Their Engagement in Party Youth Wings
This study investigates how members of party youth wings perceive their respective youth wings and identifies areas they believe require improvement. Empirically, the study surveys the youth wings of eight Swedish political parties, exploring members’ experiences using open-ended questions. The findings confirm that political and social aspects hold greater importance for youth wing members compared to material benefits. Additionally, the analysi…
Young radicals, moderates and aligned: Ideological congruence and incongruence in party youth wings
The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we propose a new typology of members as radicals, moderates and aligned, and develop a theoretical framew…
Influence or support? Member perspectives on youth wings in political parties
Political parties maintain connections with various sub-organisations to engage different segments of society. Common among these are party youth wings. These relationships are often described as mutual, where votes are exchanged for policies. However, little research delves into how members of these sub-organisations perceive their roles in relation to the senior party. Based on a web survey of approximately 3000 respondents, this study investig…
Shifting perceptions of intra-party democracy: Leader selection in the Swedish Liberal Party
The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable conseque…
Analysing intra-party power: Swedish selection committees over five decades
Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composi…
Continued Absence: A Case Study of EU Salience in the Swedish Parliamentary Election of 2022
Previous research suggests that the European Union (EU) has limited significance in Sweden. Political parties rarely address the EU during election campaigns, and few voters consider it a significant factor in their voting decisions. Media coverage of the EU is also infrequent. However, the 2022 election took place in a context where the EU's importance could be expected to be greater than usual, at least on the surface. Public's support for the …
Towards a two-party system? The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2006
The Swedish Social Democrats are one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world. Between 1932 and 2006 they were out of government for just over nine years, and had not needed
Do Anti‐immigration Parties Matter? The Case of theSwedenDemocrats and Local Refugee Policy
With the increased electoral success of anti‐immigration parties, questions regarding what impact the parties actually have naturally follow. Previous research has rarely explored this question. Furthermore, within this body of research, one is given different answers. While some argue that anti‐immigration parties have made an impact on public policy, others find no such evidence. This article shows that some of this inconsistency is a consequen…
Polarising Pluralism: The Swedish Parliamentary Election of September 2014
The parliamentary election in Sweden on 14 September 2014 resulted in defeat for the four-party centre-right coalition that had governed for eight years.1 It was displaced by another coalition, com
The Swedish Greens: A Big Step Forward - And Several Steps Back
The parliamentary election of 14 September 2014 induced decidedly mixed feelings in the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna). It led to the ejection of the centre-right government and the installation, for the first time, of Green cabinet ministers. However, the party also experienced a small but unexpected loss of votes compared to its score in the previous election. Moreover, partly because a far-right party built impressively on its bre…
Managed intra-party democracy: Precursory delegation and party leader selection
The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selec…
A party system in flux: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. Th…
The price of power: The greens in the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election
Like most of its kind, the Swedish Green Party could originally have been described as anti-establishment and policy-seeking. The slogan ‘neither left nor right’ reflected its preferred position be
Shifting perceptions of intra-party democracy: Leader selection in the Swedish Liberal Party
The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable conseque…
Locating power in party leader selection
In this article, the aim is to enhance our understanding of who has power over leader selection in political parties. To this end, we apply an analytical framework in which the selection process is divided into three phases: gatekeeping, preparation and decision. The focus is on determining the extent to which each of these phases is influential for the outcome and thereby locating the distribution of intra‐party power. Underpinning the analysis …
A new right: The Swedish parliamentary election of September 2022
The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In t…
The stigmatisation effect of the radical right on voters’ assessment of political proposals
Despite the continued electoral progress of the radical right, there are reasons to believe that its full electoral potential has yet to be revealed. Previous research suggests that it suffers from a stigmatisation effect and that many voters will find its proposals less compelling compared to if they were presented by a mainstream party even for policy issues they agree upon. This study employs a unique survey design, with two experiments conduc…
Analysing intra-party power: Swedish selection committees over five decades
Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by a selection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composi…
Attracting tomorrow’s leaders: Who joins political youth organisations for material reasons
This study compares members of political youth organisations and explains variations in material incentives for enrolment using both organisation-level and individual-level factors. Empirically, it is based on a web survey of about 3,000 members of eight Swedish youth organisations. The analysis shows that young people have a complex combination of concerns, with the main dividing line being whether or not material incentives are important. At th…
Continued Absence: A Case Study of EU Salience in the Swedish Parliamentary Election of 2022
Previous research suggests that the European Union (EU) has limited significance in Sweden. Political parties rarely address the EU during election campaigns, and few voters consider it a significant factor in their voting decisions. Media coverage of the EU is also infrequent. However, the 2022 election took place in a context where the EU's importance could be expected to be greater than usual, at least on the surface. Public's support for the …
The reality of representation in Europe: The mode of leader selection in political parties
Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the 'official story' -that is, what the parties' statutes say that they do when selecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on the final stage…
A Community of People Like Me. An Analysis of Members’ Perceptions of Their Engagement in Party Youth Wings
This study investigates how members of party youth wings perceive their respective youth wings and identifies areas they believe require improvement. Empirically, the study surveys the youth wings of eight Swedish political parties, exploring members’ experiences using open-ended questions. The findings confirm that political and social aspects hold greater importance for youth wing members compared to material benefits. Additionally, the analysi…
Influence or support? Member perspectives on youth wings in political parties
Political parties maintain connections with various sub-organisations to engage different segments of society. Common among these are party youth wings. These relationships are often described as mutual, where votes are exchanged for policies. However, little research delves into how members of these sub-organisations perceive their roles in relation to the senior party. Based on a web survey of approximately 3000 respondents, this study investig…
Inside party youth wings: The Youmem project
Youth wings fulfil vital democratic functions. They connect parties with young people, socialise them into political life, and train future candidates and officials. Yet, youth wings have been largely overlooked by party scholars. In this article, we present the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset. With responses from over 5000 members of 12 centre-left and centre-right youth wings in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Swede…
Young radicals, moderates and aligned: Ideological congruence and incongruence in party youth wings
The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we propose a new typology of members as radicals, moderates and aligned, and develop a theoretical framew…
The personal efficacy of party youth wing members
Although young people are said to be increasingly withdrawing from participation in political parties, some still join because they believe they can influence them to achieve change. We examine this sense of personal efficacy among contemporary youth wing members and ask: how is youth wing members’ personal efficacy associated with their activity levels and membership length, and with intra-party democracy and youth wing integration into the part…
The added value of youth wings: Do they nurture the members their parties want
Political parties expect youth wings to recruit and socialize young people into the norms and values of the party, nurturing aligned future grassroots members, officials, and candidates. However, embeddedness in youth wings – understood in terms of membership length and activity levels – may not necessarily deliver this. In our study, we examine whether youth wings nurture the members parties want using YOUMEM survey data from over 5000 members o…
Party Youth Wings as Forces of Renovation: A Study of Young Women Members’ Efficacy and Ambition
Party youth wings are a vital pipeline to power, but have been overlooked by gender scholars. We investigate the political socialization that youth wings offer their women members, focusing on gendered trends as regards two key political attitudes. We ask: Do women and men in youth wings differ in their acquisition of personal efficacy and electoral ambition? Using YOUMEM survey data from over 3,100 youth wing members in Australia, Austria, Germa…
Politics (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · General election (7 works)