Political parties and 'the immigration issue': (non)competition around issue ownership in Swedish parliamentary elections 1991-2010.

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This article analyses centre-right parties' attitudes and positions on immigration and integration in Denmark and Sweden. Despite being socioeconomically and culturally similar, there are also some significant political and structural differences which help to explain why immigration has played a much more prominent role in Danish politics compared to Swedish politics. The article argues that this can be explained with reference to, on the one hand, the stability of bloc party politics and, on the other, the extent to which centre-right parties have exploited 'the immigration issue' as a profiling tool. The findings suggest that even though Denmark has adopted a much tougher stance on immigration and integration compared to Sweden, the political climate in the latter has also undergone a number of changes in the past decade which has allowed for centre-right and radical right parties to use immigration to challenge the prevailing cross-party consensus on the issue by suggesting a more market oriented integration policy.

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The literature on party competition suggests that traditional conflict lines have either become obsolete or been replaced by new, less stable, ones. This development points to how political conflict has changed but also to how certain policy positions can be problematic to explain when these are linked to parties' location on 'Old' and 'New' conflict dimensions. A particularly difficult issue has been party position(s) on immigration. Solely focusing on parties' spatial locationon either conflict dimension -is insufficient for understanding the position that parties adopt. The article argues that a more fruitful approach is to simultaneously consider the degree of ownership -the strategic advantage -that parties have on particular conflict dimensions and parties' spatial location therein. Comparing parties in Britain and Sweden, the article explores the extent to which this framework explains party positioning in two institutionally different contexts.