Transparency Against Democracy: The Sweden Democrats, Radical‐Right Populism, and Political Trust
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing explanations for the rise of populist radical‐right parties often focus on two primary factors: economic insecurity, driven by globalization, financial crises, and technological disruptions; and cultural backlash, which stems from intergenerational and immigration‐related value conflicts. While these perspectives offer valuable insights, there is little doubt that the growth of populist radical‐right parties is also closely linked to political distrust and declining confidence in democratic institutions. Supporters of populist radical‐right parties tend to exhibit lower political trust as compared to voters in mainstream parties. However, these explanations often overlook the complex relationship between anti‐establishment populist radical‐right parties and the very democratic accountability mechanisms designed to uphold transparency and institutional integrity. This study explores the paradoxical role of public transparency and press freedom in facilitating the rise of populist radical‐right and anti‐establishment movements, with a particular focus on Sweden—a country with exceptionally strong public transparency mechanisms. Traditionally regarded as pillars of democratic governance, these mechanisms have been strategically repurposed by the Sweden Democrats, an anti‐establishment, radical‐right party, to expose political scandals and erode trust in traditional elites. Leveraging alternative media platforms and even troll factories, the party has effectively weaponized transparency to amplify anti‐elite populist narratives. This research critically examines whether transparency and media freedom serve to strengthen democracy or instead enable the politicization of scandals, reinforcing populist distrust of institutions. By analyzing the intersection of transparency mechanisms, free press dynamics, and anti‐establishment populist strategies, this study provides a new perspective on how accountability tools can be manipulated for partisan gain. In doing so, it sheds light on the broader implications of transparency policies in an era of rising populism and increasing democratic polarization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".