Stances on NATO Membership in Three Swedish Newspapers in 2014 and 2022 : A Study on Political Parallelism

Abstract: This master thesis explores the coverage of Swedish NATO membership by three newspapers: Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, and Svenska Dagbladet. The goal is to understand if the Swedish press shifted their reporting following the Social Democrats’ internal shift on NATO membership in April 2022. Through a quantitative content analysis of over 200 articles in 2014 and 2022, this study found that they mostly maintained a neutral stance. By looking through the lenses of political parallelism and testing its indicators, the findings show that the newspapers did not consistently align with their respective political affiliations. Only Svenska Dagbladet seemed to follow its political affiliation, while Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter had numerous neutral articles. The newspapers also provided a neutral space for debate with a diverse panel of authors who were not only journalists and occasionally allowed conflicting stances opposed to their respective political affiliations.