Immigration and competition : Are low- and medium-skilled native Swedes more likely to support the Sweden Democrats when there is an influx of immigrants, compared to high-skilled native Swedes?

Abstract: The Sweden Democrats have gained considerable political success in recent years, as have many other right-wing populist parties in the West. We theorize that the economically weakest and least educated parts of native society are the ones who experience, real or imagined, the most pressure and competition from immigration. Skill level is divided into three different categories, depending on education. These are "low-skill", "medium-skill" and "high-skill". We expect that immigration should make the low-skilled and medium-skilled more prone to vote for the SD, when compared to the high-skilled natives. We use survey data from the SOM institute of Gothenburg University, as well as municipal data from Statistics Sweden, to test the hypothesis. Our results seem to show that the support for the SD among low-skilled natives increases when immigration increases, compared to high-skilled natives. No such effect is observed for the medium-skilled natives.