Local Conditions and National Context for Anti-Immigrant Arson Attacks: the Case of Sweden in the 2000s

This study aims to explain variation in radical right violence on the local level, through a comparison of Swedish municipalities. Specifically, our aim is to identify combinations of conditions that form pathways to the incidence of asylum housing attacks. Broader factors such as national level political opportunity structures and discursive opportunities on the national level have been proposed to explain change over time or between countries in the incidence of radical right violence. Complementing such findings, several publications have highlighted the importance of local level factors such as local history of radical right activities, sudden changes in demography, municipal political opportunities and grievances such as unemployment. A common way of studying this phenomenon is through probabilistic multivariate regression analyses. A weakness of such approaches is that they have difficulties capturing multiple pathways to a single outcome and complex interaction effects, such as when some factors are causally conditional upon other factors. In the present study we aim to capture such mechanisms, using tools from qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on the case of arson attacks against refugee housing facilities in Swedish municipalities during the decade 2009-2018. We will pay attention to conditions on the local level as well as national level, but since we analyse a single national case, we focus on national level conditions that display traceable change over time. We use a dataset of arson attacks against Swedish asylum housing facilities, created from a combination of media sources and incident reports from the fire and rescue services.