This study exploits close elections in Sweden to assess the causal relationship between seat majorities for mainstream political parties and refugee reception policy. The study focuses on the two dominant mainstream political blocs, in a centre-right and a centre-left coalition, during three waves of elections from 2002 to 2010. In doing so, the study makes a few contributions to current research: Firstly, besides addressing a current knowledge gap in the focus on mainstream parties and refugee reception policy, this study investigates the impact of seat majorities which potentially have a more influential position compared to individual parties. Secondly, the study relies on an empirical strategy which allows comparison of comparable cases. Lastly, the study focuses on mainstream parties at the local level of government within one institutional context and thus addresses the obstacle of case comparability within cross-country studies. In conclusion, this study finds that the relationship between the mainstream political blocs and refugee reception policy is of an associative nature. In order to find significant estimates of seat majorities, the win margin for each bloc needs to be substantial. These results indicate that there is a unified political attitude over the mainstream blocs towards refugee reception and that other factors, and not political seat majorities, have contributed to the uneven distribution of refugees among municipalities in Sweden.

The large variation in refugee reception rates between European nation-states has spurred debate about "responsibility-sharing" in matters of migration. More recently, however, scholars have noted that the variations in refugee reception occur not only between nation-states but also within them at the local level. This study concentrates on four small-sized municipalities in Sweden with 7,500 to 50,000 inhabitants, and with historically divergent approaches to refugee reception. By performing semi-structured interviews with local politicians and bureaucrats, the study aims to contribute new insights into how these actors perceive and explain local refugee reception. This study concludes that there are shared understandings about how refugee reception has been performed locally in the included municipalities. Moreover, the absence (or presence) of prior refugee reception seems to be related to perceptions about institutional capacities and resource availability connected to refugee settlement. In explaining the municipal approach, the narratives consistently point to the importance of experience in the area of refugee reception compared to party representation in the local assembly or resource availability. These results highlight the complexities connected to local refugee reception and how disparities in historical reception rates may affect perceived abilities to host newcomers. Such perceptions might be important to consider in the implementation of a system of equal distribution.

Do asylum-seekers respond to policy changes in their destination country, and to what extent? We approach this question by using high-frequency data, and we focus on a sudden liberalization in Swedish policy toward Syrian asylum-seekers, which implied permanent instead of temporary residence. We show a clear and fast, yet temporary, increase in Syrian asylum applications in Sweden after the policy change. Also, the policy caused a shift – not limited to the short term – in the share of individuals arriving without family, and consequently in the share applying for family reunification. Our study adds quasi-experimental evidence to the literature on inter-country asylum flows and migration policy.