The rise in discontent levels in the 2010s, resulting in turn in an increase of votes cast for anti-establishment parties in western liberal democracies, including in the Nordic region, has puzzled, and alarmed many scholars and thinkers. Identifying and understanding the root causes and drivers of that discontent and change in electoral behaviour has therefore fuelled much academic work.
Most thinkers agree that overall it has been driven by the economic structural change such as increased globalisation and marketisation of public services that has occurred since the 1980s. That has increased the vulnerability of many individuals and territories and in turn led to greater inequality and a socio-cultural divide between people and places.
Discontent and dissatisfaction levels have therefore risen among people and within places that feel left behind, creating geographies of discontent in certain regions and contexts. Whether or not that is the case in the Nordic region still needs to be fully determined.
This paper has established that key factors that have driven geographies of discontent elsewhere in the West can also be found in the Nordic region. A deeper analysis, however, is required in order to ascertain whether discontent in the region is primarily driven by territorial or interpersonal inequality. In other words, it has yet to be demonstrated at a regional scale whether discontent/content fault lines can be found within or between places.