Ideological Transformations, Organizational Development and Mainstream Reactions. A Comparison of Populist Parties in Four Nordic Countries, 2015

This project offers comparative knowledge on how, why and when popular attitudes towards the out-group population translate into party political preferences in countries that share very similar socio-political attributes; hence, the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries seem to constitute a fruitful design so as to move beyond demand side explanations and to acknowledge supply-oriented explanations for the varying electoral fortunes of the four nationalist-populist parties. This project involved contextualized comparisons over time. The study called attention to the rise of national-populist parties in the four Nordic countries: the Sweden Democrats (SD) in Sweden; the Danish People's Party (DPP) in Denmark; the Progress Party (PP) in Norway and the True Finns (TS) in Finland. These parties experienced their greatest electoral success in recent years and since 2010 they have all been represented in the national parliament. The main research question was why these four parties differ in terms of electoral support, policy influence and governmental experience. The empirical focus was on how the national-populist parties have changed ideologically and organizationally and which strategies the mainstream parties have adopted faced with a new political competitor arena and mainstream reactions to their development in the public debate. Data was collected by manual coding of e.g. topic and tone of the articles in four leading newspapers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.