INTRODUCTION

Literally hundreds of new parties have been added to the party systems of well-established democracies since the 1960s. Most of those were a 'flash in the pan', so to speak, and died quickly, with little fanfare and little impact. But a smaller number survived, some of which gained what we call in these pages 'full institutionhood', not just enduring for a significant period of time, but also developing routinized procedures for carrying on party business and becoming 'forces to be reckoned with' (or at least acknowledged) by other parties in their systems. Among those, it has become almost a truism that most would be found on the left or in the centre of their countries' political spectrums, with 'right-wing protest parties' finding it particularly difficult, if not impossible, to institutionalise. And yet there have been some, and among those have been the Progress Party of Denmark and the Progress Party of Norway. Both were born in the early 1970s as additions to well-established party systems (and hence why we still call them 'new' parties), and both had fully institutionalised – by standards we develop in chapter 3 of this book – by the early 1990s.

While this book documents important facts about the development and experiences of those two parties, its primary purpose is to develop and demonstrate the utility of conceptual frameworks and theoretical approaches for the study of institutionalisation (and de-institutionalisation) of right-wing protest parties more generally, though much of what we do and find here has implications for the study of party institutionalisation (and de-institutionalisation) writ large. In the study of political parties, after all, as in any scientific endeavour, the main benefit from the study of 'deviant cases' is not the fun to be found in observing the deviates (though that can be fun), but instead the new theoretical insights which are required for understanding those cases and which have payoffs for explaining and predicting other cases as well.

For reasons we detail in chapter 5, the new right-wing protest parties of Denmark and Norway were not expected – by casual political observers but also serious party scholars in the political science community – to be more than a flash in the pan, and yet they defied the supposed odds against them and institutionalised within three decades of their births. How could that have happened? Were there particular circumstances or features of these parties and/or their environments which made it possible? If so, are those circumstances or features unique to these parties and their systems, or are they generalizable elsewhere? These are the questions which drive our inquiry in the first five chapters of this book.

In chapter 8, we turn our attention to the topic of organisational 'decay', or as we call it in these pages, 'de-institutionalisation'. Though both Progress parties were fully institutionalised by the early 1990s, only one of them survives today. Indeed, during the period from the mid-1990s through 2001, the Danish party went from institutionhood to demise. Since this happened for just one of the two parties and not both, we are presented with another puzzle: what factor(s) might help explain the de-institutionalisation of one institutionalised party while another avoids or effectively endures through episodes of decay, when the two parties share so much in common? Such is the 'stuff' of chapter 8.

Along the way, we have often found it useful to bridge existing literatures and theories as a means of spawning new insights and hypotheses. Partially as a result of this bridge-building, we have identified what we think are key factors in the stories of the Progress parties, which also help explain the special difficulties in the institutionalisation of parties like them and to explain the different trajectories of our two parties since achieving institutionhood.

At times, our attempts to learn from extant literature, and especially to cumulate from different literatures, were thwarted by conceptual fuzziness: the same term being used to mean different things, different terms being used to cover the same meaning, multidimensional concepts being treated as unidimensional, etc. And hence, we have tried in these pages to contribute to greater conceptual clarity regarding such terms as 'institutionalisation' and 'impact', not to mention 'right-wing protest party'. We turn now to a brief introduction to a few of the most important terms and concepts used throughout the book.

INTRODUCTION TO TERMS AND CONCEPTS

The term 'right-wing' party can be and has been applied to a wide variety of parties. In this book, we consider the Progress parties to be right-wing protest parties of entrepreneurial origins, and furthermore, though they were technically 'new' only in their earliest years, we and others still tend to refer to them as new parties. First, the Progress parties were from the outset right-wing in that they sought reduction in governmental intervention in the economy. For us, that condition is both necessary and sufficient to be classified as right-wing. Though others may associate, and indeed have done so, such stances as conservatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and traditionalism with 'right-wing', we prefer to treat such additional traits as extra baggage which may accompany 'right-wingism', but which do not necessarily do so (as made clear in chapter 5). While their early stances on economic issues clearly placed both parties in the category of 'classically right-wing parties', it was substantially later (i.e. in the mid-1980s) that they added 'anti-immigration' to their issue profiles. For that reason, some consider the Progress parties to have become 'new-right' parties as well.

Second, the Progress parties are protest parties, at least in origin, because the parties were chiefly identified with, and purposely emphasised, what they were against (i.e. taxes in particular), while leaving what they might be for as more of a mystery. In overtly opposing establishment parties, some features of the establishment political process, and long-established policies associated with the political establishment, these two parties clearly qualified as...