Changeability of populism: the norwegian progress party, 1973 - 2017

The party family of the populist radical right parties is the most popular party family to study at the moment. This phenomenon is always considered to be relevant because of the attention it gets from the society and media, especially in relation to questions of modern democracy and immigration. Most of the studies focus on these parties and try to explain their electoral success and the influence they have over the system. Large cross-national or cross-regional studies employing quantitative methods have created very heterogenous party family that includes both very radical and very moderate right- wing populist parties. Most of these parties are not new to the system and some of them (for example Norwegian Progress Party) are well established and yet we know so little about them. Hence it is wrong to treat them as a new phenomenon. This thesis follows Cas Mudde’s suggestion to concentrate on one case qualitative studies of these parties. In order to turn to qualitative ideological studies of members of this party family, a problematic nature of one of these parties core elements - populism cames to the light. According to Michael Freeden populism is concerned to be a thin-centred ideology and is more fragmented and inconsistent in comparison to full-centred ideologies. Drawing an assumption that this vivid nature of populism is the reason why there are so many academic arguments over this concept a question “how does the populism change?” was asked. The aim of this thesis was to examine the changeability of thin-centred ideology of populism. In order to do this a case of Norwegian Progress Party was chosen and discourse analysis of party manifestos was made. The results of the analysis helps to draw some conclusions on how do populism change. First of all, based on theory the ideological core of populism is made of homogenous and antagonistic groups of people and elite thus changeability of populism means the change of these core concepts. Results show that out of these two concepts, the identity of people tend to change more rather that the elite. Furthermore, analysis suggests that combinations of populism with different host ideologies change the populism itself differently. The findings also show that in this case populism does not change rapidly, it rather develops over the time but the change is quite big so it remains relevant. Moreover, analysis shows that populism is sensitive to the events that are happening in the periphery of the ideology. Although, it is not clear which conditions determines which events will make the impact