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Rene Karpantschof: The Radical Right in Denmark: a historical sociological perspective for a model of politics

During the past quarter century, disputes connected to the radical right and the related issue of immigration have occupied a central field of contention in Danish society. Governments have been brought down, the party system has been radically reshuffled, a new and polarized agenda has emerged in media and in parliament, popular attitudes have changed, and the pattern of grassroots participation has shifted. Social scientists have tended to restrict their analyses of this situation to the "view of specialist", approaching the phenomena in question through the perspectives of civic culture, policy and party system
conditions, public opinion creation, or social movement struggle. The present article suggests another approach, employing a historical-sociological perspective that analyses the political turn as a consequence of processes and causal mechanisms involving and intersecting all these above-mentioned elements. The article also develops a model of politics as regards the manner in which societal
actors act and struggle for symbols and identities in a contingent environment of specific political circumstances
and interaction. This model finds important processes and causal mechanisms related to four main dynamics: (1)
identity formation, (2) interplay between institutionalised politics and protest, (3) movement-countermovement interaction, and (4) national-international relations.