Talking to the Populist Radical Right: A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Debates

Abstract

In many Western European states, right-wing populist parties made it into national parliaments. This presents the established parties with the challenge of how to behave towards the new party. While the scholarly literature has focused more on the interaction with the populist radical right in the electoral arena, we know little about how it functions in an institutionally constrained arena such as parliament. This study asks in what way these structures affect the position taking and confrontation in speeches. Using different text-as-data approaches, I analyze parliamentary debates in four Western European parliaments after the entry of right-wing populist parties. The results show that government-opposition dynamics continue to structure parliamentary debates by and large, but right-wing populist parties succeed in polarizing debates on immigration. They also become the center of attention in these debates. These results have important implications for the analysis of strategic party interaction in the parliamentary context.