How non-radical right parties strategically use nativist language: Evidence from an automated content analysis of Austrian, German, and Swiss election manifestos

Abstract

Radical right parties and their nativist ideas have gained considerable momentum, compelling non-radical parties to “engage” with this demand and with the nativist “Zeitgeist.” Yet, aside from general trends such as tougher stances on migration, we know little about the strategic choices of parties when balancing their commitment to core policy goals and the need to be “timely,” that is, to respond changing environments. Theoretically, parties may either adapt their ideological “core” to signal commitment or merely attribute nativist ideas to secondary issue areas to signal general responsiveness. Drawing on Austrian, German, and Swiss manifestos for over two decades and establishing a novel dictionary to assess parties’ use of nativism, we find that while previous studies showing right-wing parties to compete with RRs using nativism in the same domains are correct, the strategic choices around this competition are more complex. How much commitment to nativist ideas parties show depends on whether RR parties use the same domains to construct their nativist claims. For research on party competition, this means that more attention should be paid to how rather than if parties “engage” with their rivals.

Targeted Nativism: Ethnic Diversity and Radical Right Parties in Europe

“…Different scholars have also examined the reaction of mainstream parties to the presence and message of radical right parties in the political sphere. They mostly agree that a move to the right by a mainstream right party can legitimize a radical right party and boost its support (Arzheimer and Carter 2006) and that increased attention to typical radical right issues such as immigration and national identity in the programmes of other parties also helps the radical right (Arzheimer 2009; Habersack and Werner 2022). Dennis Spies and Simon Franzmann (2011) find that both the convergence of mainstream parties and a high level of party-system polarization on cultural issues increase support for radical right parties.…”

“…Second, I recognize that mainstream parties can also use nativist exclusionary rhetoric (cf. Habersack and Werner 2022). I focus on the radical right parties since they have first propagated anti-minority positions and uniquely 'own' this issue.…”

What about us? Political competition, economic performance, immigration, and nativist appeals

“…Building on the political accommodation theory(Meguid 2005; Spoon and Klu¨ver 2020) and parties' policy shifts as a consequence of party competition (Abou-Chadi and Orlowski 2016; Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009),Habersack and Werner (2022) provide evidence that non-radical parties accommodate nativist ideas to their policies when in competition with radical right parties to signal commitment or responsiveness to their voters.…”

“…In the last decade, there have been prominent political arguments promoting the interests of native citizens over those of immigrants. 1 Sometimes these nativist appeals have come from extremist parties that are unlikely to end up in government (Zobel and Minkenberg 2014), but there are also examples of strong nativist appeals made by more established political parties (Habersack and Werner 2022;Hjorth and Larsen 2022;Mudde 2007Mudde , 2010 and anti-immigrant radical parties becoming part of mainstream politics (Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn 2016;De Lange 2012). In this article, we draw on several different strands of the literature to develop a series of theoretical expectations about when political parties will use more or less nativist content in their appeals to voters.…”