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

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Jan Schwalbach
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12397

371

JAN SCHWALBACH

University of Cologne & GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the

Social Sciences

Talking to the Populist Radical

Right: A Comparative Analysis of

Parliamentary Debates

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 tak-

ing and confrontation in speeches. Using different text- as- data approaches, I ana-

lyze parliamentary debates in four Western European parliaments after the entry

of right- wing populist parties. The results show that government- opposition dy-

namics 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 implica-

tions for the analysis of strategic party interaction in the parliamentary context.

“Wir werden sie jagen!”1 — “We will chase them.” With these

words, Alexander Gauland, one of the leading figures of the pop-

ulist radical- right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), described

their upcoming role towards the government after the AfD had

succeeded in entering the German parliament for the first time in

2017. Regardless of actual intention, the statement expresses con-

fidence in the power to influence the behavior of other parties— or

to frame it in the same rhetoric: the ability to chase them to a place

where they otherwise would not have gone. Additionally, several

German MPs stated that debates in parliament had “become

rougher” and direct confrontation had increased with the entry

of the AfD.2 This study analyzes how the interaction of parties

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 2, May 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12397

© 2022 The Author. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of Washington University in St. Louis.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

372 Jan Schwalbach

in parliamentary debates is structured after populist radical- right

parties (PRRPs)3 have entered.

There is a research gap in terms of comparative analyses of

party behavior when PRRPs enter parliament. The phenomenon

of PRRPs growing stronger and putting mainstream parties under

pressure is nothing new. In the last 20 years, they have entered

many parliaments in Western Europe; in some, they even sup-

ported governments. Commentators have examined the influence

of these parties using two preponderant perspectives: First, there

has been a discussion as to whether they drive mainstream par-

ties towards certain policies, such as tightened immigration laws

(e.g., Mudde2013). Second, the reaction of parties in the electoral

arena has been an often- debated topic over the last decade (Abou-

Chadi and Krause2020; Meguid2005, 2007). Another area, how-

ever, has been addressed considerably less in comparative studies,

namely the daily interaction in parliaments— the heart of demo-

cratic deliberation.

I combine the findings from research on (electoral) cam-

paigning with theoretical assumptions about the effects of insti-

tutional settings in parliament (Helms2008; Rasch2014). I argue

that both perspectives must be considered when attempting to

formulate an explanation of how parties compete in parliament.

The focus lies in the interaction with PRRPs in the field of im-

migration in comparison to other areas. Previous case studies have

shown that PRRPs participate in policymaking activities less than

the average opposition party. Therefore, plenary debates are an im-

portant stage for their communication with citizens (Heinze2021;

Louwerse and Otjes2019).

Different types of quantitative text analysis are used for the

methodological implementation. I analyze parliamentary debates

from four European national parliaments that have witnessed the

entry of prominent PRRPs. Using correspondence analysis allows

me to derive positions from political texts that provide the basis

of my analysis (Petrovic et al. 2009; Schonhardt- Bailey 2008).

Furthermore, a dictionary approach enables me to measure the

addressing of others by parties and thus contextualize confronta-

tion in parliament.

The results show that assumptions from party competition

in the electoral arena cannot be transferred to the parliamen-

tary arena. In general, debates in parliament continue to follow

a government- opposition structure after the entry of PRRPs.

However, debates on immigration reveal a division between the