Reporters lurking at the back-door: Political news, mainstream party policy shifts and radical right party success

Despite a strong political science interest in political communication perspectives, the media is still often missing from core research on parties and voters. Whenever this is the case, chances are that political news opens a “back-door path” that challenges causal inferences about the relationship between party competition and electoral outcomes. This research note illustrates the consequences of such a blindspot by re-examining the accommodation hypothesis - the idea that mainstream parties can limit radical right party success by moving closer on core radical right issues. Starting with a subsample from a recent comprehensive study of policy accommodation, I add empirical controls for news about immigration and radical right parties based on a large collection of media data from 22 election cycles in five countries. Results show how media and communication perspectives radically affect my conclusion, which in the end is that policy accommodation hinders radical right party success.