Some Are More Equal than Others: Exploring Competition Among ‘Mirror Parties’

Abstract The literature has paid little attention to the interactions between parties belonging to the same party family operating in the same political system. We introduce a novel framework to study competition among these actors, which we label as ‘mirror parties’. We expect that these parties primarily engage in ‘ideologically peripheral competition’, by aligning on core issues while differentiating on non‐core ones. We test this framework on twenty‐nine pairs of radical right and left parties in nineteen European countries. We also examine mutual attacks between party leaders, focusing on a prominent case: Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) and Lega in 2018 and 2022 General Elections. Our data supports the framework, as most mirror parties show ideological peripheral competition, although this is more frequent among radical right parties and is more expressed in terms of positioning rather than salience. Additionally, our case study on FdI and Lega reveals that mutual attacks tend to target non‐core issues.