Old Foe, New Friend? : Rhetorical responses of mainstream parties towards a radical right party

With their increasing electoral success, radical right (populist) parties (RRPs) are consolidating their presence in many western democracies. It is well-documented that mainstream parties alter policy positions and issue salience during elections to meet the RRP challenge, yet how these strategies unfold in parliament remains an area to be explored. In this dissertation, I focus on two attributes of legislative speeches, namely sentiment and issue attention, which I argue mainstream parties can leverage to compete against RRPs. These attributes, which I refer to as “rhetorical responses”, vary and are shaped by the mainstream party’s choice of strategy, the electoral threat from the RRP, as well as the extent to which the radical right and main rival bloc engage in the RRP’s defining issue, that is immigration. Paper 1 applies sentiment analysis to legislative speeches in the Swedish Riksdag. We find that MPs from Swedish mainstream parties use more negative language when addressing Sweden Democrats (SD) compared to when their speeches are directed at other mainstream parties. Furthermore, we demonstrate that negativity has declined over time, particularly among the center-right MPs. Paper 2 reveals a differentiation in the levels of negativity between legislators from the center-left and center-right blocs. Specifically, I observe a less antagonistic tone in the speeches by center-right legislators who represent electoral districts where SD’s vote share has increased relative to their own party. In Paper 4 I find that immigration’s salience in mainstream party speeches is positively associated with the RRP’s attention to the issue and its electoral performance, as well as with a main rival bloc’s emphasis on immigration. Moreover, in Paper 3, I explore the consequences of the negativity expressed in legislative speeches towards SD on partisans’ affective polarization towards the RRP. By combining the National-SOM survey data with legislative speech data, I find that a partisan’s affective polarization towards SD increases as their in-party’s rhetoric towards the RRP becomes more negative, and that this relationship remains robust even when accounting for conventional predictors of affective polarization. Overall, the findings of this dissertation suggest that party responses towards the RRP go beyond merely altering policy positions during elections. More importantly, they identify the conditions under which politicians of mainstream parties are most likely to adjust their rhetorical responses towards the RRP.