On visibility and normalization: Parliamentary representation and media attention to radical right parties, leaders, and issues

Is the mainstream news coverage of politics contributing to the legitimization and normalization of the radical right? To answer this question, we focus on two countries (Portugal and Spain) where Radical Right Parties (RRPs) emerged late and developed very quickly. A longitudinal dataset (2015–2024) of newspaper articles was employed to assess the salience of VOX and Chega , their leaders, and four core issues of the radical-right, before and after they first entered the national parliament. A major theoretical expectation was that parliamentary entrance might bolster the media salience of these parties and their leaders vis-à-vis other new political parties. While we find that Chega does indeed receive more media attention than other comparable parties, especially during election times, no such pattern can be detected for VOX. Concerning attention given to leaders, measured as salience and personalization index, we confirm that André Ventura, leader of Chega is given disproportionate attention, while that is not the case for VOX’s Santiago Abascal. Concerning issues, our findings indicate that although notable cross-national differences in media coverage persist, several key issues were already prominent before 2019 (consistent with the agenda-setting expectation) and may have helped advance the radical-right agenda in both Portugal and Spain.